Title: Kiss and Tell

Apparently, Rory doesn’t “Kiss and Tell” – at least not to Lorelai.

Summary: The Girls don’t do laundry. Luke fights the Autumn mob mentality. Rory’s got kissed! And she shoplifted! But Lorelai only finds out through Mrs. Kim. Luke catches Lorelai spying on the new kid, while he smugly bags groceries. Rory and Lorelai rent Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and pick up massive amounts of junk food at Doose’s. Lorelai invites Dean over for movie night and Rory flips. But it all ends with a kiss. 

TAYLOR: You have lived in Stars Hollow for a long time, young man. It’s time you became one of us. LUKE: Sorry, I guess my pod’s defective.

I think Luke is referencing Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a book and then several movie adaptions about a species of aliens who attempt to take over Earth after their planet goes Tits Up. In the 1993 remake/sequel, Body Snatchers, the aliens emit a high pitch scream when they detect a non-convert among them. Kind of like Taylor is doing to Luke in this scene for being a non-convert to “Autumnal Hues”. It makes sense that Luke would have a sci-fi reference ready to whip out when the moment strikes since we find out later that he is into Star Trek (S2 E8) and The Outer Limits (S2 E14).

LANE: OK, let’s do a little compare and contrast here. You get kissed on the mouth by a cute, cool, sexy guy you really like. And I get kissed on the forehead by a theology major in a Members Only jacket who truly believes that rock music leads to hard drugs.

I think these bad boys are coming back in style, just you wait. The fashion brand Members Only became popular in the 80s for their Racer jackets – a sort of polyester bomber jacket with military-style shoulder embellishments, collar straps, and knit trim around the wrists and waist. Picture Costanza from Seinfeld and you’ve got it. They were everywhere in the 80s, but lost their cool fast after that and became synonymous with “Loser” by the 90s. Which makes sense that Lane would not be thrilled to be on a date with a dude in a Members Only jacket in the Year of Our Lord, Two Thousand. And for a funny tie-in/coincidence, Members Only actually made a few weird anti-drug TV ads in the last 80s, showing drug-addicted babies which had nothing to do with their jackets. But maybe that’s why a “theology major who truly believes that rock music leads to hard drugs” would still rock that jacket?

LANE: He likes Nick Drake and Liz Phair and The Sugarplastic and he’s deathly allergic to walnuts.

Nick Drake was a British singer-songwriter who died tragically at the age of 26. His music was never appreciated in his own time but he has found quite the following since his death in 1974. He refused to play live or give interviews and preferred to stay out of the spotlight. He suffered from depression and died of suicide at his parents home, after taking a reported 30 pills of prescribed antidepressant. It wasn’t until musicians like Robert Smith of The Cure and Peter Buck of R.E.M. mentioned Nick Drake as one fo their influences that he finally got recognition, albeit posthumously. But it could be the 1999 VW Cabriolet commercial (their first ever “internet commercial”) that featured the title track of Drake’s Pink Moon album that really catapulted his commercial success. Dean’s bemoans VW’s use of Drake’s song later in this episode but honestly, millions more people know about Nick Drake because of that commercial – and really, when you find good music shouldn’t you want to share it?? A conversation for another time…

Liz Phair is another bad-ass female rocker who helped lay more bricks on that road to equality in music. She paved the way for many female musicians of recent generations to follow but she also picked up where others had paved the way for her, like Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon. Liz’s debut album Exile in Guyville is listed in Billboard’s top 500 albums of all time. Liz Phair is from Chicago too, btw, so that’s probably a contributing factor to Dean being a fan. Plus she’s pretty cute.

The Sugarplastic is an obscure reference, not quite sure how this got on Dean’s radar. Or even Lane’s for that matter. It is a super cool band name, though. They were/are an alt-rock band from LA in the late 80s and 90s. Founders Ben Eshbach and Kiara Geller met in high school and realized they liked jamming together, adding in their buddy Josh Laner on drums. They practiced in Laner’s dad’s appliance store until they got discovered by a record label. Which totally sounds like the plot to That Thing You Do. Anyway, they released 4 albums and had little commercial success. But they did produce a track for The Powerpuff Girls soundtrack in 2001, which has a nice GG tie-in since we know Lorelai is a fan. (S3E12)

LORELAI: Oh, OK, great. I was watching General Hospital the other day and you know, they have a new Lucky ’cause the old Lucky went to play something where he could have a real name. So the old Lucky had this girlfriend, Liz, who thought that he died in a fire. So then they bring on this new Lucky and you’re all like “OK, I know that’s not the old Lucky because the new Lucky has way more hair gel issues” but still, Liz was so upset about his supposed death that you could not wait to see them kiss, you know.

Well, upon further research, turns out there really was a Lucky on General Hospital who as replaced by another actor. Funny enough, the original actor came back in 2009 to play Lucky again. Only on soap operas can you pull off a move like that.

General Hospital is the longest-running soap opera still in production, airing first in 1963. How do they still have stories to come up with after more than 55 years?! The show follows the various dramas of the doctors, nurses, and patients at General Hospital in the fictional Port Charles, NY.

LORELAI: I’m not gonna talk about how good you’d look dressed like one of the guys from ‘The Crucible.’

Was this required reading at your high school too? The Crucible was originally a play by the great Arthur Miller – not to be confused with Norman Mailer (S5E6) – about the Salem Witch Trials in Salem, MA in 1692/93. The play was a thinly veiled criticism of the Communist “Witch Hunts” of McCarthyism and the mob mentality that comes with fear. The play inspired two movies, including the 1996 version with Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder for which Miller wrote the screenplay. I’m guessing Lorelai is referring to the costumes in this movie when she is making fun of Rory’s outfit. It was a big movie that year, nominated for two Academy Awards.

Little known fact: Daniel Day-Lewis met his wife, Rebecca Miller, while filming this movie. Yep, that’s Arthur Miller’s daughter!

LORELAI: You’re going to quote Freud to me? ‘Cause I’ll push you in front of a moving car.

Harsh, Lorelai! Is someone repressing something?

The one and only Sigmund Freud is probably one of the most well-known psychologists/analysts/navigators of the human mind of all time. He introduced the concept of psychoanalysis – wherein dialogue between a patient and an analyst is used to treat mental illness. His theories included a lot of repressed feelings (sexual and otherwise) towards our parents, hence Lorelai’s comment here regarding Dean looking a lot like Christopher. Freud, an Austrian Jew, fled Vienna in 1938 to escape the Nazis and died just the next year while a refugee in the UK.

LORELAI: Yeah, well by the time that gets to Miss Patty’s it’s a scene from 9 1/2 Weeks.

9 1/2 Weeks was a 1986 film starring Kim Bassinger and Mickey Rourke, wherein an art gallery worker and Wall Street broker have a BDSM, borderline abusive affair.  It’s the original Fifty Shades of Grey, but without the romance. Ironically, Rourke’s character was named John Gray! It was a box office bomb due to editing for MPAA ratings, but was championed by Roger Ebert who loved the realistic characters and charisma between Bassinger and Rourke. It’s become a cult favorite, with two sequels released in the 90s.

LORELAI: I’m going to be so cool in there you will mistake me for Shaft.

Shaft, the king of cool. Originally a novel by Ernest Tidyman, John Shaft is an African American Private Detective who’s “Hotter than Bond, cooler than Bullitt.” The character has inspired five movies with Richard Roundtree playing John Shaft in the 1971, 1972, and 1973 films, and Samuel L. Jackson playing his nephew in the 2000 reboot. Both actors will reprise their roles in the 2019 update, with Jessie Usher joining the cast as the original Shaft’s son.

When asked about the inspiration from his character, Tidyman said, “the blacks I knew were smart and sophisticated, and I thought, what about a black hero who thinks of himself as a human being, but who uses his black rage as one of his resources, along with intelligence and courage.” Hell yeah, representation!

RORY: No kissing noises. No stories from my childhood. No referring to Chicago as Chitown. No James Dean jokes. No father-with-a-shotgun stares. No Nancy Walker impressions.

The James Dean reference here is ironic since Rory’s next boyfriend is basically a carbon copy of ol’ Jimmy Dean. But for context, James Dean was the iconic teenage rebel/lost soul/motorcycling terror that all mothers feared in the 50s. Born in 1931, and dying tragically young at the age of 22, Dean was a teenage movie star known for his portrayal of moody loners in East of Eden and Rebel Without A Cause. He was killed in a car accident while driving to an auto race with friends in CA, on a break from filming his last movie Giant with Elizabeth Taylor. He became larger than life after his death, sticking in our collective memories as a true rebel, without a cause.

Nancy Walker played the overbearing Jewish mother Ida Morgenstern on the Mary Tyler Moore Show, and then in its spin-off, Rhoda. Lorelai mentions Rhoda in Season 6, Episode 19 at Lane’s wedding where Rory accuses Lorelai of deleting every picture she takes of Lorelai, to which Lorelai replies “No, only the ones where I look like Rhoda.” You be the judge…

CASHIER: Oh, you girls having another movie night? LORELAI: Yeah…It’s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.

A true classic! The 1971 film was based on the 1964 novel by Roald Dahl, called Charlie & the Chocolate Factory. The story follows a boy named Charlie who finds one of Wonka’s Golden Tickets and wins a tour of his candy factory with 4 other children. Turns out the crazy candy man wants to find an heir to his company and plays a bunch of tricks on the kids to get them to expose their weaknesses. Charlie, being poor and polite, outlasts the other kids and after a very dramatic overreaction by Wonka about some burping, he gets the company and a ride in a flying glass elevator! There’s also Oompa Loompas, some surrealist imagery, and a lot of singing. Gene Wilder plays the titular character, in his most perfect role IMO. You may have heard this before, but it was Wilder’s idea to have Wonka walk out with a cane but then stick it in the bricks and do a somersault to the kids. He said “from that time on, no one will know if I’m lying or telling the truth”. Literally iconic!

RORY: You’re like a crazy Elsa Klensch.

Elsa Klensch is a style editor/critic who had her own show on CNN from 1980 to 2001 called Style with Elsa Klensch. It makes sense that Rory would know Elsa since she was on the same network as her idol, Christiane Amanpour. Australian-born, she got her start as a news journalist before going to work for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Her show on CNN was the first U.S. tv show to exclusively cover fashion and style, and she traveled all over the world to show fashion from the major capitals.

LORELAI: Maybe he’s just late, Miss German train.

This one isn’t really pop culture, but it is a widely held perception about the punctuality of German trains. For many years, the Deutsche Bahn who operates trains across the country reported 95% on-time trains. Ironically, Germany has been experiencing many problems with its train system in recent years – from strikes to unexpected delays and cancellations. In 2018, the on-time rate was only 30%. Yikes! I traveled through Germany last year by train and found them to be very efficient, though. If you aren’t up on the platform a few minutes early, you could miss it!

BABETTE: And that Chuck Heston chin of his. Is he Rory’s boyfriend?

Ahh Charlton Heston, I don’t see him as Babette’s type. He was an actor and political activist for the Republican party and the NRA. He’s mostly known for his roles in epic biblical films like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur. He did have a great chin, though.

DEAN: How much does it suck that they used ‘Pink Moon’ in a Volkswagen commercial?

Pink Moon is the title track from Nick Drake’s third and final album. Drake passed away in 1974, but the song mysteriously made it into the 1999 VW Cabriolet commercial – the first to ever appear on the internet. Love it or hate it, it was that commercial that really catapulted Drake to stardom posthumously. Being the Napster era, people all across the country were downloading his music and listening to his back catalog, finally giving him the audience he deserved.

DEAN: Ooh, Prince Charming, huh? RORY: It was a long time ago. And not the Cinderella one, the Sleeping Beauty one.

Agreed, the Sleeping Beauty one is wayyy better than the boring Cinderella one. He has no personality in Cinderella! But neither one is actually called Prince Charming. It’s “The Prince” in Cinderella and Prince Philip in Sleeping Beauty. Prince Charming is more of a catchall term for any character in a fairy tale who comes to rescue a damsel in distress. The first usage of the term is in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, where Dorian is supposed to be a young woman’s “Prince Charming” but he abandons her instead.

RORY: The theme from Ice Castles makes you cry.

This 1978 romantic film is about a young figure skater who rises to stardom but suffers a freak accident and loses her sight. She is encouraged by her boyfriend Nick, who helps her get back out on the ice again. The theme “Through the Eyes of Love” was nominated for an Oscar and was performed at the 1980 Academy Awards. The theme was sung by Melissa Manchester whose previous hit was “Don’t Cry Out Loud” – one of the depressing songs Sookie wants to walk down the aisle to in S2 E22.

LORELAI: Oh I’ve got one. At the end of The Way We Were, you wanted Robert Redford to dump his wife and kid for Barbra Streisand.

The Way We Were is one of the Gilmore’s most beloved references and movie marathon staples. Released in 1973, it stars Barbra Streisand as Katie Morosky and Robert Redford at Hubbell Gardiner in a story about two college friends with extremely different worldviews, who fall in love then fall apart. She’s a political activist for anti-war and Marxist causes, while he is apathetic and surrounds himself with crude friends. Katie believes Hubbell could be a novelist but he choose a lucrative but uncreative job as a screenwriter. He eventually gets blacklisted during McCarthy-era Holywood because of Katie’s activism. Katie becomes pregnant but Hubbell cheats on her and leaves Katie after she gives birth. In the end, they bump into each other on the street, comfortable in their own lives as Katie is still handing out anti-war fliers on the street and Hubbell is with his pretty new wife. He asks about their daughter, and you can tell he hasn’t been in her life at all and doesn’t plan to be in the future. It’s kind of like the end of The Break-Up, except super depressing.

But seriously, it’s a major Gilmore reference. After her breakup with Luke in S5 E14, Lorelai leaves a rambling message for him about wanting to have her best friend back, like Katie asked Hubbell. And in S5 E9, when Rory is mad at Christopher for showing up to lunch after she asked him to stay away, Lorelai relays the situation to Sookie saying it was like the first time Rory watched The Way We Were and she was incensed that Hubbell would leave Katie and their baby after everything she had done for him.

DEAN: I don’t know… Boogie Nights, maybe. RORY: You’ll never get that past Lorelai. DEAN: Not a Marky Mark fan? RORY: She had a bad reaction to Magnolia.

Boogie Nights is a 1997 film by well-known director Paul Thomas Anderson, who also directed Magnolia. Boogie Nights stars Mark Wahlberg, a.k.a. Marky Mark from New Kids on the Block, as a nightclub dishwasher-turned-porn star in the 1970s named Dirk Diggler. Mark Wahlberg certainly made the successful turn from boy band to serious actor, acting in 50 movies since 1993 and serving as director and producer in many others. He was even nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Departed. So it wasn’t Marky Mark that Lorelai has a problem with, it’s Paul Thomas Anderson. His third film Magnolia was released in 1999 and is an ensemble piece about intersecting lives in the San Fernando Valley of LA. It’s generally regarded as an ambitious undertaking by Anderson but maybe a tad melodramatic. Given that Lorelai loves sweeping epics like The Way We Were and A Star is Born, I’m surprised she doesn’t like Magnolia.