Category: S2Ep5: Nick & Nora/Sid & Nancy

This is Hell

Jess leaves Luke, after the briefest tour of their living quarters, refusing to say where he is going. For Luke, this must remind him of Liz, who was always “off doing God knows what”. Slightly worryingly, Jess claims he doesn’t need keys to get in, suggesting Lorelai’s idea of him as a petty criminal may not be so wrong.

He steps outside the diner to be confronted with a typically charming Stars Hollow street scene. Townsfolk carry sheaves of wheat to the harvest festival in the park, while volunteers decorate lamp posts with garlands of autumn leaves. In the bright sunshine, happy couples stroll together, families walk in harmony, children skip merrily.

Yet this song by Elvis Costello plays, with the lyrics, This is hell, this is hell/I am sorry to tell you/It never gets better or worse/But you get used to it after a spell/For heaven is hell in reverse. Stars Hollow in early autumn looks like heaven, but to Jess, it is a season in hell.

The song is from Costello’s critically acclaimed 1994 album, Brutal Youth.

Jess Mariano (Milo Ventimiglia)

Jess Mariano is Luke’s seventeen-year-old nephew, the son of his sister Liz. He was introduced in Season Two as a romantic interest for Rory, and as a contrast with her boyfriend Dean. Jess is the “bad boy” that Lorelai feared Rory would be attracted to, in the same way she was when she was a teenager.

Jess is introduced when he steps off the bus, the modern teenage equivalent of the mysterious stranger riding into town. The bus says it is going to Hartford, and Jess boarded it in New York, so Stars Hollow must be on the bus route between these points. In real life, the bus route from New York to Hartford goes through Danbury and Waterbury, which doesn’t seem that implausible as far as Stars Hollow’s possible location goes. The bus trip takes about two and a half hours, and we later learn the bus got in at 10 am.

Jess and Luke greet each monosyllabically by simply saying each other’s names. The mirroring is a sign that Jess and his uncle share at least one characteristic – neither of them are particularly talkative.

There has already been a character named Jess in Gilmore Girls – the college boys that Madeline and Louise got with at The Bangles concert in Season 1 were named Jess and Sean. Maybe Jess seemed like a very “New York bad boy” sort of name? Or the writers really like the name Jess?

Both Rory and Jess have unisex names, or names more common on the opposite sex. It’s interesting that the name Jess Mariano has the same rhythm as Dan Palladino, and they’re obviously both of Italian heritage.

Riff

LOUISE: Everything okay?
RORY: Yeah, Riff, everything’s fine.

Riff (Russ Tamblyn) is the leader of the The Jets gang in West Side Story, previously discussed. The loyal muscle to former member Tony, he urges Tony to fight, so that Tony becomes a murderer.

Rory sees Louise as Paris’ henchman and attack dog, who eggs her on. In the film, Riff is killed in a gang fight he helped instigate – perhaps a bit of wishful thinking from Rory!

Fredo

LUKE: There’s nothing to think about. He’s family. You take care of family, period.
LORELAI: Yes, I respect that, but what if he turns out to be Fredo?

A reference to the film The Godfather Part II, the sequel to The Godfather, previously discussed.

In the films, Frederico “Fredo” Corleone (played by John Cazale) is the middle brother in his family. He is seen as a weak person, with little power or status in the crime family, and given relatively unimportant jobs to do. During the course of the film, his younger brother Michael, who has become the Mafia don, discovers that Fredo betrayed him. He has Fredo killed.

Before Lorelai even meets Luke’s nephew, she is prejudiced against him, and makes none-too-subtle hints that the boy is a petty criminal who may not be worth helping.

“Make it a blonde”

LORELAI: Luke, um, that’s not a bed, that’s a raft, which is fine if you’re gonna build a moat around the diner but …
LUKE: It’s fine.
LORELAI: Luke, the kid needs a bed. If you want to get him something inflatable, make it a blonde.

Lorelai is humorously referring to inflatable sex dolls. She also refers to the blow-up mattress as a “raft”, which feels like another subtle nod to Huckleberry Finn.

During the show, the (dark-haired) showrunners had a habit of making blonde women the butt of their jokes, and blonde characters were usually shallow, stupid, spiteful, or all three. There’s a slight suggestion here that blonde women are little more than sex dolls (otherwise, why does the sex doll have to be blonde? They could have any colour hair).

Liz

LUKE: Look, his problem is obvious, it’s his mother. You never could count on Liz for anything. Our mom died when we were kids, right? It was just my dad, me and Liz. And my dad worked all the time and I worked in the store with my dad, and Liz was off doing God knows what.
LORELAI: Well, I bet losing her mom so early was kind of hard on her.
LUKE: It was hard on all of us, but we did our part. And then the minute she graduates high school, she is outta here. Didn’t matter that my dad was sick, didn’t matter that the store was failing, she just took off. Married the hot dog king, had a kid, he left, now here we are.

Luke gives Lorelai a potted history of his sister Liz. After the death of their mother while they were young, Luke fell into the role of the “good child” who supported his father and worked alongside him in the hardware store when he wasn’t at school. Liz was the “bad child”who ran around town and did her own thing.

As soon as she finished school, she left town (and went to California?) despite her father being ill and the family business going downhill as a result. Luke now makes it sound as if Liz’s husband worked at (or owned?) the Wienerschnitzel restaurant, not merely another customer. In fact, he had a similar job to the one Luke now has!

Lorelai is immediately sympathetic to Liz, understanding the terrible loss of her mother at a young age, and having personal knowledge of being a wayward teenage girl, family black sheep, and young mother herself.

It possibly explains one of the reasons Luke is drawn to Lorelai. She was a rebellious teen like his sister and even had her child the same year as Liz, and yet while he can only see Liz as a screw-up and a flake, Lorelai is energetic, hard-working, ambitious, and a pillar of their community. Of course, Lorelai wasn’t orphaned in her teens, and her family didn’t go broke, so it’s hardly a fair comparison.

In fact, despite Luke’s disparaging summation of his sister’s character, her life story doesn’t sound particularly dire or even that unusual. She got out of a probably stifling small town to escape a miserable family situation, travelled across the country, met a small business owner (?) or at least someone in employment, got married and had a child. Although she married young, the marriage lasted fifteen years or more, leaving her as a single mother to a teenage boy who seemingly inherited her own rebellious streak.

Luke’s relationship with his sister opens up a number of questions. Does he see Lorelai as the girl who turned her life around with the support of Stars Hollow, the way he wishes Liz had? Does he sometimes cast Lorelai in the role of a ditzy younger sister? Does he give Lorelai and Rory the help and friendship he wishes he could have bestowed on Liz and her son?

And if he had directed his love and care towards his sister and nephew instead, would they be in the mess they are now? Because Lorelai has lived in Stars Hollow for more than ten years, and she didn’t even know Luke had a sibling.

(By the way, Liz is another name from General Hospital – Luke and Laura’s son Lucky married a girl named Liz, and they became a younger generation “supercouple”).

The Shawshank Redemption

LORELAI: Well, you might want to find out. Ask a couple of subtle questions, you know, has he seen The Shawshank Redemption, did the setting seem homey to him? Stuff like that.

The Shawshank Redemption is a 1994 prison drama based on a 1982 novella by Stephen King called Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. The story opens in 1947, and stars Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman in the lead roles as two prisoners with life sentences who become unlikely friends and allies.

The film received critical acclaim, particularly for the performances of Robbins and Freeman, but was a box office disappointment. However, it became one of the top rented films in video in 1995, and was shown regularly on television from 1997 onwards, becoming one of the world’s best-loved films. It is currently #1 at IMDb.

Although “Shawshank” has become cultural shorthand to mean “prison”, I think it is safe to assume Lorelai and Rory have seen the film on either video or television.

“He’s been getting into some trouble”

LUKE: Well, ’cause apparently he’s been getting into some trouble and Liz is afraid he’s heading for something bad, and rather than handle it herself, she’s just giving up. She’s sending him here so I can straighten him out.

LORELAI: Right. So what kind of trouble has he gotten into?
LUKE: Ah, just kid stuff, you know, staying out late, getting rowdy. I don’t know exactly.

The exact nature of the “trouble” Luke’s teenaged nephew was getting into was never made explicit in the show, so that the characters were free to imagine it for themselves.

Luke optimistically guesses that his nephew has been getting up to trouble in an almost boyishly wholesome way that could have come straight from the pages of Tom Sawyer. Lorelai immediately assumes that the kid is fresh out of juvenile detention and most likely has a criminal record.

Whether either are right, or whether the nephew’s misdemeanours are somewhere between these marks, is something the viewer is free to decide for themselves.

Der Wienerschnitzel

LORELAI: Where’s his dad?
LUKE: Oh well, the great prize that my sister picked up at a Der Wienerschnitzel left her about two years ago, whereabouts unknown.

Wienerschnitzel is an American fast food chain specialising in hot dogs (even though the name refers to crumbed veal, which the restaurant has only served a few times). It was founded in 1961 as Der Weinerschitzel (which is grammatically incorrect as a German phrase). Although the name was changed in 1977, many older customers still use the original name.

Wienerschnitzel is predominantly located in California, which suggests that Luke’s sister Liz met her son’s father there, and that she and her son have been on their own for two years. It is worth noting that this back story changed during the course of the show.