Coffee at Luke's: An Unauthorized Gilmore Girls Gabfest (Smart Pop Series) (27 page)

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Authors: Jennifer Crusie,Leah Wilson

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When we first met Lorelai Gilmore, she was the thirty-something mom of a delightful young high school student who was nearly the same age Lorelai was when she gave birth. Up until then no adolescent rebellion had taken place, so mother and daughter were still so close that Lorelai had yet to imagine her daughter Rory as a separate human being. Instead, she increasingly saw Rory as a mirror image of herself at that age, and consequently began to relive her own fears and regrets about past choices and past temptations. Although proud of having stood up to her rich parents and created a life for herself and her child without their help, she found herself suddenly wanting to offer her kid all the upper-class benefits that she abandoned and therefore could no longer afford. So
Gilmore Girls
doesn’t only reexamine feminist prerogatives, but also the importance of class, gender, regional culture, and social pressure in shaping female destinies.
 
Set somewhere in New England in as unbelievably bucolic a town as Andy Griffith’s Mayberry (replete with ditzy surrogates for goofy Goober Pyle, meddlesome Aunt Bee, and manic Barney Fife), the tale of Lorelai Gilmore and her cheerfully illegitimate daughter unfolds both as a critique of inbred Eastern Establishment conventionality and as a kind of reverse negative of Mayberry’s quaint Southern squirreliness.
3
Skewering these time-honored stereotypes of Anglo-American normalcy,
Gilmore Girls
further subverts the classic formula for televised family drama by giving star-billing to an unwed mother who is not stigmatized for her choices.
 
It wasn’t that television hadn’t dealt with wise, funny, beloved single parents before, even giving them leading roles in
The Andy Griffith Show
,
My Three Sons
,
Julia
, and
The Courtship of Eddie’s Father
, to name a few. But these lead characters could be single only if the lead character’s spouse was lost by divorce, death, or post-marriage abandonment. The Gilmore story flips this script in ways that question what women have come to expect from “liberation” in the past twenty years. Women who value career and personal freedom above all might wonder why a post
Roe v. Wade
high school debutante from “old line” money would refuse the obvious options of (1) abortion; (2) shotgun—but not obligatorily permanent—wedding to the “nice boy from a good family” who knocked her up; or (3) intra- or extra-family adoption, to run away from home and raise her child by the blue-collar sweat of her own brow. Lorelai not only gave up material comfort for motherhood—she passed up college, travel, upscale friends, leisure time, and a disposable income. The first question viewers are forced to ask (and every episode strives to answer) is:
Was it worth it
?
 
From the very first episode of the first season we have seen the depth of Lorelai’s rapport with her daughter Rory: they finish each other’s sentences, they have the same irreverent wit, the same easy affection for people, the same love for old movies, comfort food, and obscure pop culture references. In short, this is the most idealized mother-daughter relationship on earth. Men come and go—but these two hang tough. They are so seamlessly bonded that suddenly you know where Lorelai poured the energy she might otherwise have invested in college life, high society, or in conforming to her own parents’ expectations. Ironically, what most endangers this bond is a lingering class anxiety: Lorelai’s desire to guarantee her child opportunities Lorelai missed.
 
When Rory gets a chance to leave her small-town public high school for a prestigious prep school, Lorelai has to sacrifice their hard-won independence from her parents to pay for it. Mandatory weekly dinners with the elder Gilmores follow in which Lorelai finds herself strangely ambivalent about watching her daughter slowly seduced by the set of class values Lorelai once happily left behind. Interestingly enough, Lorelai’s reflective ambivalence about her privileged origins—and the roads necessarily not taken—transforms her (philosophically speaking) into a rich, matriarchal WASP version of a Buddhist renunciate.
 
To follow the analogy you must see that Lorelai has given up the comforts of home and inherited wealth to raise her daughter outside of the “illusory” materialistic value system of her parents. She has invented her own philosophy of Positive Parenting, and sought the hard-won freedom of Self-Empowerment. But instead of achieving true liberation from dependence on her parents’ world, she has kept one foot in Samsara, not realizing that wanting her daughter to have the same perks she herself once rejected means she is still invested in their value system. Read this way, as a Buddhist parable, the relationship between Lorelai and Rory is doomed to deteriorate as soon as we locate the remnants of Lorelai’s ego in her projections of her own wants and fears onto her daughter. For these egotistical projections are what eventually cause the same problems (issues of control and lifestyle
4
) between Lorelai and her kid that initially manifested between Lorelai and her own mother many years before. It takes awhile for our heroine to figure all this out, and in the interim she and Rory suffer through a few long, predictably painful disagreements about the pursuit of happiness.
 
Another way the show illuminates class and cultural anxiety is through Lane Kim, Rory’s oldest and best friend, who has mother problems of her own. Functioning as a Korean doppelgänger of Rory, Lane is the only daughter of an antique-store owning, evangelical Christian matriarch who left Korea in part to escape a domineering Buddhist mother (according to “I Get a Sidekick Out of You,” 6-19). Juxtaposed against the multigenerational mama-drama of the Gilmores, the Kims provide a narrative excuse to more deeply question why cultural and class “slippage” still looms as so large a threat to most American families. Mrs. Kim fears Rory is a bad influence on Lane because of the downward mobility Lorelai represents. Since only wacky Bohemians get to
choose
what class they belong to (as Lorelai has), Mrs. Kim imagines the younger as spreading a Bohemian contagion to Lane by example. So it’s no surprise that Lorelai’s mom bonds instantly with not just Michel but also Mrs. Kim the first time she meets them. She instinctively gravitates towards the only two people in town as critical of Lorelai as she is, and whose attachment to class boundaries rivals her own.
 
To some extent Lorelai must agree with them, because she urges Rory to go to prep school despite the fact that she is already getting A’s in public high school. Moreover, by “The Road Trip to Harvard” (2-4), we see that being manager of a local inn is only the beginning of Lorelai’s entrepreneurial aspirations—it’s clear that she genuinely desires upward mobility for herself as well as her daughter. But unlike her parents, Lorelai craves an upward mobility free of proprietary entitlement issues, and on her own terms.
 
In partnering with her best friend and co-worker to buy their own inn, Lorelai shows initiative inherited from Mia, the owner of her existing workplace, who hired and mentored Lorelai when she first left home with baby Rory. A confrontation during “The Ins and Outs of Inns” (2-8) between Lorelai’s mom and Mia revealed that Emily resents the years her child and grandchild spent under Mia’s protective tutelage. But those misgivings come less from the resulting loss of familial memories than because it gave Lorelai the working-class skills to escape inherited class obligations and to make her own way in the world. That’s one reason why Lorelai is powerful and fearless in ways Mrs. Kim and Mrs. Gilmore are not. She’s self-confident enough to accept those things she can’t control and to rely upon the kindness of strangers. Class anxieties generally arise from the idea that neither individuals nor families can prosper without vast, mutually obligated social networks. Whether women marry into a preferred class or work their way into one, binding themselves to the consequent web of in-group obligations can seem the best way to control their environment. Yet, as both Mrs. Kim and Mrs. Gilmore discover, the compulsive need for control creates paranoia and oppression, not security. People may need networks to survive, and yes, economic and cultural ties help form them. But to really thrive people need flexibility, self-confidence, and emotional generosity even more.
 
By the time Lorelai has her own business up and running (via business classes and a timely loan), Rory is already established at Yale, and both women have nursed each another through romantic disasters that say as much about the impossible feminist goal of “having it all” as about the craft of compromise which modern women still find difficult to master. Mrs. Kim hopes to spare her daughter the chaos of shopping for male companionship by hours of asexual worship in church and carefully chosen and chaperoned “dates.” But her best efforts are doomed to fail, for despite wealth, brains, breeding, or religion, every would-be superwoman in the
Gilmore Girls
universe reacts to romance as a form of Kryptonite. In fact,
Gilmore Girls
is so much about relationships between strong women that all the male characters—whether boyfriends, husbands, colleagues, or fathers—seem a bit weak and somehow disappointing by comparison. And yet, come hell or high water, these girls’ve gotta have ’em! It’s not that any of them think they
need
a man to be successful in life. They just can’t resist attempting the fantasy of perfection successful couplehood might bring.
 
It was in fact the loss of yet another aspiring suitor over her mother’s unreasonable demands that trigged Lane’s first open act of defiance. She had to be drunk to do it, but once she declared her determination to have her rock band and her Anglo boyfriends too, Lane started a process of emancipation, separation, and reconciliation that ultimately culminated in Mrs. Kim helping book her daughter’s band and allowing her to marry a white band mate. Part of why Mrs. Kim was able to change relatively quickly compared to Emily Gilmore comes down to differences in culture and class. First, as a working woman and head of her household, Mrs. Kim is more pragmatic than Emily ever had to be. Second, as an Asian immigrant to the U.S., she has already adapted to bigger adjustments and compromises than this. Resisting additional change was what seemed appropriate at first, but seeing her daughter struggle and sacrifice for what she believes in —after knowing the history of Emily, Lorelai, and Rory—won her respect and support in the end.
 
Compared to Lane and the machinations involved in her struggle to live on her own terms, Rory has clearly won the mom lottery here. Thanks to the legality of
Roe v. Wade
, she never has to question why she was brought into the world. She wasn’t born to measure up to some imaginary family legacy, nor was she produced as a tax write-off, free labor, or an afterthought. Even when they disagree, as happens more and more often as the series progresses, the foundation of mutual respect Lorelai and Rory have for each other allows them to avoid the deep and possibly permanent damage suffered by less compassionate and less self-aware mother/daughter dyads.
 
As the object of a loving (if slightly manipulative) tug of war between her rich, well-connected grandparents, and her self-reliant, fiercely devoted mother, Rory clearly has all the genetic and material resources she needs to become whoever she wants or needs to be. After all, she is the scion of a true twenty-first century anomaly: the contrarian, Bizarro-World suffragette. Lorelai Gilmore: the girl who, when faced with a plethora of pro-choice, haute-Feminist (and some would say even more appealing) options, decided that choosing to leave home alone to have her baby was the healthier, more revolutionary, liberating, and self-affirming thing to do.
 
Carol Cooper
is a New York-based journalist and cultural critic who has been writing professionally about books, music, film, pop trends, and social issues for more than twenty years. Her work has been published in various national and international publications, including
Essence
,
Elle
,
Latin N.Y.
,
The Face
(England),
Actuel
(France), the
Village Voice
, the
New York Times
, and
Rolling Stone
. Her work has been cited in academic journals, and her critical and sociological essays have been included in a number of anthologies, including
Rolling Stone: The ’70s
(Little, Brown and Company),
Brooklyn: A State of Mind
(Workman Publishing Company),
Dark Matter 2: Reading the Bones
(Warner Aspect), and
The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock
(Random House). In December of 2006 she published a hardcover anthology assessing the most significant cultural trends from the closing decades of the twentieth century in an essay collection from Nega Fulo Books called
Pop Culture Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race: Selected Critical essays 1979 to 2001
. She is a member of the national nonprofit comics advocacy group Friends of Lulu and a 1974 graduate of the Clarion Writer’s Workshop for Fantasy and Science Fiction. She is widely traveled and holds both B.A. and M.A.L.S. degrees from Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
 
 
Coffee at Luke’s
-isms
 
W
HAT WOULD AN ANTHOLOGY about
Gilmore Girls
be without an addendum explaining all the high-brow and low-brow cultural references used in the book? It’s like the little season-by-season DVD booklets, but harder to lose.

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