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In ‘In the Clamor and the Clangor‘, Luke tells Lorelai that he’s moved in with Nicole, which distresses Lorelai. She deflects, saying she’s simply mad because he waited 3 weeks to tell her, and friends don’t do that. Lorelai complains about this to Sookie as well. Later, Luke is anything but apologetic. He gets mad at Lorelai for thinking everything is her business and for making him feel guilty when he “owes Lorelai” nothing.
Later, when the two “make up” a little in their desire to destroy the town bells, Lorelai is secretly pleased to discover that almost nothing has moved from Luke’s apartment. She stays quiet at first, but later does pass her judgement.
Lorelai: You watch her TV, you eat her food, you keep stuff in a duffel bag at her house… you’re a rude guest, not her boyfriend!
Luke: Husband.
Lorelai: Whole other discussion.
So, is Luke right to be mad at Lorelai about this? About Lorelai making his relationship with Nicole a “husband and wife and Lorelai” situation? Or is he mad because Lorelai has valid points?
Of course, all of this could have been resolved if the Reverend hadn’t walked in on the argument, perhaps, interrupting Lorelai from having to answer why she cares and why she doesn’t want Luke to move. *sigh* Well, at least perhaps Lorelai discovered something about her own feelings here…
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247 days ago
The short answer to the question is (1) yes, Luke is right to be mad at her just because she’s completely crosses lines here, and (2) Lorelai’s feelings for Luke a clearly a mess, so it’s hard to know if she admits how messed up they are.
Lorelai admitted her “feelings” to Emily way back in season 1, and there’s probably no more that can be said than that except that they’re feelings. As a child of a single mom, I know how hard it was for my mom to date, so this is entirely credible as her primary dilemma. She lives in a small town, and Luke is the only guy she sees on a regular basis she’s attracted to. And he cares for her in such a giving way (at least for the first three seasons) she knows he’s an ideal mate for her in many ways.
But I never bought the idea that Lorelai is “in love” with Luke and just didn’t know it. I’ve never known anyone who’s that clueless about their own emotions, and if they are, I’d highly recommend serious therapy. If it were true, we should have AT LEAST had a scene where she admits her feelings to Rory or to herself (as she says to Rory about Christopher, and admits she doesn’t have those feelings about Max), but she completely denies it over and over. The only time she tells Luke she loves him (other than proposing to him), is to scream it at him.
This is the only credible explanation for her conflict, in my mind. She “loves” him as one of her closest friends who she’s also sexually attracted to, and she’s holding him in reserve as “the kind of guy she should be with if only he’d step up” – and once he romances her (temporarily) she believes it – but at this point he’s not only married but taking it seriously, so she becomes possessive and panics that she’ll lose her biggest fan that everyone has told her loves her and has always been around to take care of her.
I never had more respect for Luke than when he went back to Lorelai’s house and told her off. Of course, I lost that respect for him after the horrible way he treated Nicole, but that’s a later episode. The way Lorelai demands to know information, digs into his privacy, and ridicules his marriage and his own decisions and feelings about his marriage is so off the charts she looks worse than Emily ever did – controlling does not begin to describe it. Everything he said to her is dead on.
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247 days ago
This is such an odd picture — for this episode and blog entry? So funny! And Lauren Graham looks so uncomfortable!
To Josh, I am of two minds about this. I agree in this instance that Luke is right to be angry by the intrusion of Lorelai’s comments and questions and he did not deserve to be treated this way.
But if we are to believe that the writing was saying that Luke was in love with Lorelai — and I think this is clear from Patterson’s performance as well — Luke’s inability to articulate his feelings played a role here. His pining made his feelings so clear to the entire town that Lorelai knew it, and it was clearly was frustrating to her, especially to the extent he flirted with her, then mocked her dates and engagements, never made a move when she was single, and then married Nicole, expressed regret about it, then seemed to be acquiescing to it, and so on. Because he married by surprise, she probably felt she had lost her chance to confront him about his feelings and it all came out badly. As with Christopher, she waited until Luke was serious about someone else before she stopped pushing away.
This does not justify her behavior here, and I agree her not really being in love with him is one explanation for it, but given the role she assigned to Luke — her protector — her expectation was also a very antiquated, a regressive expectation that “the man” say something, even though she knows she’s the better talker and she knows he has a hard time expressing his feelings.
It is interesting to compare the Luke-Lorelai relationship with Rory and her three boyfriends. All three boys seem more mature than Luke and able to express their interest in Rory. And in all three cases when Rory felt nervous about going forward, she was still able to tell Dean she was interested, she kissed Jess and went to New York to give him clues about her interest (despite the later struggle there), and she directly and beautifully asked Logan if he was ever going to ask her out, eventually making the first move to ask him to be with her.
At the end of this episode, however, I thought only that Luke and Lorelai deserved each other, and if they ended up together, were destined to have an explosive relationship that would not end well. And so it seems….
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242 days ago
I kind of agree and disagree with both of those comments, i think that Lorelai did always love luke and she sort of knew that he liked her back because of the whole town basically telling her, but i dont think that she was entirely sure of her feeling towards him until he told her about his marriage to Nicole. I think that once she found out that Luke had got married and moved house she was more sure about the way she felt for him and all of those feeling just came out when they argued.
I disagree with the part where you both said that Lorelai was never in love with Luke because you could always tell that whenever Lorelai got serious with somebody (Christopher or Max) that she was always rethinking her relationship with them because of her mixed emotions towards Luke.
I do agree with the part about Luke having a right to get pissed off with Lorelai for reacting the way that she did but he also should of told Lorelai about him moving house as they have always been such close friends. Even during season 7 after they broke up they both still shared the good and bad news in there life. However i think that Luke didnt tell Lorelai about him moving because he was still unsure about his marriage to Nicole and he still had feelings for Lorelai.
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241 days ago
@ Zoe,
I totally believe everyone has their right to see art or a story in a way that relates to them, and people can believe Lorelai was “in love” with Luke.
But my point is the script and storyline doesn’t back that up. It’s clear she loves Luke as friend, all around sexy guy, and someone who generally has cared for her and taken care of her. Even if it weren’t storybook perfect, you can see why as a person she would come to love him as a best friend and be attracted to him at the same time. That’s a lot.
But soul-stirring, longing for him? It doesn’t add up.
First, I’ve never known anyone in reality who is in such denial that they’re in love with someone, unless there’s a major psychological block to it. And Lorelai never admits it, never says it. It’s always a “maybe” and she knows she has “feelings” for him, but that’s it. She says she loves Christopher to Rory, but never tells Rory any of this.
And what Amy has Lorelai do at the end of Season 6 makes no sense if she was “in love” with him. You don’t do that to someone you care about more than anyone in the world. Luke did nothing to deserve her sleeping with Christopher and breaking up with her for delaying their wedding for his daughter when she did the same thing for her own daughter.
It’s a childish, selfish, fantasy image she assigned to Luke as “the man” – Marie gets this totally right – and when he stopped playing that role, she did something that can only be explained as deliberately hurtful to him (and Christopher) — sleeping with one to rub it in the other’s face — unless she had some connection to Christopher that was more powerful.
Neither one of those explanations shows that Luke is her true love. And one of those explanations makes Lorelai look unstable and cruel.
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