Arrested Development

"She wasn't a bad girl."-- Marcel Proust

I remember taking notes I now cannot find on a particular Grey's Anatomy episode. Jessica Capshaw makes amputation the entire world, and Sara Ramirez pretends to be salivating at the prospect of being masturbated in more girl games in a hotel suite above Bailey's wedding, while the Chief's wife is succumbing to heart disease. If NBC gets sometimes courageously stark with its dramas, ABC likes to revel in our naivete, trying my patience. What made the series popular with its viewing audience led to my disavowal for its lack of nuance, although a monologue caught me once in awhile: the Asian surgeon's bad housekeeping speech.

I was rather late, as a student of literature, in coming to Marcel Proust, and his magical dips in and out of fugue states, as when we get introduced to Mlle. Vinteuil's scandalous lesbianism, about a third in to Swann's Way. Google has been uncooperative  in helping me find the mildly voyeuristic passage, to which I'll return, conditioned upon my safe transitioned survival as the end of July nears, but the wily socialite of an author nearly reconciles me to the difficulty of vicious same sex liaisons in a way that Henry James is incapable of doing, because James sees the reality of physical passion as invidious in its consequences. Proust wouldn't necessarily disagree with this Jamesian subtext; he's simply more forgiving of human frailty and obsession, moving the consequences along to the next window, like peeking at more or less outrageous sexual adventures in hotel rooms.

What genius reconciles, the screen writer's guild dissuades, however, with nearly puerile infantilism. Ramirez and Capshaw might have been behind the bleachers at a high school pep rally, for all this pepto we're all the same love scene between Caucasian damage (lost limb) in the bosom of minority lasciviousness, even if it is more inferred than shown. Nipple sucking is built up permissively in erotica, biting is moved up a gradient into porn. Tolerance comes due to what we're willing to screen away from deviations of fantasy.