Heartland

This country song by George Strait plays while Lorelai and Rory leave the diner and walk past the hayride after arguing about Rory’s unexpected reluctance to attend private school. The song is from the 1992 album Pure Country, the soundtrack to the musical western film of the same name, which had Strait in the lead role of Wyatt “Dusty” Chandler. The movie bombed, but the soundtrack was a commercial success, and is George Strait’s best selling album. Heartland went to #1 on the US Country charts.

Madame Bovary

The novel that Rory was reading the week before; her total absorption in the novel is what Dean says first attracted him to Rory. The debut work of French author Gustave Flaubert and first published in 1857, it is considered a literary masterpiece.

Madame Bovary is about a beautiful well-educated young woman who finds herself trapped in a dull marriage to a village doctor. Her longing for romance, fostered by reading popular novels, leads her into affairs with other men, with tragic results. The theme of infidelity is one which will be important in Rory and Dean’s relationship, and the hint is right there in the pilot.

Moby Dick

The novel that Rory is reading. Written by Herman Melville and first published in 1851, it is regarded as one of the Great American Novels and is Melville’s best known work. The novel is about the obsessive quest by a sea captain for revenge against a great white wale named Moby Dick.

Rory tells Dean that she thinks it is “really good”, and that it is her “first Melville”, although she admits that it is a cliche to have Moby Dick as your first Melville. Herman Melville has ten other novels still available, and presumably Rory plans to read more of them.

Is the fact that Rory is reading this novel when she meets Dean an early warning of his own obsessive nature? Or perhaps, like Huck Finn and On the Road, it’s another novel about a specifically American journey, this time upon the sea. The sexual innuendo of a “big Dick” when meeting Dean probably isn’t to be disregarded, either.

Miss Patty’s Place

DEAN: Well, maybe you could show me where this Miss Patty’s place is.
RORY: Yeah, I guess so. I really don’t have anything important to . . . let’s go.

Miss Patty’s School of Ballet, seemingly always known as Miss Patty’s Place, is a very significant location for Dean and Rory’s future relationship. And it was the first place in Stars Hollow they ever went to together.

Demerol

DEAN: Lorelai. I like that.
RORY: It’s my mother’s name too. She named me after herself. She was lying in the hospital thinking about how men name boys after themselves all the time, you know, so why couldn’t women? She says her feminism just kind of took over. Though personally I think a lot of Demerol also went into that decision.

Demerol is a brand name for Pethedine, a synthetic opioid medication and the most common narcotic pain relief given in US hospitals during childbirth.

Lorelai’s choosing to give her daughter her own name is another suggestion that she hoped Rory would be a “do-over” version of herself.

Chicago

DEAN: My family just moved here from Chicago.
RORY: Chicago. Windy. Oprah.

Chicago is a city in the Midwestern state of Illinois on the shores of Lake Michigan; it is the third-largest city in the United States. It has a massive suburban sprawl, so that Dean could be from a town quite a distance from the city itself, and still claim to be from Chicago. This doesn’t seem unlikely.

Reduced to a babbling state by Dean’s attention, Rory blurts out the only two things she knows about Chicago.

One is that its moniker is The Windy City, even though meteorologists will tell you it’s no windier than any other city in the US. Some say the wind is that which comes off the lake, others that the nickname was an insult from rival cities to mean that citizens of Chicago were full of hot air.

The other fact Rory knows about Chicago is that it’s where The Oprah Winfrey Show is broadcast from. Celebrity talk show host Oprah Winfrey’s television show went from 1986 to 2011, and was the highest-rated daytime TV show in the United States, if not the world.

Rosemary’s Baby

RORY (after being startled by Dean): God! You’re like Ruth Gordon just standing there with a tannis root. Make a noise.
DEAN: Rosemary’s Baby.
RORY: Yeah.
DEAN: Well, that’s a great movie. You’ve got good taste.

Rosemary’s Baby is a 1968 horror film directed by Roman Polanski, based on the 1967 best-seller of the same name by Ira Levin. In the film, a young housewife named Rosemary (played by Mia Farrow) discovers that a cult has tricked her into bearing a demonic child. Ruth Gordon (1896-1985) plays Rosemary’s elderly neighbour Minnie Castavet, who is a leader in the cult; Gordon won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance.

Minnie gives Rosemary a pendant necklace filled with tannis root (a fictional herb), which the cult apparently deploys as an all-round demonic treatment. As Minnie hovers around handing Rosemary tannis root in food and drink as well, it is hard to know which exact moment in the film Rory has in mind – or if she is so startled that she doesn’t quite know herself what she is saying.

Rosemary’s Baby was the #8 film of 1968, was acclaimed by critics, and is regarded as a classic movie. Dean is right that Rory has good taste. Fans of Dean Forester (Jared Padalecki) can enjoy this time during Season 1 when Dean quickly picked up on old film references and seemed to be an intellectual equal for Rory. It won’t last.

Dean Forester (Jared Padalecki)

Dean Forester (Jared Padalecki) appears in the first episode of Gilmore Girls, and is immediately set up to be Rory’s boyfriend with a meet cute that involves books and a movie reference. Dean was written to be the perfect first boyfriend for a teenage girl, which seems to mean he has almost no life or personality apart from being in love with Rory, and an obsessive jealous streak. I guess those are things that inexperienced teenage girls might find endearing. However, it didn’t take long for cracks to begin showing in the perfect Dean facade, so perhaps even the writers got bored with this conceit.

Jared Padalecki was not the first choice to play Dean: in the original Pilot episode, he was played by Nathan Wetherington, who gave him a slightly more bashful, skater-boy feel. Interestingly, in a later episode Lorelai says that Dean reminds her of Christopher, Rory’s father, and while Padalecki doesn’t really resemble David Sutcliffe, Wetherington looks much more like him.

Nathan Wetherington was considered for the role of Anakin Skywalker in the Stars Wars prequels, but took himself out of the running when he learned he had the role of Dean on Gilmore Girls, and also missed out on playing Seth on teen drama series The OC, so he’s had some unlucky breaks.

Rory’s Locker Books

When Rory is cleaning out her locker at Stars Hollow High, the viewer can identify at least three of the books she has piled up in there.

One is The Second Sex by French philosopher Simone Beauvoir, a 1949 work which is a seminal text in modern feminism. The book speaks frankly about teenage girls and their sexuality, which could be important information for Rory. It is also very critical of marriage as an oppressive instution which leads women into domestic and emotional slavery: does this have any effect on Rory’s understanding of relationships? The book does seem to have informed Lorelai’s views, who is committment-shy, not interested in cooking and housework, and highly focused on her career. We may wonder if Rory borrowed the book from her mother: especially as the book discusses the difficulties of mother-daughter relationships.

Another is Mistress of Mellyn, a 1960 Gothic romance by popular British novelist Victoria Holt (pen name of Eleanor Hibbert). Set in Cornwall in the 19^th century, a young governess finds romance with her employer, but there is some mystery over the fate of his first wife which the girl investigates. The book has a similar plot and themes to classics such as Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, and Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. This literary romance became an immediate bestseller upon publication. Could this choice of novel show Rory’s desire for romance?

You might be able to spot Chikara!: A Sweeping Novel of Japan and America by American author Robert Skimin, published in 1984 – the year that Rory was born. It’s an epic historical saga about a Japanese-American family, covering the years from the early twentieth century to the 1980s. It may be telling that the book involves multiple generations, and a man’s search for power for himself and his sons – but in the end it is his granddaughter who triumphs.

If nothing else, the books demonstrate the wide range of Rory’s reading.

Amish

RORY: And we get to wear uniforms. No more having people check you out to see what jeans you’re wearing ’cause everyone’s dressed alike in boring clothes and just there to learn.
LANE: Okay, there’s academic-minded and then there’s Amish.

The Amish are a group of traditional Christian churches, originating from Swiss Anabaptists, with a strong presence in Pennsylvania. They favour a simple, rural lifestyle with plain conformist dress and a rejection of modern technology and conveniences.