Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Apparently, the Desert Island cartoon meme is inexhaustible; the New Yorker seems to have one in almost every issue. In the current, 9/20, issue, Maddie Dai gives us an odd couple whiling away the time on their island performing episodes of the tv show The Gilmore Girls. Until…

(#1)

Dai’s DI has some unusual features. Its tiny terrain is hilly; its sand has been shaped into a chair for one DIer to sit in (while watching his companion’s miming of Lorelai and Rory in the frame of the island’s faux-tv); the two shipwrecked DIers are an interracial couple; the island has not just the usual single palm tree, but an intimate pair of them. (The remote is a fine extra touch.)

As I’ve remarked earlier on this blog, the DI form allows a cartoonist to strip some rich real-world gag down to its essentials and make it pointed — but also deeply absurd by virtue of its being located on a nearly featureless DI.

In this case, Dai gives us what could have been a wry William Haefeli cartoon on the lives of urban gay men: a couple of Gilmore Girls enthusiasts playing at animating Lorelai and Rory in their New York apartment — with the watcher no doubt providing running commentary on the performer.

Not, I think, realized as a real Haefeli. Still, it would be in the spirit of this 12/26/05 New Yorker cartoon of his —

(#2)

— but without a whiff of the raw man-on-man sex that comes with the Brokeback Mountain characters.

On the (dramatically very complex) show, of which I was a great fan, from Wikipedia:

Gilmore Girls is an American comedy-drama television series created by Amy Sherman-Palladino and starring Lauren Graham (Lorelai Gilmore) and Alexis Bledel (Rory Gilmore). The show debuted on October 5, 2000, on The WB and became a flagship series for the network. Gilmore Girls ran for seven seasons, the final season moving to The CW and ending its run on May 15, 2007.

… Gilmore Girls received critical acclaim for its witty dialogue, cross-generational appeal, and effective mix of humor and drama.

… [Premise] The series has two protagonists: witty “thirty-something” mother Lorelai Gilmore and her intellectual teenage daughter Rory (short for Lorelai). Their backstory is established early in the show: Lorelai grew up in Hartford with her old money parents, Richard and Emily, but always felt stifled in this environment. After Lorelai became pregnant with Rory at 16, by her childhood boyfriend Christopher Hayden, her feelings of familial alienation increased. This eventually motivated her to take one-year-old Rory away to a close-knit town named Stars Hollow. Lorelai found work and shelter at the Independence Inn as a maid, eventually working her way up to executive manager. Over the years, Lorelai and Rory develop a very close relationship, living like best friends rather than as typical mother-daughter. Lorelai is proud of the independent life she has forged away from her parents. In the pilot episode, however, she is forced to go to them for financial aid after Rory is admitted to Chilton Preparatory School, because she cannot afford the tuition fees. Emily and Richard agree to provide a loan, so long as Lorelai and Rory join them every Friday night for dinner. This sets up one of the show’s primary, ongoing conflicts: the Gilmore family is forced to face their differences and complicated past, their interactions fueled by these weekly Friday night dinners together. The contrasting mother-daughter relationships of Emily–Lorelai and Lorelai–Rory become a defining theme of the show and a lens through which many of the female relationships are viewed.

There’s a big supporting set of male characters too, variously hunky, sweet, or cute. Plus female friends of Lorelai’s and Rory’s.

This entry was posted on September 19, 2021 at 4:43 pm and is filed under Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.