Category: S2Ep5: Nick & Nora/Sid & Nancy

Jess Snoops Around the Living Room

Luke and Jess arrive slightly late for the dinner party, with Luke implying he’s had trouble convincing Jess to come with him. While Lorelai assures Luke that it’s fine, Jess quietly slips into the Gilmores’ living room, which is off the hall. He looks at the photos on the mantelpiece, and touches the frame of one showing Rory wearing a pink cardigan, half picking it up.

Jess manages to check Rory out before he even meets her, and there’s no mistaking that he’s interested in what he sees. A boy who touches a girl’s photo is probably thinking about touching her, after all.

Lorelai finds him and surely has an idea what he’s up to. She smilingly bundles him out to the kitchen to meet Sookie and Jackson, but she must be getting suspicious of Jess. He’s crept around her living room without asking, and checked out her daughter’s photos. I imagine she is now telling herself to keep an eye on Jess, in case he has more creeping around to do.

Henry the Eighth and the Roman Empire

SOOKIE: I want everything to be perfect. We are gonna make this kid think that he died and went to heaven.
JACKSON: Or Henry the Eighth’s house.

Another mention of Sookie’s cooking being compared to one of Henry VIII’s Tudor feasts.

A little later, Lorelai says Sookie is about to break her own record for the most food cooked outside the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire also has a reputation for sustained and lavish eat-a-thons – their banquets could last ten hours, and multiple courses were the rule. Of course, this was only for the wealthy.

Lorelai seems to get straight into the historical feast spirit, by calling Rory “Milady”.

Rory’s First Article

TEACHER: I mean, when you’ve got a reporter who can take an incredibly mundane and seemingly unimportant subject like the re-paving of the faculty parking lot and turn it into a bittersweet piece on how everybody and everything eventually becomes obsolete, then you’ve really got something. Miss Gilmore, I was touched.

This is truly one of the most unbelievable things to happen in regard to Rory’s career as a reporter. The idea that one thousand words on the re-paving of the faculty parking lot, made into a bittersweet piece on how time claims us all, is utterly ludicrous.

It sounds completely hokey and self-indulgent, and a type of journalism more reminiscent of The Simpsons‘ news anchorman Kent Brockman than The New York Times. In real life, Rory would have had her article cut by at least 75%, and a big red pen put through her waffling think piece on re-paving.

And when did Rory hand her article in? It seemed at the last meeting that articles were due at the next day’s meeting (i.e. this meeting). Yet the teacher has already received it from Paris and read it. Possibly Rory was careful to hand it in early, or give it to the teacher herself, to make sure there weren’t any other Paris-caused mix-ups. Or else when Paris said it needed to be “on her desk”, she meant her regular school desk, not her editorial desk. Which seems very confusing.

Careers of Past Editors of The Franklin

PARIS: This is The Franklin, a newspaper that’s been around for almost a hundred years. There have been at least ten former editors of The Franklin that have gone on to work at the New York Times. Six have gone onto the Washington Post. Three are contributing editors at the New Yorker. I think one even went on to win the Pulitzer Prize.

The Washington Post is a daily newspaper published in Washington DC, with a large national readership. Founded in 1877, it is famous for the printing of The Pentagon Papers, which helped spur opposition to the Vietnam War in 1971, and for breaking the news of the Watergate scandal, which led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974. It has won 69 Pulitzer Prizes, second only to The New York Times.

The Pulitzer Prize was established in 1917, and awards achievements in journalism, literature, and musical composition, in various categories. There is a huge list of past winners, one of which apparently went to Chilton.

The New York Times, previously discussed.

The New Yorker, previously discussed. Paris says that three former editors of The Franklin are current contributing editors at The New Yorker. Of those born in the US, in 2001 they could only be either Michael Agger, Roger Angell, Ben Greenham, Robert Gottlieb, Hendrik Hertzberg, Robert Mankoff, or Amy Davidson Sorkin. Roger Angell is the only one who attended a private school in Connecticut.

According to Paris, about twenty percent of The Franklin’s editors went on to achieve journalistic greatness, which seems very high. The message is clear: working on The Franklin can be a stepping stone to success in journalism.

John and Jackie

MADELINE: Hey, did you hear that Kimber Slately and Tristin are a major item?

LOUISE: I thought that Kimber and Shawn Asher were this year’s John and Jackie.

Louise is referring to former President John F. Kennedy (1917-63), and his wife Jacqueline “Jackie” Kennedy, nee Bouvier (1929-94). Good-looking and relatively young when Kennedy took office in 1961, they quickly became a golden couple who were popular in media culture, treated more like movie stars than a political family.

Poker

Jess asks Luke if he would like to play poker with him. He seems practised in shuffling the deck, and offers to lay bets, although says he can’t go any higher than $15 a hand.

Poker is an extremely popular American card game, first developed in the 19th century, in which players lay bets according to how much they believe their hand is worth. Players must then match the maximum bet, raise the wager further, or fold by throwing in their hand (losing the money they have bet so far and all involvement in the current hand). As players may bluff by staking a higher wager than their hand justifies, winning the game involves a subtle mixture of luck, psychology, probability, and game theory.

A good poker player needs to be intelligent, disciplined, independent, have a good memory, and exceptional emotional control. They need to “keep their cards close to their chest” – that is, give away very little about themselves. That’s telling us quite a bit about Jess already. Another character has already been shown to be clever and strategic through their choice of card game: the bridge-playing Emily Gilmore. It would be interesting to see a showdown between the two of them.

Jess smoking and playing poker is shorthand to show what a stereotypical bad boy he is. If he’s been involved in gambling, that would be a clue as to what sort of “trouble” he might be headed for. At this point, Luke may be worried that Lorelai’s instincts might be right about Jess. Interestingly, Fredo Corleone from The Godfather Part II worked in the casino trade …

Twenty Questions

LUKE: So you get unpacked?
JESS: Yup.
LUKE: Get enough space in the closet?
JESS: Plenty.
LUKE: You hungry?
JESS: Eighteen.
LUKE: What?

JESS: Just counting how many questions ’til we hit twenty.

Jess is referring to Twenty Questions, an American parlour game originating in the 19th century. One person chooses a particular object or subject, but keeps it a secret. Players take turns asking them questions about it, which can only be answered by “yes”, “no”, and “maybe”. Winning the game involves correctly guessing the answer within twenty questions – if not, the answerer wins the game. Twenty Questions has been made into several successful radio and television quiz shows.

Of course, Luke isn’t trying to guess anything, just asking if Jess has everything he needs, but Jess is clearly not in the mood.

Tool

JESS: You know, I think I hung my Tool tee-shirt next to my Metallica tee-shirt and they don’t really get along.

Tool is an American rock band from Los Angeles, formed in 1990 by Maynard James Keenan and Adam Jones. They had a heavy metal sound on their first album, Undertow (1993), and became a dominant force in the alternative metal movement with their second album, AEnima (1996). Their musical experiments combining the visual arts and a message of personal evolution continued with Lateralus (May 2001).

Tool has won four Grammy Awards, performed worldwide tours, and produced internationally chart-topping albums. Defying easy categorisation, their music spans progressive rock, psychedelic rock, and art rock.

Metallica, previously discussed as one of Lorelai’s favourite bands. It seems as if she and Jess have more in common than she currently realises. Jess’ sarcastic remark about certain clothes not getting along sounds suspiciously like something Lorelai would say as well.

Presumably, Jess says Tool and Metallica wouldn’t get along because they have completely different styles of metal.