Of course, everybody is entitled to their own reading of any text but I find the following reading of Gilmore Girls (one of my most favorite TV shows ever) to be very puzzling:
The obvious one Phoebe overlooks is Gilmore Girls: a very young mother who raises her daughter as an equal, the daughter is growing up much more responsible and mature than her mother.
The character of Rory in the TV show is anything but “responsible and mature.” She finds it extremely hard to separate from her mother, she can’t handle school, at the slightest contretemps she hands her life over to her rich grandparents, she can’t preserve any identity of her own in relationships with men, she turns into a mirror image of whatever guy she happens to date at any given moment. This is an extremely infantile character, and it is no mistake that an actress with such a childish face was cast for this part.
Rory’s extreme immaturity can easily be traced to two main causes: a very infantile absentee father and extremely wealthy grandparents. They are in the habit of pouring huge sums of money on top of every minor issue she confronts, so she never feels the need to grow up.
The final episodes of the show where Rory refuses to marry her domineering rich brat of a boyfriend and finally departs away from her relatives to work as a journalist covering the campaign of the yet largely unknown Barack Obama are very hopeful because they indicate that the 23-year-old Rory is finally ready to start growing up.
OK, I now want to drop everything and go watch the entire show from the start.
Clarissa's Blog 
This is an extremely infantile character, and it is no mistake that an actress with such a childish face was cast for this part.
The same actress played a depressed and infantilized housewife on Mad Men who has a brief affair with the most petulant main character and then promptly forgets it after her electroshock therapy.
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I feel sorry for the actress because as she ages, there will be very few parts for her.
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I didn’t make the association in real time and only realize who it was when reading review/fan discussion sites. The irony or course was that her husband was an even bigger asshole than Pete (how awful does a guy have to be to make Pete look like the better option?)
I’d say that if her acting chops are up to speed then she’ll find work, not as a leading lady maybe but as a character actress (better parts anyway though young actresses now flinch at the label). On of the better French actors of the last few decades is from a Moroccan immigrant family and doesn’t have the use of his right arm. If the talent is there, then parts tend to appear.
On the other hand, MM fans weren’t enchanted with her performance so who knows?
I never watched the show beyond bits and pieces but the Polish custom of voice over translation (rather than true dubbing) contributed heavily to that. I always had the idea it was something I’d hate (but I thought the same thing about
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Talented American actors? Yeah, I’m not wildly optimistic. 🙂 Of course, for a talented actor appearance doesn’t matter. But I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a talented actor or actress on the American screen.
My husband and I are now watching the 3rd season of our favorite Russian TV show “Karpov” and, man, that’s real acting. And, shockingly for Russian TV, the script isn’t impotent either. Although never as good as American scripts. My fantasy of the perfect TV show is American writing + Russian acting. That would be the bomb.
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“I never watched the show beyond bits and pieces but the Polish custom of voice over translation (rather than true dubbing) contributed heavily to that. I always had the idea it was something I’d hate (but I thought the same thing about”
– Don’t leave us hanging here!
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“Talented American actors? Yeah, I’m not wildly optimistic. :-)”
If I didn’t know better I’d say you’re showing your culture…. The problem with American actors is that most of them don’t have real training to speak of (British training is several orders of magnitude better). Maybe because their job is perceived as primarily visual and so visual considerations trump all else. Another is that they tend to have narrow ranges (Jon Hamm is amazing as Don Draper, but I’m not anxious to see him in other roles) the actress who plays his daughter is either great or simply has body language that’s very similar to January Jones (I can’t think of a character who so strongly channels a parent’ mannerisms in the way that often happens in real life).
“My fantasy of the perfect TV show is American writing + Russian acting. That would be the bomb”
Broaden that to “European” and I’d agree (Russian acting seems a little hammy and too stylized for my taste, almost like silent movies or opera).
I’m enjoying (far more than I should!) the performances in Profilage (a French procedural/mystery series based on the US series Profiler which I haven’t seen at all) not to mention Borgen (just started the third season and I love the lead actress more with each episode). But I have kind of low tastes I even enjoyed Los Misterios de Laura though have the time the plots made no earthly sense).
Also, have you seen the HBO mini-series Mildred Pierce with Kate Winslet? I’d be real interested in your opinion on the mother-daughter dynamic going on there.
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“Don’t leave us hanging here!”
I thought i’d cut that out (you need an edit option for people like me who type faster than they think and who hit the post comment too soon).
I can think of several series I thought i’d hate and which I loved (including the Sopranos and Mad Men). Most recent is Game of Thrones which I’d purposely avoided for years and then finally decided to give a (grudging) chance to and then compulsively watched the whole thing over the summer (more interesting female characters per episode than… any other series…. ever, yeah horrible things happen to a lot of them but the men have it just as bad if not worse).
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Oh, I remember that show; it was nice, albeit irritating at times.
I think that what people called responsibility and maturity was just meekness and diligence. That’s why i liked Paris more, at least she had more character.
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Yes, Paris actually experienced a dramatic growth as a character outpacing Rory by far.
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I’m only on the first season. Mostly I can’t stand romantic plots, so I can’t say Rory’s anywhere near my favorite character. I like Lorelai and Emily better. Preferably in combination. Their relationship is interesting.
I don’t know if you do Netflix, but if you do they recently added the series.
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” I like Lorelai and Emily better. Preferably in combination. Their relationship is interesting.”
– Yes, it’s a perfect example of a daughter who wasn’t allowed to go through all of the stages of separation from the mother and remains forever stuck in the stage of teenage rebellion. Which, in turn, harms her chances at a happy personal life.and undermines her authority as a mother in the relationship with her own daughter. Plus, she can’t teach Rory to separate from her because she never separated from her own mother. This is an example of psychological problems inherited generationally. Very smart, psychologically consistent writing.
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I watched the eat, pray,love movie last night, although I couldn’t quite make it to the end, because what was the point? I think the central character was Christian consumptive. I mean, maybe so. I had a Christian consumptive character once, and that is the only thing I can relate it to.
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Wow, I admire your willingness to take risks and explore cultural insanity. 🙂 The book that movie was based on was a bestseller hugely promoted by your favorite media personality. 🙂
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Right. Oprah.
Well there was nothing else on TV last night. I did learn that (supposing there is any sense to the narrative) it really is impossible to get out of the Christian character structure, if one happens to be a very wealthy American lady. Her attitude to life is too passive, as she keeps waiting to be struck by some meaning or some revelation from the outside. Even her semi-romances reveal this tendency, which is the proneness to waiting and hoping that a romantic mood might overwhelm one. This passivity pertains to the Christian feminine, and I recognised it after a while. But she doesn’t actually break free from it. She advances a little bit but is still resolutely stuck in the idea that good fortune comes from the outside.
I’d take it that this is an accurate representation of the condition of many an American upper crust female. Thing is, she thinks she escapes (or at least, the writer is presumably trying to invent this narrative), but she does not. She just loosens her belt a little bit.
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“She advances a little bit but is still resolutely stuck in the idea that good fortune comes from the outside. I’d take it that this is an accurate representation of the condition of many an American upper crust female. ”
– Not just upper crust, not just American and not just female. Sadly.
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Yes, I am sure that is true, although I suspect that if one has been protected from a lot of reality it is more likely one will develop the consumptive character.
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“I watched the eat, pray,love movie last nigh”
Once more you prove yourself to be far tougher than I am I can’t imagine lasting through the credits (if it has those). brrrrrrrrrrr
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Well it was pretty mind-numbing, which is always bad for my dreaming processes, but I do think that the very tightly controlled persona and tightly controlled emotional range of the narrative were telling in the sense that there must be a lot of real life characters who simply cannot break out into a mode of spontaneity no matter how hard they try. This was a movie about a desperate attempt to break out of a complete lack of spontaneity and into spontaneous life, and the failure to do so. I think I can recognise it as I have also been there, although I did break out and this character did not. Actually what is necessary for an effective jail break is for women who have been highly socialised by Christian ideology into a narrow gender role to embrace some of the features of the “opposite” gender. Of to put it differently embrace those features of the other that you are not. Unfortunately, even the male romantic hero near the end of the plot was highly feminized in terms of this Christian pattern. He had to be advized by his son that it is time to have a sex life, which is indicative of his extreme lack of spontaneity. Therefore, trying to gain knowledge of spontaneity from the male (in this instance) would also lead to failure.
In all, spontaneity — the breaking free of the spirit back into life — was not achieved. I didn’t watch the movie to the end as I could tell that the character would not achieve it (and the time was almost up for that).
It is very, very unfortunate if one is trapped in this way, behind a glass wall, but I don’t think that story can be easily told.
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I didn’t relate to her at all. I read part of the book many years ago and can only remember how irritating I found her. Perhaps I find this “I’m traveling to find myself” travelogue genre to be inane and stupid because most travelogues do not engage themselves or their surroundings in any deep way. Or maybe it’s because I’m from at least two places and will be until I die. I am not traveling to contrast myself against some exotic Other or to divert myself from my affluent malaise. I do not have the illusion that traveling makes one interesting or deep. So the idea that I could passively consume a prepackaged experience and have it make me interesting is alien to me.
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Yeah, I found that almost laughable, too, although I did not muster a dry laugh. But my interpretation is different and less socio-economic, more psychological. Of course the plot is inane but the emotional ineptitude that this reveals is similar to a person being behind a glass wall and being unable to speak about anything important or vital to them. From my perspective the whole story is a narrative that tells about this inability. The illusion that traveling is redemptive is a part of this psychological impotence of a person behind a glass shell, that she can never fully break out of.
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Here is my “Eat, Pray, Love” (all about the redemptive power of travel). Of course one does not escape the Christian psychological dynamics in this way, which are already in your head.
http://home.iprimus.com.au/scratchy888/Christianity%20and%20Death2.htm
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I only watched a few episodes of Gilmore Girls and found the whole thing utterly pretentious, irritating, and profoundly paralyzed by privilege. Same thing with Eat, Pray, Love. Ridiculous. I wish my job would let me travel for a year and “find myself.” Then again, by the time I was that woman’s age, I’d already grown up and discovered who I was. Why can’t people just grow up?
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I love that you enjoy Gilmore Girls. 🙂 And yes, I find Rory very young in many ways. Though I think that she gets younger, almost, as the series progresses – when the show starts out, she seems more mature and responsible (ordering food, making peace between family members, etc.) and it seems like she can’t handle growing older. I hadn’t ever thought of this in terms of her relationship with her grandparents, but that does make sense. Growing up and being a mature adult is tough work. I think perhaps this is a reflection of many people, that the moment that you don’t have to grow up, you will stop. In Rory’s case, when it was her and Lorelai alone (no grandparents involved), she was bearing more responsibility, and seemed more mature. But when the grandparents came along, they replaced that responsibility, and she regressed…
This makes an interesting thought. Perhaps I will go find other instances where things like this happen either in fiction or non. (Clarissa, it’s happened, you’ve turned me into a literature and culture researcher. My scientific mind is finally starting to understand on a deeper-than-intellectual level why this stuff is interesting and important. I’ve always acknowledged that it is, but it’s always been more of a “I don’t understand it, but I know it is important, and I’m glad that there are people who think about this”. I think I’ve taken an intellectual step tonight. Thank you :))
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This makes me very very happy. Thank you, E!
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