![]() However, this feminism comes with some conditions. Single motherhood, and with it a certain kind of feminist commitment to women’s independence and community, was suddenly not only accepted but celebrated. While gross-out comedies like Knocked Up were imposing outdated family values on their beleaguered heroines, Gilmore Girls gave us a heroic mom who chose to strike out on her own and succeeded in raising a sweet, preternaturally calm delight of a daughter who gets into Princeton, Harvard, and Yale expertly calms the many boys fighting over her and still finds the time to attend improbably numerous town events. Though it’s hard even to remember now, the show nudged us beyond the pathologizing of single mothers, making Dan Quayle’s attack on Murphy Brown a decade earlier seem bizarrely antiquated. Like all good TV, Gilmore Girls not only referenced cultural touchstones, but also charmed audiences into a new era. Norman Mailer cameos as an insufferable blowhard Rory packs fat Gore Vidal novels in her backpack for the bus ride to Chilton Academy and she ends prom night curled up in a hay bale with her hunky boyfriend Dean, falling asleep with their noses in a Dorothy Parker anthology, a nerdy teenage dream if ever there was one. The world of the show is expanded by the literary delights, which are strewn about like the numerous wedding cakes Sookie is constantly whipping up. ![]() Lorelai and Rory make their home in Stars Hollow, a beautifully lit, folksy New England town that, as the inimitable Paris remarks upon her first visit, “would make Frank Capra want to throw up.” The characters’ patter, too, recalls the fast-talking broad swoop of 1930s comedies (“Aren’t you going to act?”/”Yes, I’m going to act like you never came in here!”), but the female characters get to do more than most women in comedy: they’re allowed to be funny without ever being whacked in the head with a literal or figurative two-by-four. The world of the show is also compelling, if a bit sickly sweet. But Gilmore Girls updates the story in a beautifully feminist way: despite the men and boys who pass through their lives, the most important remarriages are between mothers and daughters - Lorelai and Emily, then Lorelai and Rory - who banter, fall out, and ultimately return to each other. ![]() The combination of snappy dialogue and slow, low-stakes plots (the conflict on which the entire show hinges is that Lorelai and Rory must endure a fancy dinner with Lorelai’s acid-tongued mother Emily once a week in exchange for Rory’s prep school tuition) deliberately recalls the 1930s screwball comedies Stanley Cavell calls comedies of remarriage, set in the Shakespearean green space of Connecticut. Together they form a fearless, wisecracking duo whose mastery of a wide range of conversation topics is also rare: despite the men in nearly all the A plots, every single episode passes the Bechdel test with flying colors. Lorelai and Rory are a compelling pair: a charming yet hard-nosed young mom with her serious, sweet sidekick of a daughter. ![]() The show features an intricate, fiercely intense mother-daughter relationship of a kind rarely explored on television. The despondent feeling of the new episodes throws into relief the entrepreneurial feminist dreams of the original, which died so definitively on November 8.įirst, the feminism. And even though the new season was made before the recent election’s results were clear, it captures something important about where we’ve been, and how we relate to where we are now. The hopelessness seems cross-generational, and is jarring when juxtaposed with the cheerful end of the previous final season, season 7, when Rory headed off to report on Obama’s 2008 presidential run.Įven though the original show cites Clinton as an inspirational figure - “See you when Hillary’s president,” Lorelai says to Luke at one point - it’s hard to imagine the characters getting excited about her campaign. The difference is more than simply the bittersweetness of growing up and growing older, more than just post-crash millennial malaise, the dawning of the reality that all the money and time and hope everyone has invested in Rory’s future cannot land her the journalism job she’s always wanted. The dialogue, slightly stagy in the original, sounds like a series of halfhearted bits, failed attempts to recapture a long-lost sparkle. The central characters, particularly Lorelai and Rory, seem adrift and weary. There’s something excessively sad about the new episodes of Gilmore Girls. ![]()
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