Entropy, Unhappiness, and the Gilmore Girls
To those who are vaguely aware of Gilmore Girls, it has the reputation of being a perky, bubbly show about an implausibly perfect mother-daughter relationship. At the start of the series, it lives up to that impression. But as I watched it again on Netflix this month, I realized that I love the show because it dismantles that premise over a long arc. It begins with a fairy tale, then slowly destroys it.
Despite my affection, there are huge swaths of plot that I don’t care about. Every minute of Stars Hollow drama feels slight, and a waste of time. That’s because Stars Hollow is presented as a place that more or less stays the same, and the most important part of the show is about how things change –irrevocably – for Lorelai and Rory. Gilmore Girls could have been aptly titled Things Fall Apart.
At the outset of the series, there are truths the characters hold to be self-evident, that are presented as fundamental to the diegesis:
- Rory and Lorelai are not only mother and daughter, but best friends.
- Lorelai is fiercely independent, infinitely capable, and needs no one else’s help.
- Luke is hopelessly, unrequitedly in love with Lorelai.
- Rory will go to Harvard, and become a journalist, and live happily ever after.
Over the course of seasons one through five, these threads all unravel.
Among most fans of the show, the seventh season is considered apocryphal. Creator Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband, writer/director/producer Daniel Palladino, left the series to everyone’s dismay. But if I could choose the moment for the series to end, it would have been one season before their departure, with the finale of season five.
The first season cements everyone’s ideas about Rory: she’s smart, lovely, hard-working, polite, and destined to succeed. As Luke describes her, she “looks like she belongs on top of a Christmas tree.” Everyone believes it, from the people in the town, to her grandparents, and especially Lorelai. Harvard is inevitable. But all those dreams are laid low, and the last episode of season five finally completes her downward trajectory.
At first, the detours aren’t unpleasant. When Rory decides on Yale over Harvard, she’s hardly choosing a bleak path, but it’s the first indication that the characters long-held certainties can be shaken. And one by one, they aren’t just shaken, but broken.
At the end of season five, Rory has gone from a model youth to an adulterer who wrecked a marriage, a college dropout with an arrest record, a mediocre journalist who is the beneficiary of nepotism despite her fierce belief in meritocracy, and generally become a whiny, complacent, ungrateful jerk. Over the course of her high school and college career, her romantic life went from perfect – dating Dean who, despite later retconning to be a bit of a dummy, starts off as a dreamboat who reads Hunter S. Thompson – to getting her heart stomped on by Jess’s inability to let go of his own idealized version of what reality should be, and then falling for Logan, who’s only kind of into her, and whose family thinks she’s basically trash. Worst of all, and devastating to the most central thesis of the show, Rory and Lorelai don’t even seem to like each other that much anymore. It’s so great.
What should be the happiest moment for Lorelai and Luke – a daydream of so many fans who spent episode after episode watching the bad timing and bad luck that kept Luke and Lorelai apart for years – a marriage proposal, is emotionally ambiguous at best. Lorelai finally drops her independence, and asks Luke to marry her, but she’s on the verge of tears, and not tears of joy. Over sixteen years, she built a narrative of her and her daughter against the world, or at least against the world her parents inhabit, and in that moment, she no longer has her daughter, and she can’t actually do everything herself. She isn’t super-powered. Her proposal is the tacit recognition of all of that, and it’s heartbreaking. Luke doesn’t even say yes. In my version of the series, the last word we’d ever hear is his response: “What?”
This is why I love Gilmore Girls. It isn’t a happy story, though there are so many moments of lightness and laughter. It’s about how all plans are ruined, sometimes by things out of our control, and sometimes by our own doing. On television, life, in all its humble, dirty grimness, is rarely given such a long arc, such a sugar coating before it gets sucked down to a bittersweet center. Life takes its own path, and wherever it leads, we just follow.
