Why Gilmore Girls?

*why oh why...

Photo: The cast of 'Gilmore Girls.PHOTO:WARNER BROS./COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION.

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Love,

Emma x o x o

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I have spent 6885 minutes watching hit American TV show Gilmore Girls, that’s seven seasons of one -hundred- and -fifty- three, forty-five minute episodes. Hours upon hours of life frittered away. Why?

For those untouched by the cult of GG, Amy Sherman Palladino’s Gilmore Girls ran from 2000 to 2007 and follows the travails of mid-thirties single Mom Lorelai Gilmore and her teen daughter Rory and has at its centre the clash between these women and their WASP-y parents and grandparents, Emily and Richard Gilmore. The show is set in fictional small-town Stars Hollow, Connecticut,(based on a mish-mash of actual Connecticut towns), a place which is populated exclusively by loveable weirdos -a sexy, grumpy diner owner who professes to be a health-nut but who flips burgers for a living, a larger than life ballet teacher, an OCD chef, a farmer who sleeps with his vegetables, an eccentric odd-jobs man with mummy issues and so on.

I did not watch the show when it first aired in 2000 but instead begun this sedentary marathon in 2022 on the recommendation of a student of mine, a bright person who was studying Hamlet, Christina Rossetti and Philip Larkin’s poetry, and who is exactly twenty years younger than me. She told me her mum watched it and loved it too by way of encouragement. (Sometimes during lessons we would take a pause from discussing Yorick’s skull or Rossetti’s Christianity to talk about who we thought Lorelai’s best boyfriend was.)

Despite the pleasant bond that my watching the show afforded me with my young tutee fairly regularly throughout this mammoth stretch of passive entertainment I would question myself. The show is the following things: casually sexist, homophobic, and racist. The focus all being on the casual, the prejudice as slouchy and nonchalant as a noughties beanie. There are intermittent, airy jokes about Luke Danes, the sexy dinner owner being gay - the joke is that he’s just so masculine and handsome so how could this possibly be true? (There’s a full piece on Kill Your Darlings about this.) And while some might suggest that GG is Feminist, (Rory supports Hilary, she’s VERY smart, or at least academic, and Lorelai is a hardworking, independent go-get ‘em type mom etc. etc. ), the show is also sick with toxic femininity- there’s a lot of slut-shaming and even more comments about ‘fat women’, (again indirect and casual, our leads are junk-food fiends but thank God they stay thin and look cute, how do they do it?!). Furthermore, the female leads are: mildly to extremely irritating depending on what season you’re in and what mood you’re in, they are regularly unbelievable -see Rory Gilmore Syndrome- and frequently narcissistic, young Rory often behaves like an absolute brat. (More on this aspect on Movie Web here.) And I’m not sure where to begin with the caricature that is Korean-American Mrs Kim, the mother of Rory’s best friend Lane, (more here). As a Korean-American friend of mine put it ‘she’s not like any Korean I know,’ and adding that ‘Lane is actually played by a Japanese actor.’ Finally, the values of the show are: uber-materialistic, (despite the fact that Lorelai claims to reject her status-obsessed WASP-y parents’ ways). The show at its core is indeed closely aligned, ideology-wise, to what one might now call hyper-Capitalist grind culture, also known as the ‘pull yourself up by the boots-straps’ mentality/fantasy. None of this I like very much. And yes, it’s was a different era, I know, as it is my exact one, like Rory Gilmore I turned sweet sixteen in the year 2000, perhaps a reason for my affinity with the show? And if this all sounds Woke then I take that as a compliment - the word comes from African-American Vernacular and was first used to describe the phenomenon of waking up to issues of injustice, especially those around race.

I return to my why?

Reflections.

I grew up in a small, English market town, GG is set in a small charming, nostalgic eighteenth-century (read old Colonial) town. I wanted to leave my small Market town as soon as possible and while Stars Hollow is not Petersfield, Hampshire* there are some parallels. One such example: while Rory Gilmore as a child attended larger than life, licentious storyteller Miss Patty’s Dance School for Ballet I attended Mrs Bloomline’s (real name) ballet school where we danced our little hearts out dressed in pink satin and were gifted Smarties at the end of every session. (Side note: we were allowed to take any bar the blue ones as they were for Mrs Bloomline’s husband. Recently I questioned: did Mr Bloomline in fact want these treats after they had passed through fifteen tiny sweaty palms? Or was Mrs B just stopping us from consuming blue food colouring - the most chemically- side-effect-giving of all the colourings?) As in Stars Hollow in Petersfield everyone knows everyone. My husband on visiting the area one year for a Christmas celebration was surprised to find that the driver in the random local taxi that we jumped into at the train-station knew me well, that on entering the local pub I knew three of the drinkers inside, that inside the other local pub my aunty was serving, that when we popped into another restaurant during that trip the owners asked after my mum, it continued in this way as we walked the High Street, I waved at some and hid from others, I pointed out local celebrity Mr Portsmouth. (Side note on him: a seller of antiquarian books and owner of magnificent local labyrinthian secondhand bookstore who is also at the weekends a wild man of football, tattooed head to toe, bell-ringing and trumpet blowing. So yes loveable eccentrics too.)

Photo credit:Sam Bagnall/Getty Image via The Guardian.

For members of the Stars Hollow community there is great pride to be found in its colonial history, for (some) members of the Petersfield community there is great pride to be found in its colonial history. A whole string of dodgy celebrations take place in the Town Square commemorating the Town Founders of Stars Hollow, though to be fair at one point diner owner Luke does mention Native Americans, one mention, seven seasons - (do tell me if I missed any others below).

At the centre of Petersfield Town Square stands a statue of William of Orange (later William III) astride a horse and once a year a bunch of Orangemen would march around him commemorating his supposed glory. Originally from the Netherlands William was an anti-Catholic noble who invaded England in the seventeenth century and then went on to massacre Catholics in Ireland at the Battle of the Boyne - hence the name Orangemen for those that still to this day provocatively parade through the streets of Belfast and Derry in Catholic neighbourhoods, as per this scene in (actually wonderful) TV show Derry Girls.

Note: the whole community is not awe-struck by this man on horse and his legacy and the statue is regularly vandalised - over my years living in Petersfield I saw many a white-sports socks wrapped around the horses sizeable nether regions, a traffic cone hat placed jauntily on William’s head, and a variety of spray and commercial paints frequently doused said face and torso. As in Rory and Lorelai’s world prejudice was both casual and overt in my home-town: a a smattering of memories: friend’s parents stating that black actors ought not to be featured in Midsommer Murders ‘unless they were to be the ones being murdered’, friend’s parents saying they wouldn’t want their daughter to be ‘with’ a black man, 'Italian was fine but don’t go any darker’ was the phrase I recall, then there was the bullying, accepted if not encouraged by the teachers, of the one clearly gay boy at the comprehensive school I attended, a close friend once saying ‘oh there’s one’ and pointing ‘you don’t usually see that here’ on seeing a black man walking down the street, hissed whispers about the children who had South Asian parentage and who the other (white) children accused of smelling of ‘curry’, far too many comments to list about the emotional and domestic differences between men and women. OK so most of it was overt it turns out and somehow this Connecticut cuteness via GG was bringing it all back.

A return to the why? The show is comforting, every season celebrated with vigour, pumpkins adorn the streets in autumn, there’s a knit-athon in the town square at winter, an annual 24-hour dance off, the magic celebration of the first snow, the spring fling madness, and on and on. Also in the pros list our co-lead Rory is a book-fiend, academically ambitious as well as looking like Bambi, a heroine with a brain, like Belle in Beauty and the Beast. Then there’s the fast-paced screwball comedy throughout - the sometimes snappy script, Lorelai and Rory constantly doing ‘bits’ (this relating again to more nostalgia, the silver screen era of Hollywood, an era which I adore, more on that here). Then there’s the close-knit nature of the community which means that, while you won’t have any privacy and the town will actually hold town meetings, lauded over by the punctilious and ridiculous Taylor Doose over the state of your love life, you will also have immense support, and your achievements will be celebrated by a whole town that loves you. Plus the whole ‘it takes a village’ thing is showcased beautifully in terms of Rory’s glorious upbringing, even if it does create a bit of bratty entitlement in her. Then there’s is the joy of observing the WASPs (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants) that are Lorelai Gilmore parents, Rory’s grandparents, those absurd creatures who take pride in the fact that there ancestors were on the Mayflower, (proud, hmmm?!), who throw back Martinis like James Bond, even the women drinking like fish! Yes, a hate-watch can be enjoyable. And finally of course and fundamentally at the heart of GG is the enmeshed mother-daughter relationship, these two are best-friends, and this theme is one hundred per cent my bag (more on that here), I never get bored of exploring this area via the arts ever. Yes, I am very close to my mother (hi mum!).

So is art a mirror, or a mirror to the soul, as playwright George Bernard Shaw would have it? Does then Gilmore Girls reflect something, perhaps distasteful, about me, my soul? Or at least the baby-teen version of my soul that is there, still, loitering dressed in popper Kappa trousers and a crop-top drinking Liebfraumilch on a car-park bench in a small market town? Am I overthinking my viewing habits? Absolutely! More time frittered away on this show. Cultural snobbery has in the past gripped me but I confess as much as I might filter myself through The Goblin Market, Plath and Ginsberg, Deborah Levy, Alice Walker and Virginia Woolf, Salman Rushdie, and Hanif Kureishi, Dylan Thomas and Mary Gaitskill, I also do so through the saccharine, idealised and partisan Gilmore Girls through cosy knits, coffee and cookies, the candle-lit filled microcosm of a low-stakes life.

*Petersfield obviously has a lot of wonderful aspects and I had a largely lovely upbringing there please don’t get upset Petersfield readers!