Kelsey Grammer is back in the building

As vintage comedy Frasier reboots, Kelsey Grammer talks with Krish Kandiah about his comeback and the significance of another recent role in Jesus Revolution.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

A group sit in a lounge playing musical instruments while the man closest to the camera laughs.

Kelsey Grammer plays Pastor Chuck Smith in Jesus Revolution.

Lionsgate.

Staying up late on a Friday night to watch Cheers was one of the regular highlights of my childhood. My parents were as bewitched as I was with the sonorous voice of Kelsey Grammer. Indeed, the whole world loved it. His spin-off sitcom Frasier went on to run for 11 years, winning 37 Emmy awards, a feat only recently surpassed by Game of Thrones. Grammer himself became one of the most decorated, well-loved – and well-paid - actors in the world.

Nearly 20 years after its final episode Frasier is being rebooted. This time it is returning to Boston, the place where everybody came to know Dr Frasier Crane’s name. I, like many, are jubilant, convinced that the warm, masterful and often farcical humour will resonate just as well with a new audience. But what about Grammer? How does he feel about putting on the jester’s motley and playing Dr Crane again?

“He's fantastic.”, Grammer explains to me with a broad smile and clear enthusiasm. I find myself wanting to tell him everything that’s keeping me awake at night.

“Whatever it is about this journey with Frasier: he's lived a kind of a parallel life with me. Now we've found our way back to one another.”

Grammer seems to be as excited as I am about the comedy comeback, but has Dr Frasier Crane changed over the decades? He explains:

“He's a little wiser, a little calmer about some things. He's still a bit of a nuts on others. But the growth of the last 20 years or so in his life is reflected, I think, in this performance now.”

Sometimes our greatest triumphs are accompanied by our lowest moments. At the same time that Frasier was first showering Grammer with fame, fortune and critical acclaim, he was wading through personal trauma. Substance abuse, addiction, and divorces resulted. I had to ask Grammer if he was a stronger person this time around:

“I came to this one differently. I came to this one prepared to enjoy it. The previous manifestation of Frasier was a little bit much maybe a little bit too soon. It was challenging at times.”

Grammer’s personal journey fascinates me. He seems to have resolved the sense of emptiness that so often accompanies great success. Perhaps a clue can be found in the film Grammer is in London to promote. Jesus Revolution is based on a true story from the 60s and centres on a small church in Florida which gets invaded by hippies. Grammer plays the role of Chuck Smith, the pastor who is torn between two very different congregations.

“He spoke to my sense of good. People finding themselves, finding their way forward and not giving up, not relenting. I loved his search and his courage in the face of a waning congregation and the challenge of trying to make God relevant in that time.”

Time magazine covers from the 60s and 70s.

Two Time magazine covers beside each other. One reads 'Is God dead?' The other 'Jesus Revolution'.

The film illustrates this challenge by bookending two editions of Time magazine. At the start of the film Grammer waves a 1966 cover at his sparse, stiff congregation. It is jet-black and asks pointedly “Is God Dead?” By the end of the film Grammer, surrounded by a crowd of unlikely long-haired worshippers, is clutching a Time Magazine from 1971, this time featuring on its cover a psychedelic picture of a bearded Christ proclaiming “The Jesus Revolution”.

Grammer’s character experiences his own personal Jesus revolution in the movie. He welcomes those long-haired bare-footed hippies into his home, his church, and his life, and as he begins to see the world – and God - through their eyes, he becomes a kinder, braver and happier person.

This is what I see in the Hollywood superstar I am interviewing: someone willing not only to talk openly about his faith, but to actively promote it. He is a man on a mission as he tells me:

"You can defend and champion and be an activist for a sort of alternate lifestyle or any number of things that you think are important. I applaud that. But it's also okay to applaud and champion the idea that a life of faith has equal value…”

Grammer, now wistful and warmer, adds:

"I just thought, I want to do something that has value, meaning, you know, other than just making people laugh."

Grammer grew up in a family of faith, but that family was also torn apart by heartbreak. His father was brutally murdered when he was just 13 years old. Seven years later his sister was abducted, raped, stabbed and left to die in a trailer park. I ask Grammer bluntly how he can have faith in God after such horrors and suffering:

“Well, I've been wrestling with it my whole life, since the early days of when tragedy first came knocking at the door… And I spent a long time looking around, you know, thinking, what the heck happened? Very recently, I stood on a baseball field at one of the harvest revivals and I just said, “Where were you?”. He said, “I was right there.”

Grammer has found a way to make sense of his life, a way to deal with trauma and tragedy. Like Chuck Smith making room for the outcasts, like Dr Frasier Crane making time to listen to troubled people on the radio, Grammer could be a new sort of pastor for a new generation.

“I think people are walking around with broken hearts. I hope they have a chance to say: ‘Well, maybe, maybe this faith thing isn't so bad.’”

Maybe he’s right. For a man that has experienced more than his fair share of personal tragedy, I have the feeling that he knows what he’s talking about. I came away feeling moved by his continuing faith in God despite everything he has suffered and despite everything he has struggled with. I hope audiences will see something of that authenticity and challenge in Jesus Revolution.

Jesus Revolution is on UK and Irish cinema release. Tickets are available now.

Explainer

Culture

Digital

30 July 2024

5 min read

How tech harvests our humanity

The second in a three-part series exploring the implications of technology.

James Lawrence

James is Canon Missioner at Blackburn Cathedral. He researches technology and theology at Oxford University.

In the first article, I painted a picture of the ordinary person using modern technology, for example, social media on a smart phone. I noted that advocates for modern technology seem to have two basic principles: that technology is natural and neutral. In this next article I want to introduce the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and show how he pushes against these two basic principles and invites us to think again about modern technology. Heidegger’s instinct, as a twentieth century philosopher, is to be suspicious that things are not as they seem, he casts his suspicious gaze over modern technology and sees a way of being that technology encourages that exists underneath the technologies that we use every day.

What Heidegger wants to show us about modern technology is not related to specific concerns about particular technologies but instead a general suspicion about the ‘essence’ of technology, or, you could say, the spirit of technology. He doesn’t want us to immediately jump to pragmatic questions about how to use technology, as if the primary question is how to make any given technology better or more moral. Instead, Heidegger wants us to take modern technology together as a whole and ask, “What is the essence of this?” Heidegger’s contention is that “technology is not an object or set of objects, nor a way of handling objects with tools, but a form of being the world. It is not something we choose to refuse, but the environment in which modern humans come into existence.”

Heidegger argues that underneath any piece of tech that we might use in our day-to-day lives, technology at its core has already completely changed the way that we as a society understand and interact with the world and everything in it. We live in a technological age and as members of a technological society and so we have been shaped by (to use Christian language, we have been ‘discipled’ by) the spirit of the age to see the world around us. Heidegger suggests that we now see the world as broken down into useable bits that can be categorised and reformed to suit our needs. As Mark Wrathall puts it, the essence of technology is to train us to “experience the world as calling on us or drawing us. To transform everything into stock pieces, so that they can be placed into a vast inventory of options.”[2] Growing up in a technological society means that we see the whole world as an Amazon warehouse a place of seemingly limitless options that can be called upon depending on our needs and quickly delivered.

A piece of technology such as the smartphone points to a wider ‘spirit’ of technology which intends to position everything, even human beings, as replaceable resources within a larger system.

The central word that Heidegger uses to describe the essence of technology is gestell which is not an easy word to translate into English, but two possible translations would be ‘positionality’, or ‘enframing’. His point is that the essence of technology is to remove objects, people, and things from their natural environment and position them so that they might become useful, a resource, available for our manipulation. When Heidegger says that the essence of technology is gestell he is pointing to the way that modern technology extracts objects from their contexts and turns them into a quarry to the plundered. There are of course obvious ways in which humanity has always extracted resources from the natural world: we have always quarried for energy (coal, oil etc) or chopped down forests for wood. By claiming that the essence of modern technology is gestell, Heidegger wants us to notice that in the modern world, it’s not just quarries or forests that we mine for resources but now anything and everything can be turned from being a singular object in the world into a recourse for extraction. Everything has become what Heidegger calls “standing reserve.”

Think again of a smartphone, it is just one of the billions of devices that sit on shelves or, having already been purchased, live in someone else’s pocket. Inside each device are thousands of transistors and circuit boards each of which again are stockpiled in warehouses ready to be replaced if needed or used for some other purpose. Your phone is connected to a network of nodes each of which can be replicated or replaced if needed, no node is unique. Your latest phone has no unique or prize relation to you, it’s just the latest upgrade which will be recycled in a year or two when the next upgrade becomes available. The person from whom you bought the phone is equally replaceable, just a faceless employee completing a set of controlled and pre-arranged tasks that are designed to be completed by anyone and no one in particular. Likewise, you as the consumer are considered to be little more than “standing reserve” by the companies that supply you with your smartphone and access to their networks. One of many millions of nodes in their system that has been analysed so that your preferences can be expertly mapped to the range of services that they provide. Within that system, you are completely replaceable. A piece of technology such as the smartphone points to a wider ‘spirit’ of technology which intends to position everything, even human beings, as replaceable resources within a larger system: “Every item within this standing reserve is reduced to a position, actively waiting to be called on. Heidegger insists this is no judgment on the radio, the internet, or the smartphone user. It is just the way in which the essence of modern technology interacts with humanity… Heidegger provides a diagnosis of our modern age and the way in which we humans have placed ourselves under the sway of modern technology, as a resource standing within a network which seeks, ultimately, to place, represent, and think of every entity as an object within an all-encompassing system.”

Let’s return to the original thought experiment at the start of the first article: a mother playing with her child, who immediately reaches for her phone to capture the moment when her child does something particularly cute. An advocate for modern technology, like Steve Jobs, may look at that interaction and see only the benefit: a mother wanting to remember a beautiful moment with her child extends the capacities of her brain using a digital tool to aid her memory. But Heidegger would be more suspicious, he would look at that moment and argue instead that the essence of technology is to turn everything, even a precious moment with a cute baby, into a resource to be used at a later date. The unique moment of joy and delight between parent and child becomes caught and codified such that it can be found and replayed at will or easily replicated to send to others. At the extreme end of the spectrum are so-called content creators who reduce themselves to just another resource to be harvested on social media.

So that is Heidegger’s diagnosis of our technological age, in the final article in this series we will consider Heidegger’s solution and consider what a particularly Christian response to Heidegger’s diagnosis might look like.