Jess and Lorelai’s Fight

LORELAI: Ugh, Jess, let me give you a little advice. The whole ‘my parents don’t get me’ thing, I’ve been there.
JESS: You have, huh?

Lorelai follows Jess again, and for the third time finds him doing something in her house on the sly. This time, it’s taking a beer from her fridge.

Lorelai handles this awkward situation rather neatly, and it’s only after Jess balks at coming in to dinner and mocks her cosy small-town life (“Well geez, Ms. Gilmore … that sounds plum crazy”) that she starts handing out unsolicited advice. It’s (mostly) well-intentioned and she is genuinely trying to help Luke if not Jess, but it goes down very badly.

It’s hard not to have some sympathy with Jess here, because Lorelai is very patronising saying that “she’s been there”. Yes, she was a smartass, misunderstood, and misbehaving teenager like Jess, but their lives were hardly parallel.

Lorelai grew up in a wealthy, privileged household, her father didn’t leave them, her mother wasn’t unreliable and impractical. Nor did her mother give up on her and basically throw her out to live with a relative she barely knows in a small town hours away from her home. In fact, it was Lorelai who rejected her parents and ran to the sanctuary of Stars Hollow.

Lorelai has the rare experience of taking someone on who is intelligent enough to match her in wits, and confident enough to stand up to her. It obviously comes as a shock, and by the end of the argument, Jess has made a crude yet insightful attack on the possible sexual relationship between she and Luke, and Lorelai has sunk to playground levels of retaliation, showing that she hasn’t grown up much since being a teenager.

It is Lorelai who retreats inside while giving a parting shot, so it’s round one to Jess, but Lorelai gets the last word.

NOTE: Edited with the kind assistance of helpful reader Daniel A Huth, who stopped me from imagining a fridge which wasn’t there.

The Secret History of Ham

SOOKIE: You know ham was originally made out of rice?

It definitely wasn’t – ham is, and always was, made out of pig. It is hard to know how ham even could be made from rice.

As a professional chef, Sookie must surely know this. I’d like to think that Sookie is making a “look how dumb I am” joke, in protest at Lorelai and Jackson putting her intelligence down. If not, perhaps she’s taken it to heart that Jackson prefers his women dumb, and is trying to give him what he wants.

“Hooked on phonics”

JESS: [looking at bookshelf] Wow, aren’t we hooked on phonics.

Hooked on Phonics is a brand of educational materials. First marketed in 1987, it was originally designed to teach reading through a system of phonetics.

Jess could have just said, “You must like reading”, or, “It’s great to meet someone else who’s into good literature”. But instead he makes a snarky, superior-sounding comment.

Hey, a snarky quip using a slightly out-of-date cultural reference that implies he’s smarter and better than most people? He sounds just like Lorelai! (It’s almost like the same people are writing their dialogue). Naturally this resonates with Rory. She just met her mother in teenage boy form, and will doubtless find him irresistible. See the entry on Freud.

Rory Meets Jess

While Jess is in the kitchen being introduced (he never bothers to greet Sookie and Jackson), he notices that Rory’s bedroom door is open, and just as he quietly slipped into the living room without being invited, he now wanders into Rory’s room. She is sitting with her back to the door, so she doesn’t immediately know he is there. As with the photos, he gets a chance to check Rory out without her knowing, and before she can look at him.

There is a parallel with Rory’s boyfriend Dean at this point. Both Dean and Jess were invited to the Gilmore home for dinner by Lorelai, and both of them went into Rory’s bedroom without asking, as a sign of their interest in her. Dean had been asked as a date for Rory, and they had previously kissed, but Jess has never even met Rory before. It’s a bold and presumptuous move to explore her personal space.

In case there is any doubt what’s going on here, Rory is wearing a cardigan decorated with pinkish-red love hearts, made to look as if they are the fluttering petals of flowers (fluttering heart, hearts and flowers!). The cardigan is buttoned up though, to show that this flower has not yet opened to Jess. Meanwhile, Jess has a large number 2 on the back of his (bad boy) hoodie. The show uses costume a lot to make a point, and in this instance, it seems impossible not to mention it.

Once again, Lorelai follows Jess to see what he’s up to, and this time she isn’t quite so smiling when she asks both of them to come to dinner. I think Jess can now count himself as being on Lorelai’s radar.

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.

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 19^th 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 …

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.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

This 1972 novel by American author Hunter S. Thompson is one of the books that Jess brought to Stars Hollow with him, seen strewn around the bedroom he shares with Luke.

The book is autobiographical, based on two trips to Las Vegas Hunter S. Thompson took with attorney and political activist Oscar Zeta Acosta (called Dr. Gonzo in the novel) in 1971. In the novel, the characters descend on Las Vegas to chase the American dream in a drug-induced haze, ruminating on the failure of the 1960s counterculture. First published in Rolling Stone, the book is Thompson’s most famous work, and his subjective blend of fact and fiction became known as “gonzo” journalism.

It’s notable that this is another autobiographical novel about travel and the American dream that Jess has brought with him, and the “fear and loathing” a comment about how he feels being dumped on a relative in a small town. Which is interesting, because it means Jess not only hates Stars Hollow, he’s scared by it, and a lot of his sneering and posturing are an attempt to disguise that.

I think we’re meant to be impressed that Jess is reading a book by a journalist, as if to say, “Jess is not only smart and enjoys reading, like Rory, but he’s interested in journalism, like Rory”. Unfortunately the writers already made Dean a fan of Hunter S. Thompson (back in the days when Dean read books and understood films), and he introduced Rory to Thompson. This undercuts Jess’ intellectual status quite a lot, although it does show he and Dean may be more alike than it appears at first sight.

Wilding

LORELAI: You know, you should meet my daughter. She’s about your age. She can show you where all the good wilding goes on . . .

“Wilding” is an American term which gained media use in the 1980s and ’90s to describe gangs of teenage gangs committing violent acts. It is no longer often used.

The word has an ugly history, coined during the Central Park jogger case of 1989, after a white female jogger was assaulted and raped in Manhattan’s Central Park. Five black and Latino juveniles were convicted of the crime, police contending that the boys said they were “wilding” in the park, the police taking this to mean committing violence.

This has been disputed as a (wilful?) misunderstanding by the police. Other theories are that the boys were repeating the lyrics to the Tone Loc song, “The Wild Thing”, or that they said they were “wiling”, meaning “hanging out, whiling away the time”.

The boys served sentences of between six to twelve years, and all later had their charges vacated after a serial rapist and murderer confessed to the crime while in prison. This was in 2002, so after this episode aired (Lorelai doesn’t know she is referencing falsely imprisoned schoolboys).

So far, Lorelai has linked Jess with prisoners and the Mafia, and joked that he may be going out to hold up a liquor store. Once she actually meets him, she connects him with violent gang rape. At this point, her “jokes” about Jess have become openly hostile, and quite nasty.

As Lorelai has joked about a violent gang rape, and used a word with a racist history to Jess, I wonder if this is when he decided he didn’t like Lorelai very much?

The Franklin Meeting

There is a meeting at the end of the school day for all those students interested in working on Chilton’s magazine, The Franklin, previously discussed.

Paris has been chosen as the editor, and plans to use her position to make Rory’s life miserable. She tells Rory the meeting is at 4 pm, but it actually began at 3:15 pm, so that Rory arrives very late (a handy writing technique, so that we don’t see all the boring part of a meeting where everyone introduces themselves and the teacher makes a welcoming speech).

Paris’ evil yet simple scheme of giving the wrong time is one often utilised in film and television, yet would have trouble working in real life. For one thing, the school day ends at 4.05 pm, so the meeting seems to actually take up class time. Wouldn’t Rory have needed permission from a teacher to attend the meeting, and wouldn’t that be a clue it wasn’t after school?

And Rory is so obsessive about schedules and timetables, is it really possible she had no other way of knowing the time of the meeting? There were no flyers on the wall, she couldn’t check with another student, the teacher in charge didn’t mention it? It’s meant to make Paris look like a villain, but in fact it makes Rory look sloppy and careless, or as if she has been so busy learning her new timetable and locker location that she forgot to make a note of the meeting time. At the very least, she’s dopily naïve to trust someone she knows is working against her.

Paris has been chosen as editor, despite being in her junior year, in the first year she is eligible to work on the magazine at all. Wouldn’t a senior year student be chosen as the editor? Or is there a tradition that only juniors work on The Franklin, as seniors have more important things to do? If so, that’s a lot of responsibility to be given when you have no experience. But that seems to be the Chilton way – throw students into the deep end and watch them either sink or swim.

Paris gives Rory the assignment she threatened to as soon as she was named editor – a story on re-paving a parking lot. How she knew such a story would be available four months later is a mystery. If it’s not a coincidence, perhaps she already knew about the re-paving in advance, and had been given a heads-up it would be one of the first stories covered when the new school year began. That she managed to manipulate the situation so that Rory was the only student possible to do the story is a testament to her genius.