Gilligan's Island

Gilligan, the Natural Man

86 Gilligan’s Island the role of Randolph Blake. In turn, each of the castaways confronts Blake as they did the night of the murder. As the last of them, Ginger, runs out of the room shouting, “I hate you,” Gilligan slams the door, triggering the firing of the spear gun. The Skipper concludes that the death of Blake must have been an accident. In the episode’s coda, the radio reports the exact findings that the castaways discovered through their performances. The slamming of a door triggered the accidental firing of the spear gun, thus clearing all the castaways of murder charges. Gilligan is so happy that their performance worked out the solution just like the police did, he causes the spear gun to fire again, severing the rope holding up the Skipper’s hammock, causing the boat captain to comically flop onto the floor. Gilligan, the Natural Man Performance and natural history studies converge in an analysis of the episode “Beauty Is as Beauty Does” (season 2, episode 38, September 23, 1965) in which Gilligan’s forward thinking derails a misguided beauty contest between the island’s three women, Ginger, Mary Ann, and Mrs. Howell. The episode begins with the Skipper, Mr. Howell, and the Professor arguing over who is the most beautiful woman on the island. They decide to hold a beauty contest, with Gilligan as the judge. In the meantime, Gilligan befriends Gladys the ape, despite her annoying antics: she wears his hat, and she steals his banana just as he is about to eat it. However, as the human tensions increase, with each male castaway lobbying for his favorite female , Gilligan finds a much-needed confidant in Gladys. Gilligan laments to her, “The friendly little beauty contest [has turned out to be] as friendly as World War II.” At the end of the episode, Gilligan decides on the winner of the Miss Castaway 01 Metz text.indd 86 1/20/12 12:00 PM 87 Gilligan, the Natural Man Contest: Gladys, because, as Gilligan explains, she is the only one born on the island. In their defense of The Andy Griffith Show (CBS, 1960–68) for The Sitcom Reader, John O’Leary and Rick Worland argue that the “Idiot Sitcom” era, which Brooks and Marsh date from the early to late 1950s . . . featured gimmicks to drive the comedy in which the characters are cartoonish and plots are “restricted to farce” (Marc, Demographic Vistas, 56). Shows such as . . . Gilligan’s Island . . . would seem to affirm Brooks and Marsh’s derisive designation. Rather than being built on gimmicks, however, The Andy Griffith Show harkens back to the affectionate and incisive rural humor identified with Mark Twain and Will Rogers. (76) Conversely, I argue that it is precisely Gilligan’s Island’s retreat into the abstract natural primitive—Gilligan is an American Adam, to return to R. W. B. Lewis’s foundational American studies formulation—that allows the show to indict nostalgic formulations of the American rural. Gilligan’s Island serves as a most unexpected solution to C. P. Snow’s problem of the two cultures (science and the humanities ): it is a show that engages key questions about the scientific relationship between humans and animals and does so with aesthetic and narrative virtuosity. Jane R. Goodall’s book Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order (2002) resonates closely with the representation of the natural world in Gilligan’s Island. Profoundly transcending Snow’s two cultures, Goodall argues that nineteenth-century ideas of human evolution found complementary expression in Darwinian science and P. T. Barnum’s theatrical performance. Early in the book, Goodall studies the appearance of apes and humans on the stage together in the nineteenth century. Good01 Metz text.indd 87 1/20/12 12:00 PM 88 Gilligan’s Island all’s most compelling textual analysis concerns the 1825 French pantomime play, Jocko; or, The Brazilian Ape. Goodall argues: Two hands reach for each other, their index fingers almost touching but not quite, so that the space between them recalls for a moment the gap between the outstretched fingers of God and Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel . . . . The hands are those of a child and a monkey, two dancing figures depicted in their parallel roles in the sentimental drama. . . . Their pas de deux is choreographed as a sequence of mirror images: the child prays...