Tag: Did You Notice?

Jess Phones Rory

Jess phones Rory out of the blue – conveniently it’s at a time that Lorelai is celebrating the end of her exams and too drunk to notice or care, so they are able to talk privately in Rory’s bedroom. And Lorelai is playing loud music in the living room, so there’s no chance of Lorelai overhearing their conversation. Jess has been extraordinarily lucky in the time he chose to phone up!

It’s now two weeks since Jess left Stars Hollow, and he makes contact with Rory, but neither of them know what to say to each other – and Jess soon says he needs to go when he learns that Lorelai is in the house with Rory. (He’s on a payphone on a pavement, so can’t really talk properly anyway). This intriguing yet unsatisfying phone conversation is what propels Rory into one of her rare, yet surprisingly regular, moments of madness.

Notice that when the phone rings, Lorelai jokes that if it’s Mick Jagger to blow a whistle and hang up. She’s earlier said she wanted to keep her children away from Mick Jagger, and suggests using a whistle to deter him – in other words, activating an anti-rape device designed to raise an alarm and gain people’s attention to your plight. Jess is definitely someone Lorelai wants kept away from her kid, and the suggestion of rape seems like a foreshadowing of later events.

Lorelai and Luke Meet at the Market

LORELAI: Hey Luke, do you think we could –

LUKE: I gotta get back.

After awkwardly running into each other at Doose’s Market, Lorelai attempts a reconciliation, but Luke evades her overture by saying he has to get back to work. He is not ready to forgive her yet, and it’s another sign to Lorelai that Jess being gone has not really solved any of her problems.

I’m not sure what Luke came into the market for, but he’s just left without buying anything, so whatever it was, he didn’t get it!

Note that Frosted Flakes breakfast cereal is shown in the background, which was so prominent in the scene where Lorelai discovers Jess will be moving to Stars Hollow.

“Richard was dead set against letting her drive that deathmobile”

EMILY: It was that car, wasn’t it? The one her boyfriend made. Richard was dead set against letting her drive that death-mobile.

Richard’s concerns about the car now seem pretty valid. Not that a different car would have stopped Jess from swerving to hit a small animal, but a new car would have had airbags and modern safety features that might have stopped Rory from getting hurt at all in a minor accident. It’s also possible Rory would have been more wary of letting Jess drive a new car. And if Lorelai had forbidden Rory from having a car at all, then obviously there would have been no way for Jess to crash it.

Lorelai wouldn’t let her parents buy Rory a new car when she started attending Chilton, which now seems a bit unfair. She allowed Dean, her seventeen-year-old boyfriend, to build her a car instead, which was actually a much bigger gift from him than a new car from her grandparents, with way more strings attached. To an extent, Emily is justified in her anger, and correct that Lorelai, however unwittingly, helped bring the situation about by the choices she made.

Note that Emily calls a dangerous car a “death-mobile”, in a similar way to Lorelai’s description of a black limo as a “Luca Brasi-mobile“.

Bees

EMILY: How did this [Rory’s fractured wrist] happen?

LORELAI: Bees.

An amusing callback to the previous episode, when Lorelai was trying to think of excuses she could use on her parents to explain why Rory was wearing a cast. All she had come up with was, “Really big bees”. Notice that Rory has a cute bee sticker decoration on her cast, the possible inspiration for this ridiculous lie (or the lie inspired the sticker?).

KC’s Annex

Before leaving for Hartford, Lorelai grabs a burger from a take-out place that is just a window in a wall, called KC’s Annex. It’s next to an art gallery that I don’t think we ever hear about. The burger is disgusting, according to Lorelai, and she is going to starve to death if Luke doesn’t get back soon (even though Stars Hollow has more food options than is economically plausible!).

This looks like the same take-out window where Lorelai bought fiesta burgers for herself and Max when they were on a date in Stars Hollow. (The menu is identical, and they both have a green window frame in a red brick wall). It might be where Lorelai and Rory buy their hotdogs, fries, and thickshakes that they bring to town meetings, as they aren’t from Luke’s.

It seems the food from KC’s is fine, as long as you know Luke’s is available as a regular option. The idea of being stuck eating nothing but KC’s is a horrible one. Lorelai drives past Luke’s, which is still closed, just as a reminder of what she is missing.

Hava Nagila

The song which plays when the rabbi doll is moved so Rory can get pizza money.

Hava Nagila is a modern Jewish folk song traditionally sung at Jewish celebrations. It was composed in 1918 to celebrate the Balfour Declaration and the British victory over the Ottomans in 1917; there are competing claims over who wrote the simple lyrics, but the tune is a traditional Hasidic religious song. Hava Nagila translates as “Let us rejoice”, and the song is all about being happy.

Notice that the photo from Rory’s sixteenth birthday party is across from the rabbi doll with nodding head, and just behind it is the monkey lamp that Lorelai swapped for Baccarat candlesticks she received as a gift from Emily.

White Lines

This is the song Kirk dances to in his film – Miss Patty did the choreography.

White Lines (Don’t Don’t Do It) is a 1983 song by hip hop artist Mel Melle, written by Melle and Sylvia Robinson, and released as a single. On original release, it was credited to Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel, but by that stage Flash and Melle had stopped touring together and were in a legal disagreement.

Originally it was an ironic celebration of the cocaine-fulled party lifestyle, but for commercial reasons was abridged with the “don’t do it” message to warn against the dangers of cocaine. It has an unofficial music video directed by Spike Lee and starring Laurence Fishburne. The song went to #9 on the US Hot Dance Club Play charts, but did best in the UK, where it made #7 on the charts.

Lorelai says that Kirk raps in the film (presumably to the song), but we never hear that happen. Kirk also tells Lorelai he needs to keep the word “damn” in his film to maintain his street cred, but we never hear him say that, either.

A Film By Kirk

Kirk’s short film is reminiscent of a section of the 1977 surrealist horror film Eraserhead, written, directed and produced by David Lynch, previously discussed as Amy Sherman-Palladino’s favourite director. Shot in black and white, it was Lynch’s first feature-length film. Starring Jack Nance in the lead role, it tells the story of a man left to care for his grossly deformed child in a desolate industrial landscape.

Upon release, Eraserhead received negative reviews, being described as “pretentious”, in “sickening bad taste” and “unwatchable”, and opened to small audiences, with little interest shown in it. It gradually gained a cult following as a midnight movie, and today is critically lauded as a film that is both beautiful and nightmarish. It was the favourite film of Stanley Kubrick, and an influence on The Shining.

Note that the poster advertises the film as “A film by David Lynch” – Kirk seems to have used the tagline as the inspiration for his film’s end title.

The other actors in Kirk’s film are Mary Lynn Rajskub and Jon Polito as the girlfriend and the father respectively. Rajskub had been in the sitcom Veronica’s Closet and has since gone on to numerous other shows, such as 24 and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Polito was a veteran actor who worked with the Coen Brothers several times, and appeared in the TV shows Crime and Homicide: Life on the Streets. Neither actor includes Gilmore Girls on their filmography!

If they are supposed to be other people from Stars Hollow helping Kirk out, we never see them again. Perhaps Kirk actually hired professional actors for his film. It doesn’t seem out of character.

Christopher Arrives

Lorelai wakes up to find that after their phone call, Christopher drove to Stars Hollow from Boston and let himself in, falling asleep in a chair next to her. Lorelai wonders if driving interstate in the middle of the night is okay with Sherry, but Christopher deflects this by saying that “Rory comes first”. (Lorelai has no hesitation in throwing herself into the arms of another’s woman’s boyfriend).

Hm, maybe Lorelai should have asked a few more questions! She doesn’t, because she’s so relieved to have someone there to share the parenting with in an emergency, for a change. She even calls Christopher a “superhero”, just for showing up. Lorelai’s excitement over this small effort is a sad indictment of how rock bottom her expectations of Christopher are (and with justification).

In their shared relief that Rory is okay, and mutual hatred of Jess, Lorelai and Christopher easily make up their fight from “It Should’ve Been Lorelai”. Lorelai is very forgiving of Christopher – probably too forgiving.