Gilligan's Island

Gilligan’s Island and Performativity

71 Gilligan’s Island and Performativity the lens and opening the door to the darkroom during processing , resulting in shots of Gilligan and Mary Ann in reverse image. The finale of the movie conveys no information to the viewer about their whereabouts: there are too many castaways in the image and the film’s spectator cannot see the map. The castaways all hate the movie. However, out of desperation, they seal it up tight and place it on a raft. In the episode’s coda, the radio reports that their film was discovered and is now beloved, especially the “blacked out” scenes. Film scholars think it is a lost Ingmar Bergman or Vittorio De Sica work. The announcer enthuses, “This ultra-modern version of Surrealism will bring back silent pictures.” In this way, Gilligan’s Island imports the traditions of international art cinema to popular American audiences in the most unlikely of vessels, the 1960s telefilm sitcom. Gilligan’s Island and Performativity These episodes about putting on a show (almost one-third of the entire run of the series, some thirty installments in all) serve as the innovative heart of Gilligan’s Island. From the Shakespeare show, “The Producer,” to the Broadway episodes (“Angel on the Island”) to the dream sequences that allowed the cast to take on new roles in parodies of High Noon (“The Sound of Quacking”), Dracula (“Up at Bat”), and Cinderella (“Lovey’s Secret Admirer”), Gilligan’s Island represented to America that the defining feature of its microcosm of characters was that they performed for one another, both for ill (trying to trick one another into getting what they want) and as testament to the best people can be (protecting one another from threatening interlopers). These impulses allow me to theoretically trap the show between two influential, yet different, theories of performativity. On the one hand, the show was made well after the publication of Erv01 Metz text.indd 71 1/20/12 12:00 PM 72 Gilligan’s Island ing Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), a crucial postwar sociological study of how and why people in professional and personal settings define their selves via what Goffman calls “theatrical performance.” The fact that the book’s research was based largely on Goffman’s dissertation about a different set of islanders, the subsistence farmers of the Shetland Islands, is a source of karmic delight. In the contemporary humanities, the most pervasive theories of the performative come from poststructural work, particularly that of Judith Butler. In her seminal work, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity—as well as her later studies, such as Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative —Butler intensifies the political implications of Goffman’s work, arguing that key identity positions, such as gender and sex, are performative. Of course, Gilligan’s Island was made well before poststructural theory, and I am not arguing that Sherwood Schwartz was reworking Goffman’s sociological understanding of human behavior. Instead, I want to forward the notion that American television can be profitably understood as a representation machine in which actors are presented to the public as models for who and how to be. The best theoretical models for understanding this phenomenon lie in both historical (Goffman) and contemporary (Butler) theoretical explorations of the nature of performance and identity. While many other sitcoms come more immediately to mind concerning performance (from I Love Lucy to Seinfeld), Gilligan’s Island is perhaps the most fertile because, while the show was not explicitly about performers, it ended up defining its seven castaways as exemplars of the lifestyle of radical performativity. In virtually every episode of Gilligan’s Island, performance is a central narrative concern. I will build a theoretical method for analyzing Gilligan’s Island as a show that foregrounds performativity as a central human trait. In many of the most beloved episodes , the castaways put on a show. This is the case with “The Producer” in which Harold Hecuba steals their idea of a musical 01 Metz text.indd 72 1/20/12 12:00 PM 73 Gilligan’s Island and Performativity version of Hamlet. As another example, “Angel on the Island” is the first of many such episodes in which the castaways put on a play on their makeshift stage made of bamboo and adorned with a curtain patched together out of rags. Even before the central plot of the...