LORELAI: Aw honey, it’s not the amount of places that turns you down that matters, it’s the quality of the place that turns you down that matters. And when you’ve got Jacko’s Loans and Stuff not wanting your business, you know it’s time to hang out with the Coreys.
The Two Coreys, or The Coreys, are actors Corey Feldman (born 1971) and Corey Haim (1971-2010). In the picture, Feldman is on the left, and Haim on the right.
The Coreys were child actors during the 1980s, and close friends, who appeared in nine films together, including The Lost Boys (1987). They became teen idols, but experienced career downturns in their late teens due to drug use. This is why Lorelai equates “hanging with the Coreys” to being an unsuccessful loser.
After Corey Haim’s death, Corey Feldman became increasingly vocal about the sexual abuse he and Corey Haim were allegedly subjected to as child stars by Hollywood paedophile rings, with Feldman saying he was repeatedly molested and assaulted, but Haim actually raped numerous times. They were each allegedly given drugs before the assaults, the origin of their drug addictions. In 2020, he brought out a documentary called (My) Truth: The Rape of the Two Coreys, identifying the people openly he had earlier only alluded to.
This put their fall from grace in a much darker context, and now unfortunately makes it seem as if Lorelai is calling child sex abuse victims “losers”.
SOOKIE: We are crazy for doing this. LORELAI: We’re beyond crazy. We are ‘Anne Heche speaking her secret language to God and looking for the spaceship in Fresno’ crazy. SOOKIE: Oh Quiness, Nakka dune notta.
LORELAI: Il el nostra doska don.
Anne Heche (born 1969), actress, director, and screenwriter. First became known as a soap opera actress, before gaining mainstream recognition in the late 1990s in films such as Donnie Brasco (1997) and Six Days, Seven Nights (1998). She was also famous for her high-profile three-year relationship with comedian Ellen De Generes, who came out to the press shortly after she and Anne began dating.
On August 19 2000, the day after her relationship with Ellen ended, Anne drove from Los Angeles to Cantua Creek, near Fresno, parking her vehicle on a roadside. She walked for more than a mile through the desert wearing shorts and a bra before knocking on a stranger’s door and asking for a shower. As she seemed reluctant to leave, the homeowner called the sheriff’s department. When deputies arrived, Heche told them that she was God, and would take everyone up to Heaven in a spaceship (she later said she had taken ecstasy). She was admitted to a psychiatric unit in Fresno, and released after a few hours.
While promoting her 2001 memoir, Call Me Crazy, Anne told interviewers that she had been mentally ill for the first thirty-one years of her life due to horrific sexual abuse by her father (a closeted gay man who died of AIDS when Anne was thirteen), which began when she was only a baby. Her surviving family strongly reject those claims, although even without that, her childhood doesn’t sound like a picnic.
Anne said that she created a fantasy world called The Fourth Dimension and had an alter ego named Celestia who was the daughter and reincarnation of God, spoke her own language, had special powers, and was in contact with extraterrestrials. It seems likely Lorelai read Call Me Crazy, as it is the sort of camp celebrity memoir she could not resist (like Mommie Dearest and Tears and Laughter), although all the information could be gleaned from the press at the time.
Anne Heche stated that she had no further mental health issues after the episode at Cantua Creek, and she has gone on to have a successful career in film and television.
Sookie’s statement means, “Oh God, I cannot do this” in Anne Heche’s invented language. Lorelai replies, “It’s too scary for me now”, in the same language. Anne said this when she believed God wanted her to heal a friend’s injured ankle, however she says she did go on to heal her friend through laying on of hands. Anne shared this information, including the example of her language, with Barbara Walters on 20/20 in early September 2001.
Like Lorelai and Sookie, and many others at the time, Amy Sherman-Palladino mocked Anne Heche mercilessly after going public. Their tone was completely mainstream for the time.
UPDATE: Anne Heche passed away after a car accident on August 12 2022, under the influence of narcotics.
RORY: Oh my God, I hate her. LORELAI: Ah, me too. RORY: You have no idea who I’m talking about. LORELAI: Solidarity, sister.
A feminist slogan from the 1960s and ’70s. Slightly worryingly, Lorelai seems to imply feminism means mindlessly agreeing with a like-minded fellow female.
LORELAI: You know, you should meet my daughter. She’s about your age. She can show you where all the good wilding goes on . . .
“Wilding” is an American term which gained media use in the 1980s and ’90s to describe gangs of teenage gangs committing violent acts. It is no longer often used.
The word has an ugly history, coined during the Central Park jogger case of 1989, after a white female jogger was assaulted and raped in Manhattan’s Central Park. Five black and Latino juveniles were convicted of the crime, police contending that the boys said they were “wilding” in the park, the police taking this to mean committing violence.
This has been disputed as a (wilful?) misunderstanding by the police. Other theories are that the boys were repeating the lyrics to the Tone Loc song, “The Wild Thing”, or that they said they were “wiling”, meaning “hanging out, whiling away the time”.
The boys served sentences of between six to twelve years, and all later had their charges vacated after a serial rapist and murderer confessed to the crime while in prison. This was in 2002, so after this episode aired (Lorelai doesn’t know she is referencing falsely imprisoned schoolboys).
So far, Lorelai has linked Jess with prisoners and the Mafia, and joked that he may be going out to hold up a liquor store. Once she actually meets him, she connects him with violent gang rape. At this point, her “jokes” about Jess have become openly hostile, and quite nasty.
As Lorelai has joked about a violent gang rape, and used a word with a racist history to Jess, I wonder if this is when he decided he didn’t like Lorelai very much?
LORELAI: Luke, um, that’s not a bed, that’s a raft, which is fine if you’re gonna build a moat around the diner but … LUKE: It’s fine. LORELAI: Luke, the kid needs a bed. If you want to get him something inflatable, make it a blonde.
Lorelai is humorously referring to inflatable sex dolls. She also refers to the blow-up mattress as a “raft”, which feels like another subtle nod to Huckleberry Finn.
During the show, the (dark-haired) showrunners had a habit of making blonde women the butt of their jokes, and blonde characters were usually shallow, stupid, spiteful, or all three. There’s a slight suggestion here that blonde women are little more than sex dolls (otherwise, why does the sex doll have to be blonde? They could have any colour hair).
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 