#luke and lorelai don't get married until she is too old to get pregnant by accident

[francesderwent]

Do you ever think Amy Sherman-Palladino hates the nuclear family as a concept? She seems to have this deep-seated inability to make the biological fathers in her shows redeemable or anything beyond a shallow symbol of failed family.

short answer?  yes.  I think ASP absolutely hates the nuclear family.

but, long answer, I don’t think it’s necessarily because of some kind of cynicism directly and immediately about fatherhood.  I think I’ve finally come to the conclusion that the root of the problem of Gilmore Girls is a deep and hidden ambivalence about children.  the only reason Lorelai’s relationship with Christopher is so complicated, after all, is because they share a child – otherwise Lorelai would be free to hook up with Christopher whenever he came to town without any real consequences, or else to forget him entirely because he wouldn’t come around at all and she could be free of him.  Luke would have been able to marry Lorelai if it weren’t for the fact that he suddenly had a kid.  we see it over and over again: the thing getting in the way of happy romances is children. the thing trapping people in unhappy romances is children.  

and more to the point, if it weren’t for Rory, Lorelai would have been able to escape Emily and Richard.  the theme of the show, according to ASP, is something like “you can never go home again, but also you can never escape”.  but Lorelai would have been able to escape – go to Stars Hollow and never come back to see her parents ever again, or travel around the country helping people with their inns, or live her life flitting around Europe – if she didn’t have Rory, if she didn’t have to pay for Rory’s schooling, if Rory didn’t consistently want to have a relationship with her grandparents.  it is children that bind us to the nuclear family – our own, but also our families of origin – and yeah, ASP does seem to view that as a bad thing, a legacy of hurt and resentment that carries on from mother to daughter to daughter inescapably.  and that indirectly explains the issue with fathers, and why I never feel like I’m reacting to ASP’s fathers the way she wants me to: because the fathers have the freedom and distance from their family that ASP seems to wish that mothers had, too.  Lorelai (and ASP) resents Christopher not because he didn’t marry her – because she didn’t want that – but because his life wasn’t wrecked by Rory, and hers was.  it’s easy for him to say he wants to marry her, because he has a choice in the matter of whether he settles down, and he’ll still be free even if they do, and Lorelai never got that choice.  Marvelous Mrs Maisel does a lot to clarify this; I haven’t seen s2-3, but from what I’ve gathered, Midge is abandoned by her husband, and then she becomes gloriously successful and dates Zachary Levi and just…ignores her children.  she gets to live like she’s a divorced man – live like she’s Christopher Hayden, actually.  and I think I’m supposed to see that as good and fun and admirable.

so it goes both ways – motherhood is awful because it ties women to their children’s flighty, useless fathers, and heterosexual romance is awful because it ties women to their husbands’ needy, useless children – and as long as we buy into that system, it also ties us to our own parents and our husbands’ parents, and we can never ever escape and be free.  all throughout the show, people are surprised and derailed by pregnancy and inconvenienced by it and afraid of it; nobody just…has a kid with someone they love, without being clearly pitied by the narrative (Sookie, Lane).  and there is never, ever anything like the scene in The Office when Jim and Pam discover they’re pregnant and they’re clearly and unambiguously happy.  because within the worldview of Gilmore Girls, having children, becoming a parent, is far from unambiguously good.