EMILY: I wasn’t taught to be best friends with my daughter … I was taught to be a role model for my daughter … I did what I thought was right. I did what I thought I had to do to protect you, and because of this we have no relationship.
And “there’s the rub” – Emily wants to have a good relationship with Lorelai, the kind of friendship she thinks Lorelai has with Rory. And yet she was taught that mothers and daughters aren’t friends, and that she has to set an example for Lorelai, not relax and have fun with her. And even though Lorelai is in her thirties and a mother herself, Emily doesn’t know how to stop being a mother, and start being a friend to her daughter. Lorelai being stuck as a perpetual teenager means that Emily can’t grow and develop either.
It’s frustrating, because clearly they are capable of having a good time together. Chad said they were the two people having the most fun at the bar. However, Lorelai has a plan for them to do a bonding activity together – steal the bathrobes from the spa. That’s her idea of a mother-daughter bonding baby step. Hm, speaking of being a role model for your daughter …
EMILY: You knew this whole evening made me uncomfortable and yet you kept pushing.
LORELAI: I was trying to do everything right. You manipulated me into taking this trip and still I came. You told me I was acting like a teenager, so I tried to be nicer. You said you needed to eat, so I made that happen.
EMILY: Yes, by sitting me at a bar where you practically forced me to engage in inappropriate behaviour.
Emily and Lorelai, who have been in an almost constant state of friction since they left for the spa, finally let loose on each other. You can see that each of them have valid points of aggrievement.
Lorelai feels that she was manipulated into going on a spa weekend with her mother – Emily never gave her a chance to decide for herself by asking, “Lorelai, would you care to go to a spa with me this weekend?”. When there was nothing appetising for dinner, she helped her mother get the courage to go out for steak, and when there was no table available, she suggested they eat at the bar instead, where they had a good time together. When a man asked her mother to dance, she made it seem like no big deal to accept if she chose, and now everything is Lorelai’s fault. Again.
Emily feels that Lorelai has been incredibly ungrateful and immature, sulking and sniping like the spoiled teenager she still is inside while being treated to a luxury spa weekend, and being driven there in a limousine. All things that Emily has organised for Lorelai as a fun treat so they can spend some time bonding – she even cancelled Friday Night Dinner for Lorelai’s benefit, so that she won’t feel that “Ugh, I have to have dinner with my mother and go to a spa with her all weekend!”. Emily agreed to going out for steak, even though she didn’t feel comfortable about it, and sitting at the bar wasn’t respectable.
When Chad asked her to dance, she didn’t really want to as it seemed disloyal to Richard, but felt pressured into it by Lorelai. Although it was okay at first, when Chad got a little too intimate, she was expecting Lorelai to act like a good friend and save her. She didn’t. Lorelai figured her mother was an adult and could handle a man coming on too strongly, the way she would have. She left Emily to sink or swim.
Rory had Paris to protect her from Jess coming onto her, and from Dean’s temper. Emily could have used a friend like that, and unfortunately, Lorelai wasn’t that friend for her.
EMILY: This is either the greatest steak I’ve ever eaten, or I’m so hungry, I’m delirious. Pass the horseradish, please.
LORELAI: I never knew you were a spicy girl.
EMILY: Oh, believe me, I can handle my heat. One summer when we were first married, your father and I stayed at this little village in Thailand where we spent two weeks eating viciously hot chillies and skinny-dipping.
Emily and Richard would have visited Thailand in the late 1960s, considered to be during the Golden Age of Tourism in Thailand. Westerners had been travelling to Thailand (Siam) since the 19th century, but it was only in 1947 that the first flights from the US to Bangkok began, when Pan Am offered it as part of its around the world ticket. By the 1960s, flights to Bangkok were cheaper and shorter.
The “little village” the Gilmores stayed in was almost certainly Pattaya – originally a fishing village with a perfect crescent of beach, only 99 miles from Bangkok, on a decent road. That made it very attractive to tourists, and by the early 1960s, some development had already begun. Today it is a modern city of more than 120 000 people with a very seedy red light district, and a major pollution problem. The once-pristine beach is now considered poor quality due to sewage dumping.
It’s interesting that Emily remembers skinny-dipping with Richard for two weeks, as he later has quite a different recollection. It is just possible that it was on this summer vacation in Thailand that Lorelai was conceived – she was born in late April 1968, meaning that she could have been conceived in July-August the previous year.
Note that Emily’s enjoyment of hot horseradish on her steak parallels Rory eating her French fries dipped in pepper and hot sauce. (And her love of Indian curry!).
It’s hard for Paris to trust that someone actually likes her – her parents’ cold and neglectful behaviour have seen to that. An overture of friendship from Rory sees Paris agree to it with a smile, although she can’t help ending with a typically Paris-like threat.
RORY: I’m not sure if there is an exact definition for what we are, but I do think it falls somewhere in the bizarro friends-ish realm.
Bizarro, previously discussed, and now used by Lorelai, Jess, and Rory.
Just as Rory found it hard to define her relationship with Jess, resorting to the word “friendish” to describe it, she also finds it hard to say what Paris is to her. Classmate? Ex-bully? Frenemy? Fellow nerd? Or an actual friend? For now, the bizarro friends-ish realm must satisfy.
Despite being explicitly told that Rory wanted to be alone and undisturbed tonight, Dean comes over uninvited with some ice cream for them to share. He does his usual stalker-y routine of not phoning until he is actually on the doorstep and can’t be got rid of. This is the boy who can happily call Rory a minimum of four times a night, but suddenly phoning ahead of time is too much of a drag for him.
When Dean discovers that Jess is at the house, he completely loses it, no doubt thinking that Rory kept him away so she could spend time alone with Jess. The fact that Paris is there too, and Rory was never alone with Jess for a minute doesn’t seem to register with him. He looms over Rory in an intimidating way and shouts at her when she tries to explain, until she says, “Stop yelling!”.
Paris overhears their argument and comes to the rescue. Unfortunately, she doesn’t do so by taking Dean to pieces, and giving him a short sharp lesson in how to treat women, or even asking Rory if she really feels safe with Dean.
Instead she lies, pretending that she had a crush on Jess, and asked Rory to help her spend time with him. Like Lorelai, Paris finds Dean scary enough in a temper that she thinks it’s better to lie to him to calm him down. Yep, Angry Dean even frightens Paris.
Even more unfortunately, Paris doesn’t have enough experience to tell Rory that her boyfriend’s treatment of her is not okay. At least Dean has the sense to walk away in order to cool off, but the fact that he obviously doesn’t trust Rory is something he needs to think about.
Jess refers to the gang rivalry between two Upper West Side gangs of New York, the Jets (white Americans) and the Sharks (Puerto Ricans). Maria, played by Natalie Wood, is a Puerto Rican girl who has come to New York for an arranged marriage with a man named Chino she does not love. She is drawn to Tony, played by Richard Beymer, a former member of the Jets.
Jess is taunting Dean by hinting that Rory no longer loves him, and like Maria, has fallen for a boy who is off-limits to her. In the film, Chino comes after Tony with a gun during a rumble, and shoots him dead. This is another suggestion that Jess is expecting Dean to become violent with him in order to keep him away from Rory.
JESS: I can’t get into poetry. It’s kind of like, geez, just say it already, we’re dying here.
Jess has actually read Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl more than forty times, so this “I’m too butch for poetry” is nothing but posturing. Maybe he’s trying provoke Rory into saying something, which would reveal to an outsider how they formed an intimate bond over her poetry book. If so, it doesn’t work.
But in what possible universe would Jane Austen have liked Charles Bukowski, as either a person or a writer? She lived in an era when it was deeply shocking, even violating, for a man to address a woman without an introduction – how would she have coped with Bukowski’s vivid description of his own penis and his offer of it to a female friend, with instructions as to its use?
Jess is saying that a nice, genteel girl like Rory can still appreciate a crude but intelligent bad boy like himself. Rory and Jess? For sure. Jane Austen and Bukowski? Not a chance.
PARIS: [The Beats] believed in drugs, booze, and petty crime … That was not great writing. That was the National Enquirer of the fifties.
National Enquirer, tabloid newspaper founded in New York in 1926, known for its sensationalist reporting and flimsy journalistic ethics.
The National Enquirer already existed in the 1950s, so I’m not sure how The Beats are “the National Enquirer of the 1950s”. Surely the National Enquirer was the National Enquirer of the 1950s? For a supposedly smart character, Paris says some remarkably silly and ignorant things.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 