Tag: Foreshadowing

Where It’s At

This song by Beck is playing in the background when Rory and Lane arrive at Madeline’s party and continues throughout the introductions to Madeline and Louise.

Where It’s At is from Beck’s acclaimed 1996 album Odelay, although he performed the song in concert earlier, including at Lollapalooza in 1995. The song went to #61 in the charts and #5 in the alternative music charts, earning Beck a Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance, while the music video won Best Male Video at the MTV Awards. The song uses samples from various sources, including one from a sex education album for teenagers – rather apt for Louise and Madeline’s later actions.

The cool alternative music at the party suggests they hired the same (rather implausible) DJ from the Chilton Winter Formal.

Toaster Pizza and Beefaroni

LORELAI: I can’t wait to try the toaster pizza. It looks so gross which is usually the mark for a great junk food.
RORY: Beefaroni.

Toaster pizza is a frozen mini pizza that can be cooked in a toaster. It has a thick pastry crust, and only a little bit of sauce and cheese so it doesn’t melt inside the toaster, or is fully enclosed in pastry, like a savoury Pop-Tart. They were first made by Nabisco in 1969, but several brands make them now. (Incidentally, this shows that the Gilmore girls got their toaster fixed – it was broken when Christopher came to stay with them).

Beefaroni is a popular tinned food made by Chef Boyardee which is macaroni mixed with beef mince, tomato sauce, and (some) cheese. We later learn it is Rory’s favourite meal.

Luke’s Fight with Dean

When Dean tries to enter the diner (maybe he’s one of the mysterious 6 am crowd who get up early on Saturdays?), Luke forbids him, and they end up in a physical altercation in the street. It is obvious that Luke has never liked Dean – if you look back at all their earlier interactions, Luke always had an air of underlying hostility just waiting to bubble over. He is protective of Rory, and genuinely doesn’t believe Dean is good enough for her.

The fight between them proves that Lorelai was right when she warned Dean from the beginning that he would not be safe in Stars Hollow if he ever hurt Rory, as the whole town loves her.

“It sleeps with the fishes”

RORY: Far, far away from the house, okay? [referring to her box of items that remind her of Dean]
LORELAI: Hey, it sleeps with the fishes.

A reference to the 1972 crime film The Godfather, directed by Francis Ford Coppola and based on the best-selling 1969 novel of the same name by Mario Puzo. The story is about an Italian-American crime family in New York in the 1940s and ’50s, under their patriarch Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando). It depicts the transformation of Vito’s son Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) from an outsider in the family to mafia boss.

The Godfather was the #1 film of 1972, and is one of the highest-grossing films in cinema history. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture, while Marlon Brando received Best Actor, and Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo won Best Adapted Screenplay. It is regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, and has been highly influential on gangster films.

In the film, Luca Brasi is the loyal enforcer to Don Vito Corleone. He is murdered by a rival mobster, who sends the Corleone family Brasi’s bulletproof vest with a fish in it, a message that “Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes” (ie his corpse was thrown into a body of water).

It becomes apparent through the series that The Godfather is a favourite movie of Lorelai and Rory.

Lorelai does not make good on her word, hiding Rory’s “Dean memory box” in the hall cupboard. It doesn’t seem like a particularly sneaky hiding place, and Rory finds it later in the season. Rather confusingly, prior to this the doorway in the hall led into the downstairs bathroom. Where the bathroom went is a mystery, but it still exists, as it is referred to several times later.

Anna Karenina

This is the book that Rory and Dean discuss after she lent it to him. Anna Karenina is a novel by Russian author Leo Tolstoy, first published in book form in 1878. It is the tragic story of Countess Anna Karenina, a socialite and married woman, and her doomed love affair with the wealthy Count Vronsky. It is widely regarded as a pinnacle of realist fiction, and one of the greatest novels of all time. Rory had to read the book for her English Literature class the previous semester.

Dean dutifully read it, but found it depressing as the heroine throws herself under a train, believing that suicide is the only way out of her relationship dilemmas. He thought the book was too long (it’s about a thousand pages), and too confusing as “every single’s person’s name ends in -ski” (in fact, of the main characters, only Count Vronsky and Anna’s brother Prince Oblonsky have names that end in this sound).

Dean believes the book is a little over his head, but Rory insists that Tolstoy wrote for the common man, and you don’t have to be a genius to understand him. Rory asks that Dean try reading the book again, as it is beautiful, and one of her favourite books. Dean actually agrees to this, which is a real sacrifice considering the length of the book and that he’d found it a difficult read. It seems Rory just won’t stop trying to force Dean to become a lover of classic literature.

Of course what Dean just isn’t picking up on is that Rory keeps romanticising heroines who cheat on their partners, from Anna Karenina to Emma Bovary to Lexie from Ice Castles. It’s a red flag of which Dean remains blissfully unaware. (More worryingly, both Anna and Emma commit suicide to escape their extra-marital woes – does Rory also romanticise self-destruction?)

The doomed love of Anna Karenina, and Rory and Dean’s very different appraisals of it, are a sign of things to come.

Oxymoron

LORELAI: Curtains?
LUKE: No.
LORELAI: Manly curtains.
LUKE: Oxymoron.
LORELAI: What did you call me?

An oxymoron is a figure of speech in which two contradictory terms are linked together as an apparent paradox; the word comes from the Greek for “sharp foolish”, an oxymoron in itself as “sharp” and “foolish” are opposites. Common oxymorons include “love-hate relationship”, “deafening silence”, “working holiday”, “only choice”, “friendly fire”, and “sweet sorrow”.

I don’t know how many times the word has been used in comedy so that a character can take (or pretend to take) offence, as oxymoron sounds like an insult.

Later in the season, we discover that Luke is in fact rather fond of ruffled curtains, which he picked out for his own apartment.

Tony Randall

CHRISTOPHER: Rory might be my only child.
LORELAI: That’s not true. If Tony Randall can crank one out in his seventies you have decades left to spawn.

Tony Randall, born Aryeh Rosenberg (1920-2004) was an American actor, director, and producer. He is best known for playing the role of Felix Unger in the television sitcom The Odd Couple, earlier discussed.

In 1995 Randall, then a widower aged 75, married Heather Harlan, a 25-year-old who had worked as an intern on one of his theatre productions. The couple had a daughter and son named Julia and Jefferson, so he actually fathered two children in his seventies. Tony and Heather Randall remained married until his death.

Christopher is being overly dramatic when he says he may have lost the chance to father more children, as he’s only in his early thirties. In fact he does go on to have another daughter in a future season.

Dean’s Phone Call

RORY (on Babette’s phone): Hello?
DEAN: Um, I wasn’t sure if you still wanted me to come over.
RORY: Oh, I do. I do, I absolutely do.

It isn’t clear how Dean knows Babette’s phone number, as Rory didn’t leave it when she rang Dean’s house. It suggests that once he knew that Rory was house-sitting for Babette, he immediately looked her number up in the phone book, and programmed it into his cell phone. Which is a little creepy.

The show tries to make it look as if Rory is sitting in the nude waiting for Dean, even though that doesn’t make any sense. Why would you get naked (while wearing a hair band) while waiting for your boyfriend to come over, especially if you’re not sure he’s even coming? Wouldn’t you look pretty silly if (for example) your mother who lives next door popped over to see how you were getting on in the meantime? And isn’t it kind of gross to sit on your neighbours’ furniture in the nude while they’re away?

However, what Rory is actually wearing and planning doesn’t make much sense either: what would she have done if Dean hadn’t arrived at that point? And Dean’s stalkerish phoning from just outside the house will backfire on him in a future season.