[Rory searches for her bracelet in the living room]
LORELAI: Anything? RORY: Just Grandma’s pen. LORELAI: Leave it there.
While searching for the bracelet, Rory finds the Montblanc pen that Emily gave her for successfully completing a year of study at Chilton. This is a very expensive pen, yet Rory has allowed it to get lost under the seat of an armchair for who knows how long. It’s meant to show how adorably unmaterialistic Rory is (ha!), but it just makes her look spoiled and ungrateful. Lorelai encourages this attitude by telling her to leave the pen there. There are times that one sympathises with Emily.
LORELAI: What did you say? RORY: That I had a rash and that I had to take it off until it healed. LORELAI: Nice save, Gretzky.
Wayne Gretzky (born 1961), Canadian former ice hockey player and coach. Nicknamed “The Great One”, he is regarded in many quarters as the greatest hockey player of all time. He is the leading goal scorer and point scorer in the US National Hockey League, and upon his retirement in 1999, was immediately inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.
In ice hockey, a goaltender is credited with a “save” when they prevent the opposing team from scoring, so Lorelai is comparing Rory’s move to Gretzky’s ability to save goals. Gretzky was actually a centerman, not a goaltender. Lorelai frequently gets sports references a bit wrong.
RORY: I don’t know where it is! LORELAI: Where what is? RORY: My bracelet – it’s gone.
Rory runs home in a panic to tell Lorelai that her bracelet is missing. Jess is listening in the background, and he now discovers that Rory’s bracelet was made by Dean, and given to Rory as a gift. Jess has a good poker face, but you can tell this does not come as welcome news.
Jess also learns that Rory thinks Dean will be angry when he finds out the bracelet is gone, and she appears frightened of his temper. This seems like such a red flag – why isn’t Lorelai concerned that her teenage daughter is actually scared of her boyfriend? Instead she soothes Rory, reassuring her that Dean won’t be angry, and he can easily make Rory another bracelet.
Despite Dean apparently being so great and understanding, Lorelai never suggests that Rory be honest with him and tell him the bracelet is missing. Why not, if there is nothing to fear from Dean’s temper? And why doesn’t Dean deserve to know the truth?
Under pressure from Rory, both Lorelai and Jess make an effort to be polite to each other. It is the only time these two characters are ever shown having a civil conversation, which is a shame, because they have a lot in common. They get each other’s references, they both love Luke but love to rag on him, and they are capable of making allowances for each other’s quirks. This scene is a real “what might have been” moment.
A callback to the scene in “Richard in Stars Hollow” when Rory offers Jess an egg roll in exchange for information. He doesn’t take one, but leaves saying, “You owe me an egg roll“.
LORELAI: So, are you a healthy eater like Luke? JESS: No. No one’s a healthy eater like Luke. Euell Gibbons wasn’t a healthy eater like Luke … Many parts of a pine tree are edible.
Euell Gibbons (1911-1975), outdoorsman and early health food advocate. He promoted eating wild food during the 1960s, having begun foraging for food as a teenager to supplement the family diet. His books on wild food were instant successes, and he became a celebrity, appearing on TV shows such as The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, and The Carol Burnett Show, often good-naturedly sending himself up by pretending to eat wooden plaques and so on.
A 1974 television commercial for Grape-Nuts cereal featured Gibbons asking viewers “Ever eat a pine tree? Many parts are edible.” While he recommended eating Grape Nuts over eating pine trees (Grape Nuts’ taste “reminds me of wild hickory nuts”), the quote caught the public’s imagination and fuelled his celebrity status.
How Jess knows about Euell Gibbons and the advertisement, which was broadcast ten years before Jess was born, is a mystery. Teenagers seem to have an amazing knowledge of 1960s and 1970s pop culture in the Gilmore Girls world.
JESS: So when was the last time you had those gutters cleaned? LORELAI: It’s been awhile. JESS: Yeah, I found an ‘I like Ike’ bumper sticker up there.
“I like Ike” was the campaign slogan for the 1952 election campaign of US President Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower. He won the election for the Republicans in a landslide victory, and became the country’s 34th president.
Hopefully Jess is joking – not having your gutters cleaned for half a century sounds pretty bad.
This is one of the many chicken-based Chinese dishes Lorelai and Rory bought the night before.
Szechuan Chicken is a spicy stir-fry of chicken cooked with Szechuan peppercorns and chilis. It originated from the Sichuan district of southwestern China. It usually contains vegetables, especially red peppers, and sometimes peanuts, as well as hoi sin sauce.
DEAN: You go look at the astronomy section, we’ll go see Lord of the Rings, and on the way home we’ll rent Autumn in New York and mock it for the rest of the afternoon.
Autumn in New York is a 2000 romantic drama directed by Joan Chen, and starring Richard Gere as a middle-aged womaniser who falls in love with a sweet young woman who is terminally ill, played by Winona Ryder.
The film received negative reviews, being judged as sappy with no chemistry between the two romantic leads, although Chen’s direction did receive some praise. It was nonetheless a success at the box office. The film was released on DVD in January 2001.
Although I think Rory would mock the film roundly, it has enough parallels with her relationship with Jess to also be uncomfortable viewing for her. The main characters share a love of poetry, just as she and Jess share an interest in literature, and there are references to Rory’s favourite poets, Emily Dickinson, Dorothy Parker, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
There is a major plot point in the film where the young woman takes her lover’s watch as a keepsake, telling him she will return it when he no longer notices it is gone. This is quite similar to Jess taking Rory’s bracelet, and returning it – except he will return it when Rory notices it is missing.
Dean has proposed what sounds like an exhaustingly lengthy afternoon: hours looking at books, a three hour movie at the cinema, and then a 90 minute video “for the rest of the afternoon”. Just how long is this afternoon? It’s early spring, it gets dark early!
Dean’s plan apparently comes to nothing when he notices that Rory isn’t wearing her bracelet. Instead of simply telling him the truth, that she didn’t notice it had fallen off, she tells him a silly lie about having a rash on her wrist, possibly caused by her Spanish mid-terms (!), and needing to temporarily remove the bracelet.
Even though this version of events wouldn’t stop Rory watching movies, she instead spends the afternoon searching the entire town for her bracelet. Again, it would have made more sense for her to have been honest, said that she lost the bracelet somewhere (for all she and Dean know, it fell off that very day), and needs to look for it.
It’s never said how she managed to cancel all her plans to spend the day with Dean to look for her bracelet without confessing it was lost, or raising his suspicions.
After the book fundraiser, which was something Rory was interested in, Dean suggests they go and watch The Lord of the Rings at the cinema, which is something he wants to do. They have already seen the film three times together in the past three months, and even though Rory enjoyed it, she isn’t enthusiastic about seeing it again.
They can only be talking about the first film in the trilogy, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which was released in December 2001. Directed by New Zealander Peter Jackson, it’s based on the novel, The Fellowship of the Ring by British author J.R.R. Tolkien, the first volume in The Lord of the Rings.
An epic fantasy adventure film featuring an ensemble cast, filmed and edited entirely in New Zealand, the story is set in Middle-Earth and tells of the Dark Lord Sauron who seeks the One Ring, which contains part of his soul, in order to return to power. The fate of Middle-Earth hangs in the balance as a young hobbit named Frodo Baggins (played by Elijah Wood) must take the Ring to be destroyed in the land of Mordor, accompanied by a fellowship of eight other companions.
The film was acclaimed by critics and fans alike, considering it a landmark in filmmaking, and the fantasy genre in particular, and was praised for its fidelity to the source material. It was the #2 film of 2001, and the fifth-highest grossing film of all time upon its release. It won numerous awards, including four Oscars and three BAFTAs, which included Best Film and Best Direction.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 