Why Gilmore Girls Sucks (based on two episodes)

[alias_sqbr]

Becuase Rae asked (in a post I locked for other reasons)
If anyone knows of anyone with a less flimsy background in literary analysis or the show itself who's talked about this stuff I'd love to see it, the best I got from googling "Gilmore girls racism/classism/marxism" was an interesting analysis of Buffy. I am of course including you guys opinions in that, feel free to tell me I'm wrong (I should make that my sig) :)

So, Gimore girls is about Lorelei Gilmore and her daughter Rory. Lorelei is the daughter of snooty upper middle class conservatives, and was well on her way to fulfilling their conformist ideas of success when she got pregnant at 16, left home, and made her own way in the world working from maid to hotel manager. Lorelei is determined for Rory not to make the same mistakes, as is Rory, who is smart and achedemic. In the first episode she gets accepted to a snooty private school. Rory's best friend is a first generation Korean girl. Her parents want her to eat vegetarian asian food, dress sensibly, and marry a (Korean) doctor etc.

To me the moral of the show is that young, white, middle class people are great. Everyone else sucks, or is at least blind to the awesomeness of the young white middle class characters. Parents (except Lorelei, who seems to act more like a teenager or someone from "Friends") are overly strict and small minded and conservative without having any useful advice or wisdom or any understanding of their children's POV. They are always wrong. This show makes a lot more sense to me now I realise it's aimed at teenagers, but I guess I've been spoiled by Buffy where while Giles and Mrs Summers are often wrong or misguided they're still presented with empathy, and we can see why they feel the way they do.

I'm 27, five years younger than Lorelei, and I know a bunch of fun loving women around my age who have kids. And to me, she acts like a petulant teenager, not an adult. Either she's more sensible and boring than she's been shown to be so far, or she'd be a constant strain and dissapointment as a mother. (I'm less sure of this point)

The Korean friend's mother is "amusingly" crazy, the implication to me being that part of her craziness is in expecting her daughter to want to hold on to any aspect of her Korean-ness when she has a chance to eat hamburgers and be an (almost) white american. I mean my highschool friends with asian parents did chafe against the comparitive strictness, but something about the portrayal bugged me. I came accross a bunch of Koren-americans online saying they liked the portrayal, so maybe it's just me or gets more nuanced.

Lorelei's parents, and everyone at the snooty school, are caricatures of the rich with no depth, all smug and emotionally empty and coldly ambitious. Now I can kind of understand this from fiction which is trying to highlight the difficulties of being working class or whatever (though it still bugs me) but as someone whose childhood notion of Extreme, Excessive Wealth was owning your own house and two cars (and then went to a snooty prestigious school) I get irritated when the "normal" character we're supposed to empathise with in contrast has a high paying, prestigious job and owns their own car and large pretty home, and there don't seem to be any actual poor people in sight.

Anyway, getting sleepy now. May edit it on like Friday (the next time I have any free time) These opinions are horribly uninformed but, well Rae asked (yeah, I am milking this as a pretext to rant :)), and this way if I am wrong chances are someone will tell me!

Comments

[tevriel.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

And okay, I can totally see your point, although from what I've seen of it Gilmore Girls does get a lot more nuanced in its portrayal of, well, pretty much everything; the ways in which Lorelai is responsible, the ways in which she's handling things, everyone's parents etc.

Lorelai isn't so much not wanting Rory to live her life, since she's quite proud of it, as wanting Rory to have the life *she* wants, and Rory wants the academic angle. I don't know. It's not like I was ever into Gilmore Girls and it does remain fairly shallow in its approach to a lot of this stuff, but it does get a little more nuance than it has at this point, so.

[capnoblivious.livejournal.com]

But...

But the dialogue is great!!

(I haven't seen much, just the occasional episode. I don't think you're wrong, but I never really noticed.)

[ataxi.livejournal.com]

"I get irritated when the "normal" character we're supposed to empathise with in contrast has a high paying, prestigious job and owns their own car and large pretty home, and there don't seem to be any actual poor people in sight."

This always gets me. Either the "normal" or "disadvantaged" character really isn't at all, in any way (the example you give), or they're rapidly removed from disadvantage in the eye of the viewer through means explained (Ryan in the OC, from the wrong side of the tracks, but adopted by mega-rich (but ever so nice) Newportians) or unexplained (Joey in Dawson's Creek, supposedly dirt-poor but always perfectly groomed and with a wardrobe of faux-thrift-store clothing that looks like it costs $$$ per item).

The "disadvantaged" may have token "tough jobs" to do (e.g. part time work in a café) but the workplaces are usually sanitised, and the amount of screen time spent there and actually working is minimal, so the work itself doesn't become part of the character. In fact these workplaces are primarily places where one has constant D&Ms with one's boss, tends bar whilst watching hugely famous indie act do a guest TV spot on the intimate stage nearby, or engages in some post-cleanup hawt romance.

I can't stand this contradictory requirement that I simultaneously pity a character whilst desperately wanting to be them. Surely it's got to be one or the other?

[ataxi.livejournal.com]

I'd also like to add that for all their rubbish acting, plotlines and general concept, Australian soaps don't suffer from this problem. The characters in them have real jobs that really suck and are actually boring.

[originalnilson.livejournal.com]

And they talk to fast. For some reason I find that a bit irritating.

[arcadiagt5.livejournal.com]

I rather like the Gilmore Girls. The idea of an American drama where a single mother is presented as a sympathetic character always struck me as odd.

It also has a genuine sense of humour, also extremely rare in American television.

I think you missed some of the point of the 1st episode though. The last thing Lorelei wanted to do was go to her parents for help. If she could have avoided it she would have. But to get what her daugher needed, she had to and she accepted that responsibility. The cost of a good education in the US is a recurring theme in the series and its not favourably presented.

And Lorelei doesn't actually own the home... there are mortgage and repair issues there that come up in later episodes.

[trs80.ucc.asn.au (from livejournal.com)]

http://girl-wonder.org/girlsreadcomics/?p=8 is a similar rant about race in comics.

[(Anonymous)]

Ok, through out the years there have been many american shows we can relate to. Gilmore girls are not the only ones. there have been of late...'Daria, and who can forget degrassi with a whole bunch of different families of different culture and back groumds there.

Soph, u make an exellent point here. the thing that annoys the crap with me about G girls...is that they alll (every character) seems to be on spped or coke...they never seem to get a breath in any of their sentances.

Sure, there is an audience for sacren sweet 'lets be best friends/always act like teenager' crap and yeah I must admit sometimes I'm guilty of even relating to this.

but welcome to the world of Television......without....what would there be....no disscussion I guess

XX KA

[alias_sqbr]

Yeah, it was a late night rant and thus "this sucks!" rather than "this has a lot of good aspects, but I was put off by it's flaws" :)

[alias_sqbr]

I did say it was based on two episodes and thus uninformed :)

If it gets better I may give it another shot. Though: does the mother become more three dimensional? I've met a fair number of overcontrolling ambitious mothers and they all got along with their daughters sometimes, if only when bonding about cake or something.

[alias_sqbr]

I totally agree, though I think the real lesson here is that you and I shouldn't watch so many shows like "Gilmore Girls" or "The OC" :)

[alias_sqbr]

And it was only after reading that that I notice the complete lack of any black or latino characters. (Which I think is somewhat forgivable since I come from a country which actually is mostly white with the odd asian(*))

I think the commenters need to learn something I had to have beaten in to me: if you only comment on the points where you disagree with someone, they will assume the you also disagree with everything else they've said. Make it very clear that you agree with everything else first, then they might actually pay attention to your points of contention.

(*)Is briefly paranoid about marginalising anyone on my flist who is neither white nor asian, realises afaict there aren't any. Mmm. Diverse social group I have here.

[alias_sqbr]

I'll give you the single mother thing and sense of humour. I mean really I was being overly dramatic, it doesn't suck but I do think it shows signs of having Serious Flaws.

To give some perspective, my benchmark for "poor enough to have some justification in resenting the rich" isn't "sometimes has trouble paying the mortgage on a two story house" but "is regurlarly nearly evicted for not paying the rent on their flat". I am the child of leftist unskilled labourers and thus have a bit of a chip on my shoulder, I'm sure I will drive my kids insane with my stories of how in my day you walked uphill 2 miles in the snow for half a penny etc :)

I did get that point about the episode, if anything I found it a bit telling that afaict in the heads of the writers and characters things are still Exactly The Same as they were 16 years ago. Admittedly it's hard to give the impression of a layered relationship so early into a show.

I'm willing to admit the show may have more depth than it exhibited in the first few episodes, and that I wasn't in a very generous mood. Since from the sounds of thing it gets better I'll at least finish the disk and see if it grows on me.

[alias_sqbr]

Actually the fast talking didn't bother me (that was originanilson) probably since I talk pretty fast myself.

[ataxi.livejournal.com]

That is without a doubt completely incorrect. Those shows need a critical audience, and if a critical audience for mindless pap is required, I'm there with my slippers and cup of tea!

It's a Cult of the Low thing ok?

[alias_sqbr]

Ah, of course, it's a public service you endure for the greater good, I should have realised :)