There is no show more confusing than Gilligan’s Island. Having read Lord of the Flies and dozens of studies on Primate behavior, the show is simply appalling.
Gilligan’s Island ran for three seasons and produced 18 million episodes. Not a single repeat has been reported by any viewer. The show is about Gilligan. The skipper, too. It features a millionaire and his wife. There’s also a movie star. Additional characters include the professor and Mary Ann. They all live on “Gilligan’s” Island as castaways because of a three hour tour that went awry.
This cross section of white Hawaii, and possibly 1960s white America, finds themselves free of nonsense tradition, oppressive social constructions and the political subjugation of binary strategic class conflict.
Instead of finding their humanity through the destruction of psychological bondage as presented by their separation from civilization, they followed the paradox of humanist philosopher Ernest Becker, “Out of freedom, man creates his own prison.”
They are so obsessed with keeping the details of their long lost culture that they continue to wear the same clothes episode after episode. They continue to wear clothes. They continue to engage in sexual segregation and continue to observe cultural sexual suppression. They continue to respect false displays of socially constructed bourgeois power as depicted by Mr. Howell’s money on an island with no economy and the ideal of feminine mystique through Ginger’s form on an island with only two theoretically receptive women
From a sociopolitical perspective, the characters of Gilligan’s Island fail immediately and thoroughly at seizing the chance to create a neo-Luddite paradigm of social existence.
Biologically, the show is patently incorrect. It seems that the producers went out of their way to ignore the fact that everyone on the Island is human. They demonstrated a misplaced belief that humans would not revert to natural behaviors if left to their own devices. As ethologist Susan Oyama once pointed out, “Beliefs may fulfill themselves not by virtue of their truth but by virtue of their fixity, and we are only too ready to disavow responsibility for what we perceive as biologically imposed.”
Yeah… whatever she just said. And wtf is an ethologist? Moving on…
Normal primate group behavior instinctively develops some system of economics based on available resources. On Gilligan’s Island, two major resources are food(everywhere) and sex(MaryAnn and Ginger). Mr. Howell’s money is irrelevant and Mrs. Howell is a massive waste of protoplasm.
Why didn’t the two chicks seize power and control the distribution of food through sex? Why didn’t Mary Ann become more assertive? Why didn’t Ginger discover that she could wield power beyond her looks? Was the stunted character development of these women part of a larger sociological plot by bourgeois powers to reinforce the artificially constructed cultural bonds attached to women?
It is certainly interesting to consider such questions but this line of thinking gives the producers far too much credit for having any intellectual capacity. If the purpose was to make men like Howell into powerful figures regardless of social, political, physical or environmental reality then they failed here also. Power, as defined apparently by money, should have made Howell the Alpha male of the island. Knowing his position, a properly characterized Mr. Howell would force the remaining two women into his harem and hire a beta male like the skipper to enforce the social structure of the castaways. The only other potential Alpha male is the professor and he acts as if he has a lobotomy when women are in sniffing distance.
The only character that deserves a marginal defense is Gilligan. His defense comes only as part of a greater mission to explain how intrinsically worthless this show really is. Proponents of Gilligan’s Island say that the show was progressive because it was the first to give any hint of a homosexual subplot. As evidence, they cite the skipper’s frequent and affectionate reference to Gilligan as “little buddy.”
Gilligan was not gay. Gilligan was 250 pounds lighter than the skipper and cannot be blamed for simply putting up with the little buddy comments. Not only is it wrong to blame Gilligan for the skipper’s fudge packing dreams, it is unlikely that any character on Gilligan’s Island was homosexual.
In a study on baboon behavior in 1930s London, researchers discovered that unnatural behavior arises from overcrowding. Baboons have highly rigid social structures that involve the absolute dominance of males over several females and social division in terms of troops divided into bands divided into clans. In the wild, baboon troops function normally because there is plenty of space. These early researchers mixed essentially random baboons and watched their Primate subjects deteriorate into behaviors involving extreme violence, murder, homosexuality and necrophilia.
Needless to say, researchers speculated that such behaviors served to alleviate the overcrowding problem when no other options existed.
With that in mind, it is safe to say that there was enough room and resources on the island to keep everyone as a heterosexual player. The problem is that it looks like this show uses characters from the Michael Jackson School of Asexual Behavior.
The producers missed a chance to create the most powerful social commentary since Lord of the Flies. Instead, they created a show that is politically inert, socially false, sexually impotent and intellectually sterile.
Gilligan’s Island can go to hell.
