Hey, guys. It's Chelsea from
The Financial Diet. And if you haven't
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super-amazing society at TFD and if you have seen the title
or the thumbnail of this video, which I don't know how you
wouldn't if you clicked on it, you already know
what time it is. And that is my
favorite time of all, dissecting pop culture
through a class slash economic slash
financial lens. We have already
talked about some of the greatest hits
in terms of torpedoing our healthy
relationship with money and class on this
channel, hits like Sex and the City and
Carrie Bradshaw's comically unrealistic life
or the phenomenon of The Real Housewives, which brought
us an entire baseball team's worth of scammers, including
Erica Jayne, who got her own video on the subject. But while those
targets are mostly culpable for going
above and beyond in the grotesque
aspiration and wealth they demonstrate, one of our
other big cultural touchstones for women of a
similar generation, i.e. myself, that doesn't
so much focus on aspiration but focuses on the very
legitimate and honestly sometimes confusing
portrayal of social class, and that's Gilmore Girls. Many of us who grew up
watching Gilmore Girls felt that it was giving us a
window into class dynamics that might prepare us
for the real world or make us a little
bit more aware of the various dynamics
going on under the surface when there are different
levels of money and power in a given relationship,
especially familial ones. But almost every lesson
that Gilmore Girls taught us about class was ultimately
extremely compromised, if not outright ridiculous. Now, Gilmore Girls
broached the topic of money in nearly every episode. And you could argue
that this puts it head and shoulders
above other similar shows because at least
it was addressing the financial elephant
in the room, as opposed to shows like Friends,
where we're just led to believe that struggling
actors and baristas are able to afford sprawling
apartments in Soho. But while money is
addressed on this show, considering that its entire
premise is about class differences, it's remarkable
just how completely tone deaf it was as both
a piece of writing, and as a broader
cultural phenomenon. So let's break it down
with the miseducation that Gilmore Girls gave
us about money and class. So let's just start
with the basics. Most working or
middle-class Americans don't have rich parents or
grandparents to fall back on. Gilmore Girls centers on
Lorelei Gilmore, a hotel manager in her 30s raising her
teenage daughter, Rory, in the quirky small town of
Stars Hollow, Connecticut. And in the show's
pilot episode, we learn that after
getting pregnant at 16, Lorelei ran away from
home after giving birth because she didn't want the
future that her parents had laid out for her, which
basically included marrying well and doing things properly. 16 years later,
Lorelei goes to visit her semi-estranged
parents, Richard and Emily, to ask for a favor. She can't afford the tuition
for the prestigious prep school that her daughter
Rory was accepted to, so she needs their
help paying for it. And because that kind
of money historically always has strings
attached to it, this is where the show's
central drama begins. Lorelei must resume
regular relationship with her parents in exchange for
covering Rory's tuition, which sends Rory into a stuffy prep
school, where the student body comes from a very,
very different background than her humble middle
slash working class roots. Now, in the context
of the show, we are supposed to see Lorelei
as a kind of noble protagonist because she left her
WASPy roots behind to live a life that was
more true to herself. But one of her defining
character traits on the show is how much she wants to
have her cake and eat it too. For example, she's constantly
miserable about having to go to her weekly Friday
night dinners with her family but more than happy to let
them float Rory's tuition or buy her a car
for her graduation because it also
benefited Lorelei. So even though so
many of her decisions are framed as brave
and independent, she ultimately makes them
because she knows and utilizes the fact that she has
something cushy financially to fall back on. For instance, near the
end of season three, just as Rory is graduating
from Chilton, her prep school, which, again, her
grandparents paid for, Lorelei's father gives
her some good news. Thanks to an investment that
he made in her name the day she was born, she now
has a check for $75,000 to do it as she wishes. We all love when that happens. Do you remember the first time
your father came up to you, and you were like,
here's a $75,000 check to have fun with because I
made a good investment when you were born. We love that. And almost immediately
Lorelei uses this money to pay her parents back
for the Chilton tuition, even though there were many
other more pressing expenses to address. It could have been put
toward Rory's now college tuition and the fact that
mother and daughter were about to embark on a
three-month tour across Europe. And her parents
are understandably upset about the way she
handles the situation, mostly because it represents an end to
the transactional and somewhat obligatory
relationship that they had because of their
funding of Rory's tuition. But if she was so
desperate to break off these ties from her parents,
which is the reasoning she gave her daughter for paying
it back in one lump sum, why would she not have
been saving and paying them all along? Why wait for this sudden
unexpected windfall to all of the sudden
care about breaking free? Also, why the [BLEEP]
are you going off to Europe for
three months if you owe all of this
money to your parents and your primary
motivation in life is not having to see
them on Friday nights? Show me the logic. And while Lorelei's
parents in this show are framed as the pinnacle
of WASPy, oblivious, tone deafness, they are far
from the only characters in the show who exhibit it. Throughout the series, it
is not difficult to see Richard and Emily's privilege. Emily's never
worked, for example. And there's an ongoing gag
throughout the series where she can't keep a
maid for very long because she
continually fires them for not being able to keep
up her impeccable standards. And the main reason for
Lorelei's estrangement from her parents was
that she felt stifled by the stuffy environment. She was giving big
Rose Dewitt Bukater. She was not trying to have
a life of polo matches and cotillions. As a side note-- and I might
actually do a video on Titanic at some point-- but I would have
married Colin, cheated on him. Be smart, girl. Secure the bag. But like in the
case of Rose, money was used as a tactic of control. But even if Lorelei
is framed as being more worldly and
cultured and aspiring to a more spiritually
rich life, she ultimately wants the same bougie
[BLEEP] her parents do. She wants an Ivy League
education for her daughter without the burden
of student loans and all of the opportunities
that it would afford her. And she ultimately falls
back on that privilege we all know and love in
order to secure those things. And that's one of
the things that's so frustrating about
Lorelei as a character. She left home at 16
and worked her way up from housekeeper at an
inn to the manager of it. So clearly she's aware that
an extremely elite education is not the only way
to succeed in life. But yet the extremely WASPy,
traditional, old-school paths of success are the
only one she ever considered for her daughter. This gives me extreme
vibes of in my hometown there was this extremely
expensive Montessori school that cost like, I'm
not kidding, almost $30,000 a year for high school. And all of the kids that
went there were very much like aspiring artists and
performers and directors and all of this stuff. And all of their
parents were, of course, like, doctors and lawyers
and executives and whatever. And around the college age,
they all sowed their wild oats. Like, they went and did
a bunch of crazy shit. Like, one of them was like
in a vaudeville improv group in New Orleans,
which is like should be banned under the Geneva
Conventions as torture. But they were all basically
out doing their crazy art house stuff in Bushwick, whatever. But eventually they all
went back into the fold. And the vast majority
of them, or at least the ones that I still
can see on social media, they all ended up just getting
normal legit high-paying jobs because if that's
where you come from, statistically chances are
that's where you'll end up. And yes, struggling the
beautiful struggle for a while feels really romantic
and sweet and bohemian. But ultimately, they just
want a nice apartment. And similarly, Lorelei's
issues with her upbringing almost always seemed about
her personal inconveniences and aesthetics less about
anything systemic or class based. Like, that girl
did not give a damn about the actual class
inequities perpetuated by things like the Ivy League. And Rory has certainly leaned
on her own privileged background when needed. In the aptly titled season five
episode "But I'm a Gilmore," Rory is beside herself that her
boyfriend Logan's parents don't think she's good
enough for him saying-- I mean, I'm a Gilmore. Do they know that? My ancestors came
over on the Mayflower. And let's not pretend that
all of their neighbors and various background
characters in the almost completely white
town of Stars Hollow don't have their own issues
with privilege and entitlement. For example, Taylor Doose,
the town selectman and leader of the weekly town
hall meetings, is a pretty damning portrayal
of a New England NIMBY. He turns up his nose at
all of the same things Richard and Emily wouldn't
want in their own neighborhood, from skateboarding
teens to permit-less streetcarts to disruptive
musicians in the town square. And while Lorelei and Rory
may, yes, have had some working class habits,
their lifestyle was nowhere near an accurate
portrayal of the working class. So yes, Lorelei and Rory's
lives do look different from the everyday lives
of Lorelei's parents. They take public transportation. They rarely travel. And Lorelei's putting herself
through business school a few nights a week while
working a full-time job. But their lives in
practice look radically different from working or even
most middle-class Americans. There's a running
joke on the show that both Lorelei and Rory
eat like complete crap, to the point where
Lorelei thinks that she must be pregnant
when she randomly craves fresh fruit. And yet they have seemingly
endless metabolisms. The amount of pizza, junk
food, and takeout they eat is portrayed as a cute
quirk, thanks to them both having sample
size physiques. However, while other
characters often acknowledge the
disconnect between their physical appearance
and the way they eat, to a point that could
honestly be considered kind of problematic, no
one ever acknowledges that their food
buying habits simply do not make sense for two people
in a middle-class single-parent household. They eat at the same diner
almost every single morning for breakfast, often
also for dinner. And they almost every
day order takeout. Like, [BLEEP] cut out on
the Chinese a couple of days a week. There's your
tuition right there. You don't need to go
back to your parents. Additionally,
because this is just like the golden
rule of sitcom TV, their quirky little
houses apparently worth an estimated $2.8 million
in today's market, which begs the question, similar
to Carrie Bradshaw, how in the world is Lorelei
paying her mortgage? According to a Time
article from 2015, at the beginning of
the series, Lorelei works as the manager of the inn. According to PayScale,
the average salary for an inn manager was $51,564. When we first meet
Lorelei, she has been employed at
the Independence Inn for at least 15 years,
starting as a maid at 16 and working her way
up the food chain. While it isn't clear exactly
when she became the boss, we can assume that with well
over a decade of experience, her salary was closer
to $62,000, which is the average for an
experienced manager. So let's say Lorelei
was able to save her pennies while living at
the Independence Inn rent free for 11 years. And let's further
say that she was able to snag a jumbo
mortgage with the most generous down payment
requirement of 15%. Even then, that is 420-- blaze-- thousand
dollars down, to say nothing of closing costs,
which would also be jumbo. And yes, there is a chance
that her salary was much more generous than the median. But that's still ain't getting
her anywhere near a $2 million home. And even beyond Lorelei's
wealthy parents, money problems on the
show are almost always deus ex machina-ed away. Like so many other
shows centered around privileged white women-- Sex and the City-- money
problems on the show are often solved with an
improbable one-time fix. That conveniently leaves
the main characters not ever having to confront
their own habits or what might have put
them in that situation in the first place. Now, most of these do come
from the elder Gilmores. When Lorelei can't
qualify for a loan to fix termite damage in
her house, yet more evidence that she definitely wouldn't
be able to afford that house's mortgage, her mom
co-signs a loan with her. And one of the biggest
examples came in season four when Lorelei needed money
to finish renovation on construction on
the inn because she and her business partner,
Sookie, have run out of funds to pay their contractors. So after breaking down to
her friend and future love interest, Luke, the
owner of Luke's Diner, Luke ultimately lends
her the remaining $30,000 she needs with basically
no strings attached. But the worst offender
in the series, though, came in the four-part 2016
Netflix reboot titled Gilmore Girls-- A Year in the Life. Now, similar to the Sex and
the City movies, it's up to you whether you consider
this canon or not. I don't, but you do you. After spending the
entire mini series flailing about
unsuccessfully, having all of her articles killed in
progress or flat out rejected, and making zero money, now
freelance journalist Rory has a brilliant idea
to get back on her feet professionally and
financially, which is writing a memoir about
her use titled Gilmore Girls. Now, first of all, it is
beyond unrealistic to expect the advance on a debut memoir
from a completely unknown writer to pay the equivalent
of an actual year's salary. I can talk all frickin'
day about book advances. But let me tell
you, first of all, they're not much to begin with. Second of all, they
come in installments. You only get a little
bit on signing. And third of all,
you often don't even get the actual rest of it
until years after the fact, depending on how long it
takes you to write the book. But the even more frustrating
thing about this situation is that while Rory spends 90%
of the mini series complaining about these money problems,
they appear to all but disappear as soon as she's focusing
on this new project, even though the project
hasn't even sold yet. As TFD contributor Shannon
Luders-Manuel put it, "I'm left a bit disappointed
with this ending, as it seems to provide
false hope to those of us who are struggling to
make a living as a writer. I'm all for Rory
completing a manuscript, and it helps give me
the continued drive to complete my own. But my bills are still
there, seemingly endless, while Rory's have
just left the screen." Now, listen, we all have
our problematic faves. And we can still
love Gilmore Girls for its quirky adorkable
pop culture reference-laden portrayal of a quiet
New England town. But if we're looking
for an accurate depiction of the
working or middle class, especially for being a show
that prides itself on giving us that, it is a big old fail. And as always, guys,
thank you for watching. And don't forget to hit
the Subscribe button and to come back every
Monday, Tuesday and Thursday for new and awesome videos. Goodbye.
