Tag: History

Shipping Off to ‘Nam

DEAN: Don’t go.
JESS: Oh geez man, she’s not shipping off to ‘Nam.

Jess sardonically compares Dean’s distress over Rory going on a picnic with him to someone being sent to the Vietnam War (1955-1975).

Although the US had been involved since World War II in a very limited capacity, the first US ground troops arrived in Vietnam in 1965, reaching a peak in 1969, by which time more than half a million Americans were stationed in Vietnam. This was also the year in which the dreaded draft lottery began, where young men were called up for service based on their birthdate.

Opposition to the war played a key role in sparking the Civil Rights Movement and the hippie counterculture, as well as wide-ranging changes in popular culture. The last American troops pulled out of Vietnam in 1973, by which time there had been more than 58 000 US casualties.

Lorelai’s Triple Feature

LORELAI: How about a triple feature? Three Days of the Condor, Shoah, and The Jerk?
RORY: Uh, Shoah’s like nine and a half hours.
LORELAI: But The Jerk is short.

Lorelai chooses three well-regarded films that are completely different from each other in subject and tone, in contrast to triple features in real life, which are usually connected in some way.

Three Days of the Condor, 1975 political thriller directed by Sydney Pollack, based on the 1974 novel Six Days of the Condor by James Grady. Robert Redford plays a bookish CIA analyst working covertly at a historical society who has to outwit those responsible for massacring his colleagues while he was at lunch. It was well reviewed and won several awards. It was made into a television series, 2018-2020.

Shoah, 1985 French documentary about the Holocaust (known as “Shoah” in Hebrew), directed by Claude Lanzmann. Over nine hours long and 11 years in the making, the film presents Lanzmann’s interviews with survivors, witnesses and perpetrators during visits to German Holocaust sites across Poland, including extermination camps. Hailed as a masterpiece, it won several prominent awards. It was released on video in 2000.

The Jerk, 1979 comedy directed by Carl Reiner, and starring Steve Martin in his debut screen role (he also co-wrote the screenplay). It’s a ludicrous, picaresque tale of rags to riches to rags to riches, with Martin playing a naïve white man who is the adopted son of black sharecroppers, standing out for his skin colour and lack of rhythm. It was a box office smash, becoming the #8 film of the year, was praised by critics, and is considered one of the funniest films of all time. It has a running time of 95 minutes.

Minutemen

TAYLOR: Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the new uniforms of the fabulous fighting Minutemen.

The Stars Hollow basketball team is called the Minutemen. They are patriotically named after the Minutemen from American history – civilian colonists who independently formed their own militia groups during the American Revolutionary War, so called because they were ready to fight at a minute’s notice. They were among the first to fight during the war, comprising perhaps a quarter of all troops. Generally young, they provided a highly mobile, rapidly deployed force that could respond immediately to threats.

We knew of the Minutemen way back in Series 1, Episode 1, in the Pilot. When Rory is talking to Dean for the first time at school, there is a sign outside the high school saying Go Minutemen, listing them as the champion team of the 1997-98 season.

Consumption, The Vapours, Leeching

LORELAI: Actually … I’m sick.
EMILY: I knew it, what’s wrong?
LORELAI: Consumption with a touch of the vapors. I’m going for a leeching tonight after coffee.

Consumption: a 19th century word for tuberculosis, an infectious disease mostly affecting the lungs. It was seen as a romantic disease affecting artists, poets and composers, whose creative talent would somehow be amplified. In real life, it was primarily a disease of the urban poor, due to their cramped conditions.

The vapours: an old word, dating to antiquity but still used in the 19th century, for a variety of medical issues which might include depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, fainting, or PMS. It was only ever used towards women, and ascribed to female hysteria.

Leeching: from ancient times, leeches were used medically, becoming especially popular in the medieval and early modern period to take blood from a patient, which was thought to balance the “humours” of the body. Although this went out of fashion, leeches began to be used in the 1970s, as it was realised the proteins in their saliva had numerous medical benefits, and they were classified as a medical device in the US in 2004.

Stalin

LORELAI: Have you seen my bag with the beads and the fur, kind of looks like Stalin’s head?

Joseph Stalin (1878-1953), Georgian revolutionary and Soviet leader who governed the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death. He is occasionally depicted wearing a round furry hat, which might be what Lorelai is thinking of. Of course Lorelai has a Communist bag!

Chang and Eng

PARIS (to Rory): Why don’t they just sew our sides together and rename us Chang and Eng?

Chang and Eng Bunker (1811-1879), Siamese-American conjoined twins of Chinese ancestry, previously mentioned. Born in modern-day Thailand (then called Siam), they were brought to the US in 1829, and became wealthy by exhibiting themselves in “freak shows”. After ten years, they retired from touring, became American citizens, bought slaves, married two sisters, and fathered twenty-one children between them. For many years, conjoined twins were called “Siamese twins” because of Chang and Eng’s birthplace.

Tar and Feathers

TAYLOR: The bottom line here is that there is a consensus among townspeople who are in agreement that Stars Hollow was a better place before Jess got here.
LUKE: So this half of the room gets the tar, and the other half gets the feathers?
TAYLOR: Well, there hasn’t been any talk of tar and feathers. Although …

Tarring and feathering is a form of public torture and punishment handed out as unofficial justice, used in feudal England and colonial America, as well as the early American frontier, as a form of mob or vigilante vengeance. The last known example was in 2007 in Northern Ireland, against someone accused of drug-dealing.

The victim would be stripped naked or stripped to the waist, painted with hot tar, and then rolled in feathers (there were usually other punishments thrown in, such as whipping or scalping). The skin would be burned by the tar, and scraping it off later led to the skin being torn off, so it was extremely painful as well as humiliating. “Tarring and feathering” is now used as a term to denote severe public criticism.

Luke is saying the town meeting is on a par with the brutal mob justice associated with the Wild West, in agreement with Lorelai’s earlier comment. It is actually quite horrifying, because they seem to be saying Jess should be run out of town, even though he’s a high school kid who’s only guilty of petty theft and a few mild pranks.

It’s also baffling, because Jess isn’t exactly a stranger – he’s Luke’s nephew, Liz’s son, and the grandson of the respected William Danes. The town should be prepared to take him in as one of their own, and the fact that they won’t is a deeply troubling sign. Maybe there’s a good reason why Liz took off.

Neighbourhood Watch

TAYLOR: I speak for the Stars Hollow Business Association, the Stars Hollow Tourist Board, the Stars Hollow Neighborhood Watch Organization, and the Stars Hollow Citizens for a Clean Stars Hollow Council.
LUKE: All of which are you.

Neighborhood Watch is an organisation for civilians devoted to preventing crime and making neighbourhoods safer. In the US, it developed in the late 1960s in response to the rape and murder of a female bartender in Queen’s, New York, who was stabbed outside her apartment building. According to media reports, thirty-eight people saw or heard the attack, and none came to her aid or called the police, so that law enforcement agencies encouraged communities to get more involved in reporting crimes (although in fact the media exaggerated the story – there weren’t so many witnesses, somebody did call police, and another held her while waiting for help to arrive). Neighborhood Watch was a new iteration of the town watch from colonial America.

Taylor’s comment provides a nice little roll call of the major community organisations in Stars Hollow – all apparently spearheaded by Taylor. Taylor can legitimate claim that Jess’ prank is pertinent to all these organisations. He committed a crime, which Neighbourhood Watch needs to keep an eye on, he defaced the pavement, in violation of keeping Stars Hollow clean, and as a result he has made Stars Hollow less desirable for business and tourism. Ingenious!

John Birch Society

MIA: He [Luke] would help people carry groceries home.
RORY: Oh, how very Boy Scout-y of you.
MIA: For a quarter a bag.
LORELAI: Oh, how very John Birch Society-y of you.

The John Birch Society is an ultraconservative, radical far-right political advocacy group. It was founded in 1958 by businessman Robert W. Welch Jnr (1899-1985), who saw it as a way to oppose Communism. Welch owned the Oxford Candy Company in Brooklyn, so maybe he was just on a major sugar high, but he denounced nearly everyone as a Communist agent, including former presidents Truman and Eisenhower.

The society is named in honour of Baptist missionary John Birch (1918-1945), a US military intelligence captain in China who was killed in a confrontation with Chinese Communist soldiers, ten days after the end of World War II. He was posthumously awarded the Army Distinguished Service Medal. Welch saw Birch as the first casualty of the Cold War.

The John Birch Society has had a resurgence with the election of Donald Trump, previously discussed, and its previously fringe views have now become mainstream in right-wing politics.