Footnotes to the TV series
After not speaking to each other for four months, Lorelai finally manages to get Luke to acknowledge her. Bouncing into the diner like nothing had happened didn’t work, and only made Luke colder. It was when she slipped in humbly, miserable, vulnerable, and needing Luke that he began to thaw. Although he does his best to comfort Lorelai, Luke still keeps his distance from her while they talk. Is their friendship back on track? Not quite, but it’s a beginning.
LORELAI: I just . . . I feel like I’m never gonna have it . . . the whole package, you know? That person, that couple life, and I swear, I hate admitting it because I fancy myself Wonder Woman, but . . . I really want it – the whole package.
Wonder Woman, previously discussed as one of Lorelai’s personal feminist icons.
Here Lorelai admits that she would actually like to be in a stable, established relationship, suggesting one of the reasons she may have agreed to get engaged to Max, even knowing he wasn’t right for her.
RICHARD: And I am shocked by your naïveté … Did you really have pictures of Norman Rockwell family Christmases dancing in your head? Lorelai had her chance for a family, she walked away from it. That was her choice.
Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), painter and illustrator, most famous for the cover illustrations of idealised or sentimental American life he created for The Saturday Evening Post for five decades. His Christmas illustrations [pictured] are well known as iconic images of the Yuletide season, and still popular.
Richard also references the poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas”, attributed to Clement Clarke Moore, and previously mentioned as a classic work which has shaped the American view of Christmas. In the poem it says,
The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads.
Richard mocks Emily’s hopes for Lorelai and Christopher to be together as idealistic and sugary-sweet as Christmas paintings and rhymes. He has never wavered from his position that Lorelai had one chance to have a husband and family, when she was sixteen, with Christopher, and that walking away from it was irresponsible. The idea that not marrying Christopher might have been the responsible thing to do, not to mention that stepping back from Christopher and Sherry now is the more moral choice, is something he cannot fathom.
When Lorelai goes to dinner with her parents, they ask where Christopher is (they have bought him a far better gift than they bought Lorelai, who got scone mix). Lorelai explains that Christopher’s girlfriend is pregnant and he went back to her, and surprise, surprise – it’s all Lorelai’s fault somehow! Emily accuses her of “flitting from man to man” when she only went on one nothingy date since breaking up with Max more than a year ago.
The last time Lorelai had an argument with her parents about Christopher, it was Emily who ran upstairs to cry on her bed. This time it is Richard who specifically blames Lorelai for not being with Christopher, still harping on about not “following the correct procedure” and getting married when she was sixteen. He then goes off to sulk in his den about it.
Emily and Richard never take Lorelai to task for sleeping with someone else’s boyfriend – they regard Christopher as already “hers”, and Sherry as someone he’s known for “two minutes” (it’s actually more than a year now). They don’t blame her for jumping into things too quickly with Christopher and getting Rory’s hopes up, either. In fact, they offer no moral guidance to their daughter at all, only chastise for not getting her hooks into Christopher and ruthlessly refusing to let go. Their lack of concern for Sherry and her unborn child is utterly chilling.
By the way, Emily had a meltdown about Lorelai and Rory eating on the patio (at a barbecue!), because only barbarians eat outdoors. Yet she is serving some sort of cheese and biscuit refreshment on the patio in this scene. For that matter, she has had a tea party on the patio. Apparently it is alright to eat small snack-sized amounts of food outdoors, but not a full meal. The rules of Emily Gilmore are hard to understand.
DEAN: Yeah, I’m back – and I’m glad to find you not blonde.
RORY: Yeah, I was just having way too much fun, so . . .
Rory refers to the Clairol hair lightener advertising slogan, “Is it true …blondes have more fun?”. It was written by advertising director Shirley Polykoff – a blonde – in 1956, and was considered rather risque at the time.
Rory bleakly jokes that she didn’t dye her hair blonde, because she was already having too much fun (of course she’s actually having a terrible time). Ironically, it is Jess’ girlfriend who is the blonde, and having a lot more fun than Rory.
With his usual ability to turn up unannounced wherever Rory happens to be, Dean has returned home from Chicago three hours early. Although this would have put a serious dent in her plans to be with Jess at the festival, she may be more glad to see him than not, considering that Jess is with someone else, and she’s just had a huge fight with her mother.
Note that even while hugging Dean, Rory is looking over his shoulder at Jess, her face hurt and angry.
RORY: I know all of this about Dean … I know how great he is. I knew it before you did!
LORELAI: Well, knowing this has apparently not stopped you from dragging his heart all over this town.
A possible reference to the 1981 song “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around”, written by Tom Petty and Mike Campbell, first recorded as a Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers song. Stevie Nicks from Fleetwood Mac sang on the record, with Tom Petty joining her for the chorus and the bridge. It was released as the first single from Nicks’ 1981 debut solo album, Bella Donna. It was one of the first music videos played on MTV when it launched on August 1 1981, and peaked at #3 in the US.
The song is about a woman who feels weighed down by her relationship, and wishes to part, despite having an emotional attachment to her lover. That does seem to apply to Rory – she does have feelings for Dean, but feels “dragged down” by him.
LORELAI: If you want Jess, that’s fine – go get him, there he is. If you think that’s the great love of your life, then great . . . grab a liver treat and a squeaky toy and run to him.
Lorelai and Rory not only get into a fight in public at the festival, Lorelai gets perilously close to calling her seventeen-year-old daughter a “bitch” or a “dog” with her barb about grabbing a liver treat and a squeaky toy. She seems to suggest that Rory is acting like a “bitch in heat” over Jess, or is acting like a “dog” towards Dean.
The viewer is quickly made aware that although Rory hasn’t felt able to write to Jess over the summer, she is hoping to see him at the End of Summer Madness Festival. It is three hours before Dean is due home, and she is apparently planning to make the most of them. She insists on going to the festival in town, even though she’s only just got home from the airport, and changes into a nice dress. Lorelai insists on calling this “changing for Dean”. The Dean who isn’t there.
However, her plans are scuppered when she finally catches a glimpse of Jess – and it turns out that instead of spending the summer pining over her, he’s got a girlfriend (a blonde one, so you just know she’s stupid and awful!). Did he hope that Rory would see them and get the message that Jess Mariano is not some sap you can toy with, then toss aside while you waltz off to Washington for the summer? If so, message received.
Jess is kissing his girlfriend up against a tree, in flagrant view of the whole town. It’s very similar to the way Dean and Rory used to kiss against trees and shelves in the market, which must have been difficult for Jess to witness, so he seems to be getting his own back. Rory is getting a tiny taste of what Jess has been through for the past few months.
Rory and Lorelai almost immediately get into a fight at the festival when Lorelai says it’s lucky she didn’t throw “everything” (ie Dean, he’s everything now) away for Jess. She brushes Rory’s feelings for Jess away as a “little crush”, until Rory tells her mother that she kissed Jess at Sookie’s wedding while there with Dean. Lorelai is indignant on Dean’s behalf, conveniently forgetting that she herself slept with a pregnant woman’s boyfriend at the wedding, and doesn’t really have much high moral ground to stand on.
It is set up in the story, and repeated several times, that Rory went away for the summer, and therefore has had no contact with Jess since the wedding. The trouble is, the wedding wasn’t at the start of summer vacation, Rory still had two or three more weeks of school left. And she didn’t go to Washington for the summer vacation, only for the last six weeks of it. That makes at least eight weeks that she and Jess were in Stars Hollow together and somehow managed not to talk to or even see each other.
It doesn’t seem plausible – Stars Hollow is a small place. Presumably Rory was avoiding Luke’s diner in support of Lorelai, and busy with school, and getting prepared for Washington, but I can’t see how she avoided Jess for six weeks straight unless he was also determinedly avoiding her. If so, suggesting that he was very hurt and confused about being unexpectedly kissed, told to keep quiet about it, and then seeing that Rory and Dean were still together as if nothing had happened.
[Lorelai and Rory walk out of some bushes near Sookie and Jackson’s house]
LORELAI: See, three minutes faster. I also found a way to get to Al’s Pancake World that shaves a good forty seconds off our normal route.
Another inside joke about the difficulties of getting to Sookie’s house – even though the set used for Sookie’s is right next to the set for Lorelai’s home.
Lorelai and Rory are going to pick up Sookie and Jackson to go to the festival, which makes no sense. Sookie and Jackson live in the opposite direction to the town square, which Lorelai and Rory live close to. It would make more sense for Sookie and Jackson to walk to Lorelai and Rory’s house, and then onto the festival together. As it is, they would all have a long walk together from Sookie’s house to the town square – but Lorelai and Rory have to do it twice.
As it turns out, Lorelai and Rory have wasted their time, because when they get to Sookie’s, she and Jackson are having a fight, so they quietly walk back into town without them. Sookie has filled the house with tons of “manly” objects from Kim’s Antiques, including a stuffed grizzly bear (this must have all cost a fortune!).
Jackson demands that she get rid of it all and put the house back the way it was. Easier said than done – I can’t imagine Mrs Kim tamely taking everything back and refunding the money! Anyway, however implausibly, we can assume their ridiculous fight is over for this episode.
RORY: Eventually, maybe, but for now – solidarity, sister.
LORELAI: Ya ya!
RORY: You’ve been waiting for six weeks to do that, haven’t you?
A reference to Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. The 1996 novel by Rebecca Wells has already been discussed as one that Rory (probably) read, but the comedy-drama film came out in June 2002, and it is undoubtedly this version which Lorelai has recently seen and refers to.
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood is directed by Callie Khouri, and stars Sandra Bullock and Ellen Burstyn as the daughter and mother in conflict. The film was a commercial success, but received mixed reviews, with critics feeling it was overly melodramatic and unoriginal.
Rory indicates that she hasn’t spoken to her father all summer, and for a while at least, she is going to continue ignoring Christopher to support Lorelai.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 