Grace Perry - The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture

An iPhone blared the sound of an old-timey newsroom telephone, and the bedside lamp flicked on. My mom sat on the edge of the other queen bed and mostly listened. Okay okay. She had to be talking to my dad. And youre at the hospital now? My eyes fluttered open, and I took in the hotel room. It was a Route 66themed Best Western in Missouri. Staying on theme, the walls were dotted with black-and-white photos of road trippers posing with their big, bulky Fordsan homage to those whod done the route from Chicago to Los Angeles before my mom and I had started eighteen hours prior. I bet those people made it more than one night on the route, though. I sat up, silent and disoriented, hoping this was a very vivid, very bad dream. After a few minutes, she hung up.

Zach had fallen, Mom said, but he was okayokay being a euphemism for aliveconscious and responsive, but he had passed out and busted his face on the bathroom floor. An ambulance came to our house, to our childhood bathroom, where my thirty-year-old brother had fainted around midnight. They rushed him to the closest hospital. The ER doctors thought it mustve been related to the headaches Zach had been having in the days leading up to our departure. His oncologists at Northwestern, who had been treating his leukemia on and off for four years, believed the headaches were a side effect of the new trial drug he was on. In the emergency room, my mother continued, he had a temporary catheter drilled into the side of his head in the middle of the night. That had relieved the symptoms nearly immediately. He was resting now. He showed no signs of permanent brain damage. He was okay.

Oh, and Dad said something else, my mom added. Before the procedure, Zachs mental state started to well, deteriorate. Apparently he wasnt making any sense. He was just spelling out words and speaking in numbers? My heart pounded. And at one point, I guess he just started speaking only in Spanish? Like, he was saying, No ms! and Vmonos! cause he wanted to get out of there.

I replied with an absurd line Id find myself repeating a lot over the next week: Oh, yeah, thats a thing with brain injuries. I saw that on an episode of Greys Anatomy. My mom burst out laughing.

It was true, though! In early season fourteen, Dr. Amelia Shepherd (Dr. McDreamys sisterMcDreamy died in a botched surgery two seasons prior. Catch up.) is diagnosed with a massive brain tumor. Shes a neurosurgeon, too, which makes the diagnosis extra wild. Anyway, she gets the tumor removed, and two days post-op, she finally speaks for the first time. Meredith and the others get word that Amelias up and talking, and they rush to her room. And yes, shes speaking, but shes speaking French: Un verre deau, sil te plat, she croaks, Jai soif. The Grey-Sloan Memorial Hospital (formally Seattle Grace Mercy West, ne Seattle Grace Hospital. Catch! Up!) gang is confused. Amelia doesnt speak French, she speaks German! But Meredith, a Shepherd in-law, recalls that the Shepherd kids all went to French preschool, so that language must be somewhere in the recesses of her brain. It reverses on its own its still good, its progress, Dr. Grey explains. My Greys knowledge served me well. I didnt have to google speaking foreign language brain injury to figure out what was going on with Zach. I didnt have to subject myself to the limitless permutations of diagnoses WebMD would offer. I didnt wonder whether Zach had entirely forgotten the English language. Id heard of this before. It happened to Amelia Shepherd, and she was more or less fine in the next scene. So Zach would be fine, too. Meredith Grey said so.

At the very moment Zachs face hit our bathroom floor, I was literally dreaming I was in surgery with Meredith Grey. Not because I have ever even vaguely aspired to be a surgeon, but because it was simply the only material my subconscious had to work with come nightfall. Id been bingeing Greys Anatomy nearly every night for the four months priorpartially because Id watched Killing Eve and craved more Sandra Oh, partially because I was living at home to save money, but mostly because I was going through a breakup and wanted a new personality and elected for one based solely on the Shondaland tentpole. Id watched the first couple of seasons in high school, but I fell off before the long-standing, seminal queer romance between Drs. Callie Torres and Arizona Robbins. I intended to just rewatch the first two seasons; how naive I was. Shonda Rhimes does not create content of which one can simply watch a few episodes. And so, single and living with my parents, I watched fourteen seasons of Greys Anatomy in four months. At the time I left Chicago for California, my brain was about 70 percent Greys Anatomy.

When we use the word escapism, were generally talking about a persons desire to leave reality, to withdraw from some terrible set of IRL circumstances. So, when we describe a book or movie or TV show as escapist, we mean its so different from our real, everyday world that engaging with it lets us forget that the real world exists. Entertainment labeled escapist is usually absurd, or pulpy, or heightened to an unrealistic extreme. Fantasy shows are an obvious exampleGame of Thrones brings the viewer into a whole new world of dragons and White Walkers and full-frontal male nudity. But escapist media can also be just a slightly removed version of real life. Musical theater allows us to escape into a world where streets full of New York City strangers burst into coordinated song and dance. The Real Housewives franchise lets us leave our own lives to peek into the gauche, surreal environs of permadrunk, middle-aged baronesses, who lead lives utterly unlike our own. Escapism is a euphemism for guilty pleasure, used in an attempt to obscure the embarrassing fact that we, as a species, love silly and frivolous stories. Its a highbrow-sounding word that validates our cravings for the idiotic. Escapist is grown-up code for, I know its canonically asininejust let me fucking watch it.

One could characterize my Greys Anatomy binge as escapist, but I wouldnt. No matter how outlandish the world or story, I find the whole notion of escapism to be disingenuous. Or, at least, I think its an unhelpful way to describe our experience of engaging with pop culture. The word escape implies attaining some kind of permanent state of freedom. Its a word with a wide-open future. That doesnt really fit for how we engage with entertainment. Watching a TV show is a finite experience. Even when we nurse a post-birthday hangover by watching season three of 30 Rock in one sitting for the forty-fifth time, that binge eventually comes to an end. We come back to reality, come back to the doldrums or nightmare or whatever it is pop culture helped us avoid. We turn on the TV, and then we turn it off. We go away for a while, and then we come back.