Lorelai Paints Luke’s Diner

On the morning after the disastrous dinner with the Haydens, Lorelai suddenly remembers that she never showed up to help Luke paint the diner on Friday night. She runs over while still in her pyjamas to apologise and explain, unnecessarily increasing Luke’s pain by letting him know that she was with Christopher.

In fact their “date” for painting the diner was so vaguely worded that I couldn’t tell when exactly they were planning to do it, and Lorelai had triple-booked herself, as she had Friday Night Dinner with her parents, and also business class, which she never seems to attend. Even if Emily let Lorelai leave early, when were she and Luke planning on doing the painting – in the middle of the night?

As their poorly-planned painting date didn’t happen, Lorelai somehow manages to sneak into the diner while Luke is asleep – the bread guy let her in, suggesting she started at dawn – and paints the entire thing in an hour or two. This would take at least two days (you can’t just start painting, walls have to be prepped), and she was doing it all alone.

Furthermore, later episodes confirm that Luke slept over the diner and would have almost certainly heard her, and that he got up extremely early so the diner could open at 6 am, meaning that there was no time for Lorelai to paint the diner before he got up (and also that he couldn’t have possibly painted the diner at night as they originally planned; he wouldn’t have got any sleep).

Chernobyl and the Hindenburg

CHRISTOPHER: So …. last night.
LORELAI: Ah, last night was Chernobyl and the Hindenburg combined.
CHRISTOPHER: Right, just checking.

Chernobyl was a city in the Ukraine which is now a ghost town. It is infamous as the site of the Chernobyl Disaster when a reactor exploded at the nuclear power plant; it is the worst nuclear disaster in history. The city was evacuated on April 27 1986, and the area around it is now restricted. (Weirdly enough, some people still choose to live there, and since 2004 it has become something of a tourist site).

The LZ 129 Hindenburg [pictured] was a German airship operated by the German Zeppelin Airline Company. First launched in March 1936, it was destroyed by fire on May 6 1937 while attempting to land at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey at the end of its first transatlantic American flight. Known as the Hindenburg Disaster, it was the last of the great airship disasters, with 36 lives lost, and effectively spelled the end of airships as a form of transportation.

By his manner, Christopher seems to want to know how Lorelai felt about them having sex the previous evening, but her reactions makes it clear she considers the entire night a disaster of epic proportions. He seems subdued and disappointed in his response.

Straub, Richard, and Lorelai

Christopher’s father Straub (Peter Michael Goetz) could hardly be written as more hateful. He makes it clear that he sees Rory as nothing more than a terrible mistake, entirely Lorelai’s fault, which ruined his son’s life. He even suggests that as a sixteen-year-old, Rory is just about to get pregnant herself (“dangerous age for girls”). He looks down on Lorelai, and identifies her position as executive manager of an inn as a “blue collar” job. This is ridiculous, as Lorelai is in no way performing manual labour – I suspect he still thinks of her as a maid.

It is entirely satisfying when Richard throws Straub and the mousily ineffectual Francine (Cristine Rose) out of the house (with Francine, you can see where Christopher gets his weak character from, although Straub’s bullying also provides an explanation for his overly compliant wife and son). The fight between Straub and Richard explains why Rory never has any further contact with her paternal grandparents.

Lorelai thanks her father for defending her, but instead of a sweet father-daughter moment, Richard coldly tells her that he wasn’t defending her, but “the Gilmore name”. He lets Lorelai know in no uncertain terms that she brought shame to the family by getting pregnant, and that after she ran away from home Emily was confined to her bed for a month with grief – something Lorelai did not know until this moment.

Richard lets Lorelai know that he hated Christopher for getting her pregnant, but that Christopher at least was willing to marry Lorelai and work in the insurance business to support her and Rory (Christopher would agree to anything to avoid conflict, although we can feel fairly confident he would have found a way to weasel out of it at some point).

Richard continues to blame Lorelai for not marrying Christopher, her personal feelings being irrelevant to him. This seems to be further evidence that the whole plan to reunite the Gilmores and the Haydens was something cooked up by Richard and Emily, who really want Lorelai to marry someone suitable, with Rory’s father being the best candidate in their eyes.

President Bush

LORELAI: I hate President Bush … He’s stupid and his face is too tiny for his head and I just want to toss him out.

Lorelai is talking about George W. Bush (born 1946), who had been elected President of the United States in November 2000, and sworn in on January 20 2001, less than two months previously from Lorelai’s perspective. He is the son of George H.W. Bush, who was US President from 1989 to 1993. Like so many famous people referenced in the show, George W. Bush has a Connecticut connection, being born in New Haven: he also attended both Yale and Harvard.

Lorelai’s perception of George W. Bush as “stupid” was one shared by many people, due to his frequent lapses of grammar, mangled sentences, and baffling statements. Polls showed that American voters saw him as having a low intelligence. Historians rate his presidency quite poorly, although his popularity has picked up since he left office in 2009.

It was rare for Gilmore Girls to stray far into politics, so this was an unusual moment which identified Lorelai as a Democrat. She was clearly desperate to get attention away from Rory, and her plan worked. Impulsive as ever, Lorelai didn’t stop to think whether her comment was going to make the evening easier. It didn’t help things.

Emily’s Phone Call to Christopher

While they are all in the diner for lunch, Christopher receives a call on his cell phone from Emily Gilmore. It seems awfully suspicious that Emily just happens to call Christopher when he is in Stars Hollow, and even more of a coincidence when it turns out that Emily knows his parents are in Connecticut at the same time.

Knowing Emily’s passion for meddling in Lorelai’s affairs, it seems likely that Christopher’s trip back east was engineered by Emily in the hopes that he would get closer to Rory, and maybe to Lorelai, and would bring Christopher’s parents, the Haydens, back into the fold as well.

It is Emily’s desire that Lorelai and Christopher form a family together with Rory, with the blessing of Straub and Francine Hayden, who haven’t bothered to see their granddaughter since she was a baby. This definitely looks like one of Emily’s master plans, and Richard’s comment about Christopher’s new business back in the Pilot show that the elder Gilmores had been in regular contact with Christopher for some time (and perhaps had always been).

Rory and Donna Reed Night

It isn’t obvious what Rory hoped to achieve by holding a Donna Reed Night with Dean, or what she thought she had proved by doing so. If she wanted to confront him with the reality of being an ideal 1950s housewife to show him how unrealistic it is, she is only partially successful.

Dean clearly adores the idea of her cooking for him while dressed in high heels and pearls, and even likes the rather terrible food she has prepared from packets and cans. Rory receives reassurance from Dean that he doesn’t really want her to be Donna Reed, but when she says she would do it all again, he is very quick to show interest in the idea. If anything, she may have awoken a desire in him he didn’t know he had.

If Rory planned to seduce Dean with cuteness to resolve their argument, she succeeded – but at what cost? And why? Was she simply scared of losing Dean, and made a grand gesture to win him back? If so, it’s sad, but probably not unrealistic for a teenager, that a single disagreement over an old TV show could make her so frightened and desperate.

There seems to be an element of wanting to demonstrate to Dean that she can have opinions and an identity that differ from Lorelai. Her choice of teenage rebellion is a bit strange, but she seems to have decided that she will set herself apart from from her mother by being far more willing to change herself and her ideas to please her boyfriend. Little wonder the uncompromising Lorelai thinks a blow to the head might have been involved.

Research on Donna Reed

DEAN: As amazing as this whole thing was, I mean, the music, the outfit, the dinner, I hope you know that I don’t expect you to be Donna Reed. And I don’t want you to be Donna Reed. That’s not what I meant. This just totally got blown out of proportion. I’m actually pretty happy with you.
RORY: I know, and I appreciate that, but aside from this actually being fun, I did a little research on Donna Reed.
DEAN: You did research on Donna Reed.
RORY: Look. See, she did do the whole milk and cookies wholesome big skirt thing, but aside from that, she was an uncredited producer and director on her television show, which made her one of the first women television executives. Which is actually pretty impressive.

After her argument with Dean, Rory looked up Donna Reed on Internet Movie Database (IMDd); this was first formed in 1990, began as a website in 1993, and incorporated in 1996. By this stage at least, she must know Donna Reed was real!

Donna Reed and her husband Tony Owens had a production company named Todon (made from both their names) which produced The Donna Reed Show, and Donna Reed helped develop the show. I can’t find any reference to her actually directing any episodes, though presumably as it was her show she would have had a fair amount of creative control.

Rory’s research actually supports her original argument that The Donna Reed Show is sexist, since Donna Reed’s role as an executive producer was uncredited, with her husband receiving the credit. Oddly enough, she somehow seems to think it negates her argument.

However, this episode of Gilmore Girls wants to make an important point about the history of women in television which is generally overlooked. As a female producer herself, Amy-Sherman-Palladino often had to fight to get her ideas taken seriously, and people who had only seen her name on scripts sometimes assumed it was a female pseudonym adopted by a man – Aaron Sorkin was one suggestion.

Rory’s Dinner for Dean

Appetisers (premade pastry shells filled with what looks like some sort of processed cheese-like product, such as Velveeta or Cheez Whiz)

Steak

Mashed potatoes (instant, made from a boxed mixture)

Green beans (from a can)

Dinner rolls (ready-made dough, just needs to be placed in oven)

Lime Jello-O (from a box) with Cool Whip imitation cream (from a can) – quick setting due to being made in individual glasses rather than a bowl

Rory’s dinner is clever because most of the ingredients are processed, with each of the food items being available during The Donna Reed Show era of 1958 to 1966. From a practical point of view, it means that Rory, who can’t cook, didn’t have to do a lot of actual food preparation – frying the steak was the only part that required any real kitchen skill, and is pretty basic.

On a deeper level, it is showing the artificiality of the era, and the “fakeness” of being a perfect 1950s/1960s housewife. Obviously any woman who, like Donna Stone, has to provide extraordinary amounts of food, as well as keeping the house spotless, doing the laundry, child-raising, volunteering, and looking immaculate at the same time has to rely on processed and convenience food to save time. It’s unlikely Dean picks up on this sly comment, however.

Unlike the dress, the ingredients for the dinner are easily explained – Babette told Rory there was tons of food in the house, and implied that she could help herself.

Flower Girl of Bordeaux

This instrumental piece by Mexican band leader and composer Juan García Esquivel, often known by his surname only, is the “interesting music” which is playing when Dean first arrives at Babette’s and finds Rory in costume. It is from the CD that Rory got from Lane’s “miscellaneous” section, and which she described as “the weird one”.

Esquivel is considered to be the king of late 1950s-early 1960s quirky instrumental pop, or lounge music – Rory’s choice of his music shows that while she has tried to be faithful to period, she is doing so with her own idiosyncratic style, and subverting conventional expectations.

Esquivel’s music was released on a series of CDs in the 1990s; Flower Girl of Bordeaux is from the 1995 compilation album Music From a Sparkling Planet.

Notice how this is a slight callback to the “kick ass” Bordeaux wine drunk earlier in the episode; perhaps an allusion to how intoxicating Rory appears to Dean.

“Stella!”

When Lorelai realises that the chick Stella is somehow missing, even though it was in a secure cage and had previously been fine, Lorelai screams out the chick’s name in a way reminiscent of the way Stanley calls to his wife Stella in an iconic scene from A Streetcar Named Desire.

It seems to be a truism in television comedy that anyone named Stella, especially an animal, will escape or disappear so that their name can be yelled in the same manner.