The Code Black episode which ran last evening seemed to intentionally reference the Spanish Catholic motif that the unpleasantness of life is a dream from which we invariably wake, with varying degrees of courage or fortitude to follow suit, whether it's Dona Luz coping with a deceitful lover and becoming content to be a virtuous single mother thereafter, or the futuristic sensibility of Vanilla Sky rather unevenly adapted for Americana. It was an irritating cheap trick, whether or not there is a certain degree of commiseration for William Young as the compassionate patriarch who knows when to give in to the disruptions of the urban disenfranchised. Spastic has no particular affinity for current medical serials, however more sophisticated scripts, but Raza was at least a curiosity, whereas Rob Lowe is the manufactured, if seasoned veteran, who delivers line readings with new found square jawed machismo. To go from that to the silicon metrosexual tweaks of Pure Genius is insufferable. The public airways may be frambrosia next to what retarded and fed baby boomer narcissism, but it makes taking a backward glance at Cary Grant beat one's chest for glamour, and bourgeoisie style held in place by gleaming hair gel and aerosol.
Grant was already a mausoleum plague in the Columbo era, but what appealed to our mothers, that vaudeville charm, holds the same magnetism now as then, whether tightly wound in Hitchcock, or more subversively timed in his comedies, which can be decoded along the same lines as Rock Hudson, if with more heartbreaking effect. To scroll a tawdry digital gallery and read that Grant was gay simply because he lived with another male friend was indeed shocking. We may not be able to read orientation on a whim, but Grant? It drew tears, when a more cautious intellect might have challenged the veracity of such claims. As a journalist, rebelling in despair at an encroaching twilight, blows having already broken her back, delving into this particular undercurrent would be akin to chasing Loch Ness: His grandchildren would disavow it, and there is no proof which can be confirmed. The reasons these rumors dog the star stem from the very things that made him one of the greatest celebrities. He toys with sexual secrets to keep his female admirers on the bait, even if we don't give much of a thought to poor Ingrid Bergman, the *gay bachelor's* patsy, as she was against Anthony Perkins in :Goodbye Again (though I would have fucked Perkins in that movie, and again in On The Beach). Bergman is not particularly sexual. She is a gracious elegance of poised need. And the idiot who cast her against Matheau in later years should have lost his job. It did not work. If you see her as the wife of Sartre, sacrificing all for such a great ego, that works. That is how women of her era derived standing, but there is culpability in that social form that shields the deviations of dandies which Proust exposes like a montage in the tide. Spastic cannot read it in Grant, however, the inclination toward sodomy. He might have been an empty vessel mimicking the upper echelon whose ranks he joined by virtue of his talent, but risking that for more roughshod homoerotic experimentation seems beyond where his attention to personal detail would take him.
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