new year, new us
a rumination on new years that's actually a rumination on gilmore girls
i love new year’s eve. put aside, for a moment, the scramble for plans, the coordination of ubers—you dress up in your most garish, glittery outfit to reckon with the march of time! that’s beautiful! i love the strange atemporality of a new year’s eve party, the nostalgia of champagne and auld lang syne laced with the future tense of anticipation. i love, more than anything, the countdown: our collective agreement to believe, for ten seconds a year, that the future is good.
i hate new year’s day. i’ve never done well with comedowns. the champagne sours into a headache, the thrill of possibility curdles into dread. the year stretches before you, blank squares on a calendar, expectations and anxieties and disappointments lying in wait.
the internet is rife with tips for avoiding the future. you can spend hours on r/30PlusSkinCare, discovering new problems with your pores and enlightening yourself on tretinoin, retinol, botox, juviderm. (some reddit commenter recently wrote that anti-aging was the new weight loss discourse, and while that’s maybe another conversation, i thought it was interesting.) you can scroll back in any of your social media feeds and wallow in how much funnier you were two years ago. you’ve probably seen the online discourse around the year of the girl and the question of regression—when we lean into barbie and bows, are we self-infantilizing as a rejection of girlboss politics? as submission to the male gaze? any which way, you could argue it’s been a big year for backsliding.
lately, i’ve binged almost the entirety of gilmore girls. i’d never seen it before, and it seemed as worthy a regression show as any—and it was! it’s just as quick-witted as everyone says, and so much weirder. delightfully bizarre choices abound, from casting (sherilyn fenn, who you may remember as audrey horne from twin peaks, is cast as two different characters in the series and no one talks about it) to editing (it’s hard to explain, but what is shown and what is not shown is super odd to me—they’ll be like, “i’m so excited for the party but i’m nervous about my big speech” and then the next scene they’re like, “i’m so glad my speech went well. also i’m glad we resolved that big argument. anyway!” like?? after all that build-up, why didn’t we see the party?!) to sound design (my husband pointed out that many scenes have no music or score beneath the dialogue, which is unusual for a sitcom and has this unsettling stage drama effect). also, we can’t get over how every surface in sookie’s kitchen is covered in feasts that wouldn’t be out of place in daisies. does star’s hollow not have a health inspector? where does anyone chop? i know that the entire show is supposed to be idyllic small town porn, but something about the abundance of unrefrigerated food is so lavish and perverse, i can’t stop thinking about it.
in gilmore girls, one of rory’s friends throws a 2002-themed party. my husband and i joked about having a 2019-themed party, and i was filled with so much sadness. 2020 was rife with horrors, but the thing that really kept me in bed all day was the possibility that we would adapt. that this would be normal. and it was. immersed in grief, people in my dreams started to wear masks, like how you dream in french after enough classes. it’s a sign of fluency. and now, days from 2024, we’re operating in the brave new world with minimal meltdowns. we’re paying our car registrations and buying vitamin c serum and chit chatting about the newest strain. we speak the language.
the thing, though—the terrible, beautiful thing—is that we can’t go back. watching gilmore girls in late 2023, i see a town of lovable weirdos, but i also see that lorelai’s happy-go-lucky freedom is selfish and sad and self-destructive. rory is clever and kind-hearted, but loses herself to terrible relationships over and over again. it’s an aggressively white and heteronormative show—in an early season, they even say that Michel dates women, which come on—but gilmore girls’ jaunty third-wave feminism feels especially disturbing. in the final seasons, i’m particularly horrified by the storylines of lane and sookie: after a single horrible sexual experience, lane finds herself pregnant with twins and has to closet her drum kit to make way for the cribs. after insisting that she’s done having children, sookie’s husband lies about getting a vasectomy and so she, too, finds herself unexpectedly pregnant. it’s not surprising that gilmore girls wasn’t ready to tackle abortion—a relatively contemporaneous episode of degrassi portraying abortion was initially banned from american television, and finally aired two years after its initial release date—but it’s devastating to watch grief turn to acceptance for each woman over the course of a single episode. they are women with hopes and dreams whose futures have been leveled by unplanned (and, in sookie’s case, coerced) pregnancy, but don’t worry, babies smell good! they’ll get a party!
this is not at all to hate on gilmore girls or the people that love it. i love most of it, excluding the super sad pregnancy stuff! this is to acknowledge that i can’t watch gilmore girls as if i were watching it when it came out. gilmore girls has stayed the same, but it’ll never be 2006 again. for better or worse, we can’t eternal sunshine the past with a pink bow and a comfort show.
how strange, to see some marker of the past, the notch on the doorway, the distance between then and now. that empty, terrible feeling when we face the new year—is it some nauseating acknowledgement of how far we’ve already come? i don’t do well with comedowns, but i don’t do well with come-ups either—the eye of the needle, the anxiety before the rush of joy. could dread be the come-up to hope?
anyway: new year new me, whether i like it or not. if we must be burdened with knowledge, we should at least get some credit for it.
