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In ‘Those Are Strings, Pinocchio‘, Rory is made valedictorian of Chilton (not Paris) and has to give a speech. And what a speech!!
Here’s the transcript of Rory’s Valedictorian Speech:
Headmaster Charleston, faculty members, fellow students, family and friends, welcome. We never thought this day would come. We prayed for its quick delivery, crossed days off our calendars, counted hours, minutes, and seconds, and now that it’s here, I’m sorry it is because it means leaving friends who inspire me and teachers who have been my mentors – so many people who have shaped my life and my fellow students’ lives impermeably and forever. I live in two worlds. One is a world of books. I’ve been a resident of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, hunted the white whale aboard the Pequod, fought alongside Napoleon, sailed a raft with Huck and Jim, committed absurdities with Ignatius J. Reilly, rode a sad train with Anna Karenina, and strolled down Swann’s Way. It’s a rewarding world, but my second one is by far superior. My second one is populated with characters slightly less eccentric but supremely real, made of flesh and bone, full of love, who are my ultimate inspiration for everything. Richard and Emily Gilmore are kind, decent, unfailingly generous people. They are my twin pillars without whom I could not stand. I am proud to be their grandchild. But my ultimate inspiration comes from my best friend, the dazzling woman from whom I received my name and my life’s blood, Lorelai Gilmore.
My mother never gave me any idea that I couldn’t do whatever I wanted to do or be whomever I wanted to be. She filled our house with love and fun and books and music, unflagging in her efforts to give me role models from Jane Austen to Eudora Welty to Patti Smith. As she guided me through these incredible eighteen years, I don’t know if she ever realized that the person I most wanted to be was her.
Thank you, Mom. You are my guidepost for everything.
As we prepare ourselves today to leave…
Did what Rory say reflect well on her life at Chilton? Was it an appropriate speech? What did you like or dislike about it? Do you think we missed a lot of the speech, since obviously it was meant to continue after the last sentence there.
Watch this episode of Gilmore Girls on TheWB.com here.
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272 days ago
I loved it. I thought it was very real and touching and I really thought it was something rory would say and that it stayed true to the character and the show. Also I cried like a baby…but so did Luke so.
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272 days ago
Definitely what was shown was meant to engage a Gilmore Girls viewer. Perhaps Rory spent a bit too much time talking about herself, her love of books, and her family than actually *graduating* – but it was really aimed as a tearjerking moment for fans. We’re supposed to assume that she did talk about academics and the future of her graduating class more offscreen. But if my high school valedictorian went on like that about herself, I’d be pretty annoyed.
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272 days ago
i thought it was perfect! i think she spent just the right amount of time talking about herself, because that wasn’t the end of her speech…she goes on to talk about the rest of the school and graduation, but didnt show that part to cut it down for time
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272 days ago
Of course it was moving, but I am always amazed how many people miss the most important line in it:
“I don’t know if she ever realized that the person I most wanted to be was her.”
This, of course, becomes on of the most unfinished themes with the Palladinos gone. There is so much of Lorelai to WANT to be like — her professionalism, her sense of humor, her energy, her love for life, her lack of pretense — but on a personal level, she is not a role model, and Rory may have fallen into one trap after another with boys because Lorelai is unwilling and unable to use her own life and a loving voice to try to stop Rory from her mistakes — she tries to act like a friend and blows up like a child and cannot get through to Rory when it comes to Jess, a married Dean, and Logan.
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272 days ago
I cried a little just reading it.
Remember Sookie and Lorelai trying not to cry and Luke telling them their fools and balling himself.
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272 days ago
I got the chills again just by reading it. I think Rory delivered a beautiful speech. It’s great she seized that opportunity to thank Lorelai and her grandparents. She doesn’t do it much (especially Emily and Richard who she treated like dirt in season 6 IMO), at least until her farewell speech in the series finale. It’s good she acknowledges everything they gave her.
Marie, Lorelai is certainly not perfect and I think that Rory is aware of her flaws, especially when it comes to relationships. I doesn’t help that sees her a model. After all, Lorelai can be very aspiring: she never gave up, she’s smart, she’s funny and she sacrificed a lot for her daughter. She deserved to be considered as a guidepost.
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272 days ago
I loved Rory’s graduation speech. It’s beautifully written and presented. I actually started crying in this scene which is really a first for me with any movie or TV show. I don’t think we missed that much. I think we heard the most important part. The rest was probably thanking the teachers etc.
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272 days ago
cry everytime
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272 days ago
Mac,
I’m not sure, but I think we said the same thing.
Lorelai is a role model as a professional woman, but also as a charming, funny person. Unfortunately, not looking up to Lorelai selectively, no matter how much she was aware of Lorelai’s problems, made things worse for Rory. It’s very clear in the early episodes Rory wants to be like Lorelai in her ability to flirt with boys, and some of that had an effect on her in other ways, it seems.
The bigger issue, though, is that when Rory needed Lorelai to shake Rory out of her own problems, she couldn’t do it, because Rory wanted Lorelai to be her friend (squeal and be happy like Lane that she slept with Dean). And Lorelai, as calm as she tried to be, couldn’t get past childish bickering with Rory over Rory’s refusal to listen to her.
A parent should have said over the Dean affair – “If you want to be mad at me and don’t want my opinion and say you don’t need to hear more from your mother on this, then be a real adult and ask yourself if you would want to be cheated on, or ask someone you respect on this more than me — ask Luke, Sookie, your Grandfather, your Grandmother, Miss Patty, Reverend Skinner — anyone other than me. I think you know what they’ll say, and how you’d feel if your husband was cheating on you.”
Instead, she wanted Rory to listen to her and be like her, and Rory wouldn’t listen to her for the same reason.
That doesn’t mean Lorelai isn’t a role model in other ways, as I said before. It just failed Rory horribly here.
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272 days ago
I love her speech! It’s so sweet, and I cry each time I watch it (I’ve seen it a lot!) I love how she sticks her tongue out with Lorelai when she gets her diploma. There’s a group of people at my school who love Gilmore Girls, and when we graduate in 2 years we’re going to do it, too!
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272 days ago
I absolutely love that speech! It never fails to make me or my mom cry. So well written & delivered. One of my favortie episodes, although I probably say that about every episode. It does frustrate me too when Lorelai passes up the chance to really be a parent to Rory when Rory makes bad decisions about guys, from helping Dean cheat on his wife, to letting Jess treat her like crap, to dating a guy like Logan who used to be everything she loathed in a person. Logan always reminded me of Tristan from Chilton! Yuck. But maybe along with everything great Lorelai passed on to Rory, she also passed on issues with men. Maybe they were destined to learn certain things at the same time. Anyway, I love “Gilmore Girls” & I always will! I’m still hoping for a movie some day to wrap up some loose ends. I still wanna see a Luke & Lorelai wedding & what Rory’s doing in the future & who she ends up with! =)
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272 days ago
A wonderful opening act to what I’m sure was an amazingly comprehensive speech and a borderline tearjerker for me as well. However, my favorite moment came later when the girls took a minute or two while alone to reflect on just what had been accomplished over the last three years as they bade adeau to the hallowed halls of Chilton which they had so successfully cut down to size.
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272 days ago
I absolutely loved her speech. I totally remember hearing that speech for the first time after having watched every episode leading up to that and thinking how very right it was. It was right at that moment in her life. I loved what she said about Lor so much. The way she spoke of her and her growing up is how I’d love my kids to describe my parenting one day.
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271 days ago
I absolutely loved this speech. It makes me cry every time I hear it. It’s so well written and emphasises how she feels about Lorelai. Also I loved the references to Emily and Richard because it showed how much they meant to her as well. Absolutely brilliant.
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270 days ago
In the passage in question, Rory’s Graduation Speech, Gilmore Girls series, season three episode twenty two, the author, probably Amy Sherman, emphasizes the role of her protagonist as a representative of the American system of education. Rory represents all the aspirations of thousands of young students throughout the country. But, as the title ironically suggests: “Those Are Strings, Pinocchio”, the educational system may also have transformed an intelligent mind, eager to learn, to a kind of Pinocchio that will henceforth be constrained to follow the intricate web system that constitutes the American society as already suggest by Whitman in one of his poem. This intricate web, where Richard is so at ease, but were so many students, like Pinocchio, are articulated according to the strings represented by all the fiction they had already read. It’s not a hazard that one book listed in Rory’s reading is “The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand where you can read Roack saying to Peter: “Until they had killed anything in you”. Which means, kill the capacity of thinking by yourself, to create by yourself, and not according to the ideas of others, as suggested also by Thoreau, or Emerson, not mentioned her…
That is what AS has already done with a sharp eye for realistic details through the past seasons. A kind of conclusion here that emphasizes what can happen when a brilliant mind is metamorphosed into an articulated Pinocchio.
This discourse is also a critic of women condition in the American Society. Like the title or metaphors evoked in this discourse, American women condition is still well ridden with Victorian principles, where a woman is still nothing without the rights strings of a right web. We are very far away from Lorelai’s rebellion, who, like Magy, in the Mill on the Floss, she rejected all social conventions in order to live her own life. We are more rooted than ever in a world full of conventions where a woman is still nothing without a husband, without a trousseau, without social reconnaissance in other words.
In this discourse, Rory is more like Chaterine Morland in Northanger Abbey, able to quote the right conventional passages that all good students or even more, socially accepted students are expected to quote.
A close analysis of this passage should take into account a number of different elements. It is made already clear in GG that society continues to judge according to the appearance. Rory knows how to conform herself to those rules, and even more, this discourse implies her willingness to conform to them all from then on. This theme, is the central idea of her discourse. The second point would be to remember how much GG is ridden with cultural references, for instance the Frontier. Is Rory going to be a pioneer or simply, perhaps, like the modern American society, a student that has lost some of its identity and capacity of adventure? Perhaps an answer is given in her last sentence: “Thank you, Mom. You are my guidepost for everything”, which seem to imply that Rory is willing to be a dreamer, eager to go to the conquest of some new world… That could be true if, somehow, Lorelai hadn’t already given up some of her free spirit?
Remarque: Apart the attempt of doing a kind of commentary here, I still see GG as a lovely piece of art, and as every piece of art, it is still a kind of “Song of Innocence”
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