Tag: Reality Check

DAR

RICHARD: Emily, I didn’t know we were having company for dinner.
EMILY: Oh well, it was just sort of a spur of the moment thing. Chase’s mother and I are in the DAR together and he just moved back to Hartford, and it just seemed like a nice idea.

DAR stands for Daughters of the American Revolution, an organisation for women who are directly descended from someone involved in the United States’ efforts towards independence, especially the Revolutionary War.

The DAR works to promote historic preservation, education, and patriotism, with a motto of “God, Home, and Country”. It was founded in 1890 as a sister organisation to the Sons of the American Revolution, and was supported by First Lady Caroline Harrison, the wife of President Benjamin Harrison. It currently has around 180 000 members organised into about 300 chapters.

In real life the DAR is basically a genealogy-based service organisation which does worthy things like raise funds for historic buildings, give scholarships, conduct essay contests, volunteer to support veterans, participate in citizenship ceremonies, and hold exhibitions.

However, in the Gilmore Girls universe, the DAR is a highly exclusive women’s club whose wealthy members seem to spend most of their time having tea parties and looking down on others. I suspect this reflects more how the DAR might have been in the 1930s and ’40s – it now works very hard to promote diversity and tolerance.

In real life, the DAR has a chapter in both Hartford and West Hartford that Emily might have belonged to.

Misery

LORELAI: Oh God. Mom has gone a little crazy with the figurines here, huh? A little Kathy Bates. Although you probably haven’t seen Misery, which is a good thing because Rory couldn’t sleep alone for a week after we watched it.

Misery is a 1990 thriller film directed by Rob Reiner, and based on the 1987 novel of the same name by Stephen King. The movie is about a popular romance novelist (James Caan) who is held captive by a crazed fan (Kathy Bates) so he can continue writing about her favourite character, named Misery. The movie was a success, and Kathy Bates won Best Actress at the Academy Awards for her role.

Lorelai is referring to the numerous figurines owned by Kathy Bates’ character, which the writer must be careful not to disarrange when he manages to sneak out of the room where he has been confined. Lorelai must feel that she is in a similar position, and the film also gives us a clue as to how trapped and tortured Lorelai felt when she lived with her parents.

Rory would have only been six when the film came out, so she and Lorelai must have rented it on video at some point when she was older. We don’t know how old she was (it might have been quite recently), but either way it was still too scary for her, and she had to sleep in Lorelai’s bed for a week afterwards.

Lady and the Tramp

LORELAI: Wow, it’s gonna be just like Lady and the Tramp. You’ll share a plate of spaghetti, but it’ll just be one long strand, but you won’t realize it until you accidentally meet in the middle. And then he’ll push a meatball towards you with his nose, and you’ll push it back with your nose, and then you’ll bring the meatball home, and you’ll save it in the refrigerator for years and . . .

Lady and the Tramp is a 1955 animated musical film made by Walt Disney. Loosely based on the short story, “Happy Dan, the Whistling Dog”, by Ward Green, it tells the story of a cocker spaniel named Lady who lives with an upper-middle class family in the early twentieth century. Lady meets a stray mongrel named Tramp, and they have many adventures together, eventually falling in love.

Lady and the Tramp was the #6 film of 1955, and is now regarded as a classic. It was released on video in 1987 when Rory was three years old; Lorelai might have bought it for her then. It was re-released on video in 1998 when Rory was 14, which is another possibility.

Lorelai is describing the most famous scene from the film: the two dogs share a plate of spaghetti at an Italian restaurant where Tramp has been begging for scraps, and accidentally share a kiss as they swallow opposite ends of the same strand of spaghetti. She goes on to imagine Rory saving a meatball as a memento of her dinner date, something which Rory tries to do.

O’Hare

RACHEL: Yeah, yeah, well things were pretty crazy over there, not a lot of writing time. But I finished up my assignment, and I flew back to Chicago and I was walking through O’Hare, and I look up and there’s a plane leaving for Hartford in like 20 minutes, and all of a sudden, I’m on it.

O’Hare International Airport is the primary airport serving the Chicago region. Last minute flights such as the one Rachel got on are typically expensive, but because of its size, O’Hare Airport can be relatively flexible, and sometimes you can score a great deal. Today Rachel’s spontaneous flight could have cost her as little as $300, and the flight to Hartford would take around two hours.

Costco

LORELAI: If there was a runoff between what Emily Gilmore would care about less, a two-for-one toilet paper sale at Costco or your three month anniversary, your anniversary would win, hands down.

Costco is an American multinational corporation which operates a chain of members-only warehouse clubs, selling goods in bulk to keep costs low. It is the second-largest retailer in the world after Walmart, and the first warehouse opened in 1983.

Should Emily have gone mad and actually cared about the hypothetical toilet paper sale at Costco, she could have shopped at the Costco in New Britain, about 15 minutes drive from Hartford.

Three-month Anniversary

DEAN: There must be some other excuse that you could use.
RORY: Like what?
DEAN: Like it’s your three-month anniversary with your boyfriend.
RORY: It is?
DEAN: Yeah. Three months from your birthday. I mean, that’s when I gave you the bracelet and that’s when I figured this whole thing kinda started.
RORY: Wow. Three months.
DEAN: Actually, technically your birthday was on a Saturday, so really it should be Saturday, but I work Saturday and I planned out this whole big thing so I thought maybe we could do it on Friday.

There is no way that we are only three months from the night that Dean gave Rory her bracelet as a birthday present (despite what Dean says, it wasn’t her birthday, but the day after her birthday). That was in late October, so three months later would be late January. It’s now mid-March, so it’s roughly four and a half months from her birthday.

Frustratingly, it is about three months after another significant date in their relationship – the night of the Chilton Winter Formal on December 9, when Dean and Rory mutually agreed that they were boyfriend and girlfriend. It would have made a lot more sense if Dean decided that was the start of their relationship, and then we could have dated their anniversary dinner to March 9.

Dean says technically it should have held on the Saturday as Rory’s birthday was a Saturday (again, not her birthday, but her birthday party in Stars Hollow), but he has to work that night. That isn’t how anniversaries work – they are on the same date each time, not on the same day of the week. This one is just really perplexing. (It also shows that if there is any clash in their schedules, Dean expects Rory to change her schedule to suit him, rather than changing his schedule for her).

We’re probably meant to be struck by how much more invested in the relationship Dean is than Rory, as she paid no attention to the one-month and two-month anniversaries while he did. However, due to this sloppy and confusing writing, you can hardly hardly blame her for that.

Dean has arbitrarily decided what marks the start of their relationship, and has his own method of deciding what makes a month. Under these circumstances, any normal person would have been at a loss to keep up. Of course, it does show that Rory just hasn’t been paying attention to her relationship and is taking it for granted.

“Relocated to a plastic bubble”

DEAN: Well, what if it’s for a really special occasion?
RORY: Well, that special occasion better include my being relocated to a plastic bubble if my grandmother’s gonna let me out of dinner.

Rory is referring to the disease severe combined immunodeficiency, a rare genetic disorder where the sufferer remains extremely vulnerable to infectious disease due to having an immune system so compromised it is effectively absent. It is sometimes called “bubble boy disease”, because high-profile patients became known for living in sterile environments.

The disease became well known after the 1976 television film The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, directed by Randal Kleiser, and with John Travolta in the title role. The film was inspired by the real-life cases of David Vetter (1971-1984) and Ted DeVita (1962-1980); DeVita actually had severe aplastic anemia, which is able to be better treated now.

Although the movie wasn’t shown on television during Rory’s childhood, bootleg copies were widely available on video, and Lorelai may have obtained one.

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).

Christopher Leaves

When Christopher prepares to ride back to California on his bike, he makes the manipulative and irresponsible move to have Rory re-state his marriage proposal to Lorelai. This only serves to give Rory more false hope, and to place the blame for him not being in her life on Lorelai. Rory also asks him to phone more often in the future, further confirmation that the “weekly phone call” from Christopher was much less often in reality.

I’m not sure how Christopher can afford to drive home when his credit card is maxed out – the trip across America to California would take several days at least, and cost a lot in fuel, food, and accommodation. Maybe Richard and Emily gave him money, or his own parents.

This episode, and the previous one, make it abundantly clear that Christopher is a creep and a wastrel, and it’s a testament to David Sutcliffe’s acting that he also imbues him with such charm and boyish appeal. You can see that Lorelai and Christopher have great chemistry, and genuinely care for each other, but it’s not a relationship that could ever last the distance.