Gilligan's Island

Studying Gilligan

13 Studying Gilligan with a fork, missing his food entirely. At another, Gilligan pours coconut milk all over the Skipper, missing his glass by a full 90 degrees. The comic turn is justified in the episode’s coda. It turns out the castaways never need the Minnow II. Gilligan brings in his lobster traps; he has been using the Professor’s measuring stick to gauge the depth of the water into which he places his traps. Since the lobster fishing yields have been declining, he has been moving the stick into deeper and deeper water. While Melville’s Moby-Dick is about the sinking of the Pequod as a result of Ahab’s mad mission that dooms his microcosm, Gilligan’s Island finds the American representatives safe and sound on terra firma. The sinking of Schwartz’s social microcosm is only dangled as a plot device but, within twenty-three minutes, is dismantled by the comic impulse. In these early forays into analyzing Gilligan’s Island, I have mixed with wild abandon two intertextual readings of the show, one claiming its relationship to absurdist comedy in Waiting for Godot and the other its Melvillean exploration of American cultural identity. The method for this book is built on the belief that the ninety-eight episodes of Gilligan’s Island, each in their own way, couple with a great diversity of texts in the Western tradition in such productive, intellectually stimulating ways. Studying Gilligan Whatever else it may be, Gilligan’s Island is one of the most ubiquitously comprehended references in American cultural history. An extended study via Google Books bears witness to this grandiose claim. The largest group of Gilligan’s Island hits in Google’s massive collection of scanned books is in novels: characters mention sitting around watching reruns of the sitcom , usually to express some form of self-loathing for their own time-wasting proclivities. For example, the narrator of Scott 01 Metz text.indd 13 1/20/12 12:00 PM 14 Gilligan’s Island Michael Gallagher’s novel Geneva (2007) writes: Long before I met Geneva, the nighttime had a dual aspect for me. Being an insomniac, many nights were filled with the horrors of restlessness—watching late night cable, with its surreal infomercials, I Dream of Jeannie or Gilligan’s Island reruns etc.—a maddening and torturous twilight zone of loneliness and frustration in which time took on the slow tick of suffering as my body begged for the relief of sleep while I channel surfed on the couch. (216) The other citations, in academic works, argue directly against this notion of the show as a complete waste of time, positioning Gilligan’s Island within a wide intellectual terrain. Priscilla Walton begins her study of cannibalism with reference to the show: “Like many other 1960s children, I saw my first ‘cannibal’ on television. As a regular viewer of the TV program Gilligan’s Island , each week I watched the trials of the protagonists, who were stranded on a desert island where they were periodically visited by cannibalistic headhunters” (1). In their communication textbook, Tony Schirato and Susan Yell use the show as their point of reference in order to explain ideology: From a Marxist perspective, everything that happens on the island can (more or less) be explained in terms of the actions of Mr. Howell and his capitalist operations. But as we have seen, there are many competing identities and ideologies on Gilligan’s Island. How can we make sense of this? Volosinov makes the point that economics is just one of a number of spheres we have to take into account. . . . The professor and Mr. Howell . . . are taking part in an ideological struggle involving different types of habitus, and therefore different values, goals and agendas. (79–80) 01 Metz text.indd 14 1/20/12 12:00 PM 15 Studying Gilligan Schirato and Yell use Gilligan’s Island in a similar way that I do in my classroom, as a cultural reference that one can be sure students know well. As a teacher, I believe that if we want students to grasp complicated analytical material, it is best to apply these methods, not to difficult high culture, but instead to texts with which they already have a significant familiarity. Despite the ubiquitous popular mastery of Gilligan’s Island —or perhaps precisely because of it—the show is the most ignored text in television...