Gilmore Girls

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21 November 2016

Far from just “comfort TV” in dark times, Gilmore Girls reminds us that pop culture isn’t stupid

“Do you remember in The Way We Were, how Katie and Hubbell broke up?”

By pure coincidence, the most politically tumultuous month in decades is also the month that sees the release of the Netflix revival of Gilmore Girls. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this has seen a rekindling of the old dismissive that Gilmore Girls is “comfort TV”: the perfect thing to watch when the real world is getting you down.

“Bad day? Bad 2016?” asked the BBC. “Gilmore Girls might be the comfort you need.” In a moving personal essay for the Guardian, Abigail Radnor wrote that Gilmore Girls is “perfect comfort TV”, as “sunny and safe” Stars Hollow (the fictional town where it’s set) saw her and her mother through some of the hardest moments of their lives. In the Observer Sarah Hughes argued, “this is a time for blanket-hugging comfort” that shows like Gilmore Girls can offer.

All these pieces are positive, even adoring, in their thoughts on Gilmore Girls. I agree with them all. But “comforting” can also be a loaded term. Allusions to “comfort food” suggest mindless binge-watching, an unhealthy retreat from the real world. Descriptions of TV as “comforting” or “safe” can imply that the product is twee, naive, and, in taking no artistic risks, has no genuine artistic value. The word “comforting” can suggest that something is nice, but ultimately, kind of stupid. Gilmore Girls rejects this premise.

The fifth season episode “Say Something” comes just after Lorelai and Luke, the show’s will-they-won’t-they couple, have a very painful, very public argument. It happens at Lorelai’s parents’ renewal of their vows – a ridiculously lavish affair that leaves Luke self-conscious about his crumpled trousers. Lorelai’s mother Emily has made it clear that, in her eyes, Luke is not good enough, not proper enough, for Lorelai: “He owns a diner, he’s a divorcee, he’s uneducated.” She pushes Lorelai’s ex, and the father of her child, Christopher, towards her instead: he, in contrast, has “good breeding”. It results in a shouting match between the two men and Lorelai. Luke leaves, ostracised and humiliated.

Lorelai goes after him. Not finding Luke at the diner he owns, she wanders around their shared small town, searching for him. She finds him at the movie theatre. It’s not much of a cinema – it’s a bookstore called Black-White-Read kitted out with an odd collection of assorted chairs, a big red sofa (nicknamed “Big Red”) and a whirring analogue projector.

Slipping in next to him, she asks, “What are you watching?”

“Something stupid,” he replies.

What’s actually playing is My Man Godfrey, a 1936 film often considered to be the definitive screwball comedy. It stars Carole Lombard as Irene, a sheltered, foolish socialite and William Powell as Godfrey, the homeless man she persuades to come with her to the Waldorf-Ritz hotel so she might win a scavenger hunt. Godfrey is made to stand on a podium, where he is verbally and physically accosted by the glamorous guests so they might determine his “authenticity”.

Luke and Lorelai are seen watching the scene that follows. Lombard is apologetically pleading with Powell. “I'd never have brought you here if I thought they were going to humiliate you,” she blusters. “I’m terribly grateful. This is the first time I’ve ever beaten Cornelia at anything and you helped me do it.”

“Man, they sure talked fast in these things,” Lorelai interrupts. It’s a meta comment that brings us outside the fictional world of the show for a moment: all viewers know that Gilmore Girls is notorious for the extremely fast pace of its dialogue.

Of course, My Man Godfrey is not such a stupid film to be playing at this precise moment in the series arc. Yes, it’s a lighthearted comedy with a farcical and absurd plotline, but its scenes of a working-class man deliberately shamed in spaces of great splendour could hardly be more relevant to the events of the evening.

Later, Lorelai dreams that she’s in her house, looking for Luke. As she walks into her kitchen, she finds that big old film projector, whirring away. Luke is sitting on Big Red, his back to her. Suddenly, they’re back in Black-White-Read’s theatre. Again, she sits beside him and asks him what he’s watching. Again he replies: “Something stupid.”

This time, they’re watching a black and white film of themselves, re-enacting their first date, except now it’s happening in Lorelai’s kitchen, with candles perched on the surrounding countertops as they drink their champagne.

“This isn’t stupid,” Lorelai says, smiling.

Finding a version of yourself on screen is an experience only rivalled by those moments in which real life feels so grand, so pathetic, so beautiful that they take on a cinematic quality. Gilmore Girls knows this. That mile-a-minute dialogue showcases pop culture references that come at you thick and fast: so much so that there are dozens of listicles and even entire websites devoted to cataloguing them all.

But whether it’s Rory and Jess flirting through annotations in a copy of Howl, Lane locating her sense of self in her extensive CD collection, or Rory and Lorelai’s uncomfortable moment of recognition while watching Grey Gardens, the show’s cultural references are more than just quirky conversational flair. Like Annie Baker’s play The Flick, Gilmore Girls sees cultural phenomena as tools that help its characters to understand themselves and each other.

One film that gets more than its fair share of air time on Gilmore Girls is The Way We Were, the 1973 romance starring Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford. In season one’s “Kiss and Tell”, Lorelai and Rory try to guess the “embarrassing secrets” of Rory’s new boyfriend, Dean. “The theme from Ice Castles makes you cry,” shoots Rory, before Lorelai jumps in with, “at the end of The Way We Were, you wanted Robert Redford to dump his wife and kid for Barbra Streisand.” In season five, Lorelai says of Rory, “She was so serious. You know how she gets really serious, like when she saw The Way We Were, and she couldn't believe that Hubbell was going to leave Katie after she had the baby?”

It’s obviously a film that has stuck with Lorelai, and in her moment of crisis with Luke, she turns to it again. At the end of “Say Something”, when Luke dumps her after the embarrassment and shame he feels at her parents’ party, Lorelai is a wreck, and calls him, sobbing.

“Hey, Luke, it’s me. I know I’m not supposed to be calling, but I am not doing really great right now, and... I was just wondering, if – do you remember in The Way We Were, how Katie and Hubbell broke up? Because his friends were joking and laughing, and the president had just died, and she yelled at them and he was mad and he was going out to Hollywood, and... I mean, which she hated, and... And he broke up with her and she was really – upset. And she called him and asked him if he would come over and sit with her because he was her best friend and she needed her best friend, and he did. And... and they talked all night, and they went out to Hollywood – which was a disaster, but it was good at first, with the boat, and uh... and the putting the books away? I’ve seen this movie a lot, so if you don’t remember the putting the books away scene, don’t feel stupid or anything, I was just sitting here thinking about it, because I, um... I’m in my house, and I was just, uh. [She sobs.] Could – please come over, I – please – really need to see you, and talk to you and please come over.”

Gilmore Girls understands the way people make big and small connections with each other, and themselves, through popular culture, and the ways we can lean on theatrical, technicolour explorations of emotion when struggling to comprehend or process our own. It reminds us that, in dark times, finding comfort in pop culture isn’t stupid at all.

***

Now listen to the Gilmore Girls special of the NS pop culture podcast, SRSLY:

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Anna Leszkiewicz is a pop culture writer at the New Statesman.

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Books

22 November 2016

Books of the year: the NS team on their favourites of 2016

From Jason Cowley to John Bew, the New Statesman team share their favourite book of 2016.

John Gray

Chris Petit’s The Butchers of Berlin (Simon & Schuster) is the story of a murder investigation in Berlin in 1943, when the Nazis knew the war was going against them and the city was being cleared of Jews. Unnerving in its depiction of a time when killing was an everyday occurrence, this dark and powerful novel is in a category of its own: once you’ve started reading it, you won’t easily be able to put it aside. Charles Foster’s Being a Beast (Profile Books) is the record of the author’s attempts to find out what it is like to be a non-human animal, a quest that involved living in a badger’s hole, eating worms and being hunted as a deer. A book in the singular genre of J A Baker’s shamanistic masterpiece The Peregrine, Foster’s account is precise, poetic and thought-stirring.

Shiraz Maher

Few issues capture the public imagination quite so urgently as that of Islam’s troubled relationship with the West, democracy, modernity and, indeed, itself. The debate that follows is often as poorly informed as it is polarised. This is where Shadi Hamid’s Islamic Exceptionalism (St Martin’s Press) comes into its own. Offering a provocative thesis – that Islam is a wholly different system from normative Western values (which the West should recognise and accept) – Hamid carefully unravels various thorny issues surrounding Islam’s place in the modern world. Whatever you think of this book, and there is plenty in it to disagree with, there’s no doubt that Hamid has made a thoughtful and important contribution to a debate that many have entertained but few have understood.

Rowan Williams

John Berger’s A Fortunate Man: the Story of a Country Doctor (Canongate Canons) is a unique essay in photographs (by Jean Mohr) and prose (by Berger) about a driven and charismatic GP in the Forest of Dean, first published nearly 50 years ago. It depicts a man whose sense of medical vocation was a long way from the situation of the harassed modern professional. Yet it is an unsentimental portrait – all the more so as this edition records, shockingly, that the subject eventually committed suicide. It remains a rare meditation on love, pain, commitment and the possibilities of healing, and it is an extraordinary gift to have it back in print just at this moment. Eugene Vodolazkin’s Laurus (Oneworld; translated by Lisa C Hayden) is also a picture of an unconventional healer, a medieval Russian holy fool. It is not at all a typical historical novel. It uses conscious and outrageous anachronisms; it is funny, subversive and vivid in its evocation of medieval life in Russia and the Middle East; and it plants questions about faith, irony, self-deception and integrity in the style of the greatest Russian fictions.

Michael Brooks

As compelling as a novel, Black Hole Blues: and Other Songs From Outer Space by Janna Levin (Bodley Head) is the definitive account of how we completed the hundred-year hunt for gravitational waves. Albert Einstein used his general theory of relativity to predict that these ripples in the fabric of the universe should exist. Levin, a professor at Columbia University, is an expert guide to the extraordinary physics and technology that confirmed Einstein’s hunch and the people who did it. Despite being granted full access by the physicists involved, she hasn’t held back from exposing their darker sides. It’s punchy, witty, timely and deeply insightful; I haven’t read a better book on the realities of doing science.

Michael Prodger

“I have long accepted my position as apostle to the lowbrows.” So said Kenneth Clark, the director of the National Gallery, founder of the National Theatre, reviver of the Royal Opera House and, of course, creator of Civilisation. James Stourton’s immaculate biography, Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation (William Collins) is an elegant and perceptive portrayal of the ultimate arts grandee as a frustrated scholar. For The Lost Watercolours of Edward Bawden (Mainstone Press), James Russell and Tim Mainstone tracked down many of the English pastoralist’s paintings from the 1930s that disappeared into private hands. The result is a gulp-inducingly expensive (at £160) but stunningly beautiful – and revealing – book.

John Bew

“The people aren’t happy. Something is stirring in towns like Middletown in rust-belt Ohio, and Jackson in Appalachian Kentucky.” Having grown up between the two, a boy from a broken family, J D Vance offers a deeply personal analysis in Hillbilly Elegy (William Collins) of the disintegration and angst of poor, white America and the tarnishing of the American dream.

Ever heard of Alex Calvo García, the Basque footballer and graduate of Real Sociedad who moved to England and became an unlikely cult hero of Scunthorpe United, despite being unable to tell the manager he was playing in the wrong position? Scunthorpe Hasta La Meurte (deCoubertin Books) by Iñigo Gurruchaga, translated by Matthew Kennington, tells this unlikely story with charm, subtle wit and deep affection for grass-roots football in northern industrial England and Spain, with their dreary terraces where dreams are occasionally born but usually go to die.

Erica Wagner

It was astonishing that Francis Spufford’s brilliant Golden Hill (Faber & Faber) didn’t appear on the longlist for the Man Booker Prize. Set in New York in the turbulent days before the American Revolution, this book is many things: a thriller, a meditation on the form of the novel, an examination of the beginnings of American politics. And it’s a ripping good read. As is Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End (Faber & Faber), which moves us forward into 19th-century American history, when a young Irish immigrant finds himself fighting first the country’s native population, and then the Confederacy. It’s a bloody book, but one that allows for hope – just what we need right now.

Helen Lewis

What would be different if women were physically stronger than men? Naomi Alderman’s The Power (Viking; reviewed on page 51) imagines a world in which women develop the ability to deliver electric shocks. One of the achievements of science fiction is to render the familiar strange, and throughout this fast-paced, funny and provocative novel, Alderman shows there’s nothing “natural” about the structure of our world. What at first looks like a simple revenge fantasy – who wouldn’t want to lightly electrocute a few people? – becomes an investigation of how power corrupts. And, it turns out, electrical power corrupts absolutely.

Jason Cowley

John Bew’s Citizen Clem (Riverrun) is a book about one man – Clement Attlee, Labour’s greatest leader – but it is also the story of a political party and movement. Attlee was born into the prosperous Victorian middle classes and enlisted at the age of 31 to serve in the First World War. His politics were shaped by what Bew calls his “unobtrusive progressive patriotism” and by the time he spent working among the poor of London’s East End. Like Orwell, Attlee believed that “love of country could be a noble and unifying theme”. Read this book to understand what Labour once was and what has been lost because of its embrace of identity politics and ultra-liberalism.

Peter Wilby

The Observer, under David Astor’s editorship, gave me my first job in journalism. So Jeremy Lewis’s vivid, insightful and sometimes very funny biography of Astor (Jonathan Cape) gave me most pleasure this year. The man’s achievement was to turn the post-1945 Observer into compulsory reading for the young middle classes. Though he was a somewhat diffident editor, his engagement with important issues and his willingness to champion unpopular causes were inspirational. Lewis’s account of his life is essential reading, not just for present and aspiring editors, but for anybody who cares about newspapers.

John Burnside

If we have learned anything in recent years, it is that the understanding of the mind (or rather, psyche) should not be left solely to the medical establishment. We must also study our own ways of healing.

Jay Griffiths is one of the most perceptive and lyrical writers working today; she also brings deep learning and immense moral courage to Tristimania: a Diary of Manic Depression (Hamish Hamilton), an elegant and inspiring study of a condition shared by many who feel obliged to conceal their pain. A triumph in every sense, this is a book that gives us all an uncompromised and hard-earned sense of hope.

Tom Gatti

The winners this year of the Man Booker and Goldsmiths Prizes (the latter is run in association with the New Statesman) make a strong double act. Start with Paul Beatty’s bitterly funny and finely layered satire on American race relations, The Sellout (Oneworld), which – set in an LA neighbourhood that is twinned with “the lost city of White Male Privilege” – seems even more essential after the racially demarcated “whitelash” of Donald Trump’s victory. Follow with Mike McCormack’s Goldsmiths winner, Solar Bones (Tramp Press): the story of an ordinary man’s working and family life in the west of Ireland, told in a single, fluid, compelling sentence.

Leo Robson

The work of the academic psychologist Anders Ericsson has inspired half a dozen popular accounts of the relationship between talent and effort. This year, with the science writer Robert Pool, he produced a book of his own, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (Bodley Head), which may be the liveliest and clearest of the lot. Daunt Books reissued two pieces of journalism which proved that factual writing can be as “creative” as any novel: John McPhee’s Oranges and V S Pritchett’s London Perceived. Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City (Canongate) is a descendant – a genre-blind book about everything: art and Aids, Warhol and Winnicott, Sontag and social media.

Books of the year: authors

Books of the year: politicians