Coffee at Luke's: An Unauthorized Gilmore Girls Gabfest (Smart Pop Series) (25 page)

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

Authors: Jennifer Crusie,Leah Wilson

Tags: #Humor & Entertainment, #Television, #History & Criticism

BOOK: Coffee at Luke's: An Unauthorized Gilmore Girls Gabfest (Smart Pop Series)
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Unlike the broad and (cartoonishly) violent slapstick comedies of the silents, the screwball comedies were driven by repartee and social farce. Although the comedy was fast and vigorous, it was also much more intellectual than the slapsticks. Talking pictures were still a new idea, and directors and screenwriters were eager to use lots of words when they told their stories.
 
The witty exchanges that marked the screwball comedies were heavily influenced by the plays of Noël Coward, as well as by the writings of poet, playwright, and raconteur Dorothy Parker (who would later be honored by Amy Sherman-Palladino as the namesake of her production company).
 
Coming shortly after the aforementioned Hays Production Code slammed the door on cinematic sin, skin, and smuttiness, the screwball comedies relied on innuendo and tease for their sexiness. Nonetheless, the comedy was distinctly adult in sensibility, reflecting a mature (if discretely veiled) sexuality.
 
This exchange, from Howard Hawks’s
Bringing Up Baby
(1938)— one of the most verbally adroit of the screwballs—shows some of the twists and turns that would later become a feature in
Gilmore Girls
. Katharine Hepburn’s Susan, a socialite and free spirit, is speaking to a psychologist about Cary Grant’s David. It’s hard to capture the verbal acrobatics of
Bringing Up Baby
in a single short excerpt, but try to keep in mind that Hepburn’s character (who’s on screen for most of the movie) keeps up this kind of conversational pace pretty much all the time, and leaves everybody in the film as lost as poor Dr. Lehman:
DR. LEHMAN: You may have heard me lecture . . . I usually talk about nervous disorders. I am a psychiatrist.
 
SUSAN: Oh! Crazy people.
 
DR. LEHMAN: We dislike the use of that word. All people who behave strangely are not insane. . . .
 
SUSAN: What would you say about a man who follows a girl around? . . .
 
DR. LEHMAN (listening intently): Follows her around? . . .
 
SUSAN: And then when she talks to him he fights with her?
 
DR. LEHMAN: Fights with you? . . . Is the young man your fiancé?
 
SUSAN: Oh no, I don’t know him. I never even saw him before today. (Blithely) No, he just follows me around and fights with me.
 
DR. LEHMAN: Well, the love impulse in men very frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict.
 
SUSAN: The love impulse!
 
DR. LEHMAN: Without my knowing anything about it, my rough guess would be that he has a fixation on you.
 
 
 
Besides wit and pacing (Hawks is famous as the first director to have actors overlap their dialogue), the script of
Bringing Up Baby
reflects
Gilmore Girls
in that the heroine is usually at least three or four conversational steps ahead of everyone she meets (this is true in many screwball comedies, but it’s particularly distinct in
Baby
). The big difference between Lorelai and
Baby
’s Susan is that while Lorelai’s quirkiness is her way of being charming, Susan’s quirkiness is because she’s more than just a little odd (still charming, but not as consciously so).
 
The beautiful but independent young socialite who rebels against her upbringing is a staple of the screwballs. Most of them don’t break away quite as forcibly as Lorelai did—the Depression-era audiences of the screwballs were hungry for the fantasy of wealth and leisure, and while they might appreciate a heroine who would risk her birth-right for love, it wouldn’t be a happy ending if she actually lost it—but the parallel is obvious. For example, Claudette Colbert’s runaway heiress in Frank Capra’s classic
It Happened One Night
starts out as an unregenerate brat, but over the course of the movie she grows in maturity, thanks to some actual contact with working-class reality (and the love of a real man, of course).
 
Small-Town America
 
Stars Hollow is certainly the most daringly unrealistic element of
Gilmore Girls
. While Chilton Academy or Richard and Emily Gilmore’s social circle are determinedly old-fashioned and conservative, Stars Hollow exists in a parallel universe . . . or at least a time warp. It’s straight out of the ’40s—and not the war-torn ’40s of history, but the pure Platonic ideal of the ’40s as seen in the
Saturday Evening Post
covers of Norman Rockwell. Stars Hollow has no chain restaurants (in fact, as far as we have seen it has no fast food), no big-box stores. It also has (let’s face it) no black people, other than the racially ambiguous Michel. As far as we can tell, none of the kids in the high school has ever tried an illegal drug of any kind—this is a town where the teenage rockers go to church every Sunday, and a moody underachiever like Jess Mariano can be viewed as a juvenile delinquent. Now, I know that some small towns in New England go a lot further in setting standards to preserve their nostalgic ambience than communities in the Heartland, where I grew up . . . but seriously, does a town like Stars Hollow exist anywhere in the twenty-first century other than in the paintings of Thomas Kinkade?
 
In the ’40s and ’50s, America was fascinated with small-town living. After surviving the Great Depression only to be thrust into the maelstrom of WWII, followed by the long, tense uneasiness of the Cold War, the American Dream crystallized around a neverland vision of small-town America as the embodiment of prosperity, virtue, and serenity.
 
Not everybody bought whole-heartedly into this myth. Even in the ’50s, some writers and directors knew that small towns could be hotbeds of vicious rumor, petty backbiting, and rampant hypocrisy— melodramas like
Peyton Place
and the films of Douglas Sirk ruthlessly exposed the secret guts of rustic America.
 
But in the comedies, things tended to be a great deal sweeter. Any evil that did come to Heartland, USA was probably coming in from the big city and was likely to succumb and repent in the light of the sheer blinding virtue of the salt-of-the earth citizens before the final credits rolled.
 
Today, this sensibility seems like a very conservative idea, but it actually came out of the left. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries glorified “high society” with its glitter and affluence, but in the wake of WWI, Marxist thought began making inroads among the American intelligentsia. The Marxist paradigm glorified the worker, the common man. Writers and directors turned against wealth and high society (where they actually lived) and began to glorify small working communities (which they probably had driven through or flown over at some point). It’s no wonder this vision of rural living was a bit detached from reality.
 
Frank Capra, for example, really believed in small-town America. Although he grew up in Los Angeles, as the son of Italian immigrants he knew in his heart that the true essence of the American Dream was waiting out there in working-class America. In films like
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
,
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
, and
Meet John Doe
he has heroic rural Everymen carrying the torch of the American Dream out of their rural enclaves and back to the decadent economic and intellectual elites of the cities. In perhaps his most famous film,
It’s a Wonderful Life
, he shows us a harrowing juxtaposition of the good, innocent, bucolic small town of Bedford Falls with a vision of a ruined Bedford Falls where rampant capitalism has contaminated the town with pollution, poverty, and vice.
 
While Capra’s vision of small-town America certainly influenced Stars Hollow, there’s a crucial difference—Capra saw small-town life as good, but he never, ever saw it as “quaint.” Some of the people in Capra’s towns might have been charming and quirky, but others were dull, and still others were small-minded or vicious. To Capra, that was merely a believable artistic adaptation of the rich tapestry of American life. Frankly, Capra probably would have been horrified by communities like Stars Hollow, which struggle to stay charming so as to be more attractive to tourists. He certainly would have been more strongly drawn to Luke’s “live and let live” philosophy than to Taylor’s program of economic advancement through ever-increasing winsomeness.
 
Gilmore Girls
wasn’t the only TV show developed in the ’90s to feature a comedically idealized vision of small-town America. Shows like
Ed
,
Key West
,
Picket Fences
, and, perhaps most notably,
Northern Exposure
all were set in similar small-town quasi-utopias.
 
Whether they come from the ’40s or the ’90s, appeared on TV or in film, were inspired by socialist utopianism or jaded turn-of-themillennium nostalgia, one thing always remains true . . . small-town comedy is the natural environment of the great character actor. The character actor—an actor who specializes in one consistent portrayal of a character who flaunts and basks in his or her own unique eccentricity—was a crucial part of the classic Hollywood comedy aesthetic. A really good character actor could make a fictional town seem as real as Main Street running past the marquee outside the theatre, while at the same time making it seem somewhere sweeter and more wonderful than mundane reality. In the ’60s and ’70s directors turned away from the character actor in favor of more naturalistic supporting characters, but recently the art of the character actor has gotten a boost from the hour-long dramatic TV comedy, and nobody on TV has a stronger ensemble of quirky and charming supporting characters than
Gilmore Girls
. From
It’s a Wonderful Life
’s Bert the Cop and Ernie the Cabbie to
Gilmore Girls
’ Kirk, Miss Patty, and Taylor, writers and filmmakers through the years always remember that nothing makes the small-town dream come alive more than a strong stable of gifted character actors.
 
Teenage Romance
 
The idea of the teenager is a distinctly twentieth-century concept. Prior to that, you were a child until you started work or got married (or, if you were very, very lucky, went to college), at which time you became an adult. The idea of a transitional state between childhood and adulthood didn’t even occur to anybody until the industrialized prosperity of the twentieth century gave children (in America, anyway) a few extra years to devote to growing up.
 
In the ’30s, swing music provided the cornerstone of a “youth culture,” with fashion, music, and vocabulary quite distinct from the square adults. In the ’50s, rock ’n’ roll music catapulted the youth culture to a whole new level, while at the same time adult society started to fear that the whole teenage thing was getting out of hand. The term “juvenile delinquency” was coined. (In the ’60s, of course, everybody’s worst fears were confirmed.)
 
With the birth of teenage and youth culture, it was only natural that films for and about teens would soon follow.
 
Of course, teenage comedy (and drama, and horror) are pervasive in modern films and TV shows. But Rory Gilmore’s story doesn’t seem to fit in very well with fare like
Beverly Hills, 90210
and
The O.C.
Most teenage shows on TV today deal with temptation and sexual awakening. Even more moralistic shows like
7
th
Heaven
and
Joan of Arcadia
look at their “good kids” largely in terms of the threats and temptations they face.
 
Rory’s world seems a good deal more innocent. It isn’t the sanitized, puritanical innocence of ’60s sitcoms, but has more of a sense of balance. Rory does have a sexual dimension—in fact, both she and Paris eventually lose their virginities under somewhat less than morally ideal circumstances (Lane, of course, actually manages to hold out until marriage)—but sex or sexuality are never really at the heart of her character.
 
The central element of Rory’s character is that she’s always been protected—defended first by her mother, then by her community, and later by her school and her grandparents. The convention in modern film or TV is that a character who’s grown up as “sheltered” as Rory has will be unnaturally naïve, timid, and vulnerable—either that, or when she does find freedom she’ll go a little bit crazy. However, Rory’s upbringing makes her strong. If she is naïve, it’s only because she’s young and still learning—her more “sophisticated” friends at Chilton and Yale all tend to be less well-prepared for real life than Rory is.
 
Whatever Amy Sherman-Palladino’s politics may be, this is an intrinsically conservative idea—in fact, it’s Biblical. The Book of Proverbs advises, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” Rory is protected, but her protectors—most of all Lorelai—never lie to her or prevent her from seeing the world as it is. By the time she’s sixteen, at the start of the series, she’s allowed unrestrained access to any books or films she likes, and she’s already proven herself well able to handle this responsibility. Rory is not being insulated from the real world; she’s being prepared for it.

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