Gilligan's Island: A Darker View

© Dale Franks, 1997

Though long regarded as a simple, harmless television sitcom, Gilligan’s Island is anything but.  Beyond the vapid gaiety and the simpleness of the laugh track is a harsh reality.  Gilligan’s Island is a dark, nihilistic vision of American Culture.  The America of Gilligan’s Island is a culture in decline, hopelessly lost in a philosophical morass of conflicting ethics, ideology, and social order.  A society doomed to pass without rescue.  A society with no way out.

In a real sense, the vision of Gilligan’s Island is a vision of the New Left.  It is a construct specifically designed to evoke the neo-liberal themes of the decade of the sixties, itself an era of pessimism and rebelliousness.  It is a series that reflects the dominant leftist thinking of the radical counterculture of the time.  In Gilligan’s Island, every portion of American society is held up to ridicule.   Hiding behind the laughter is a sinister view of America that is insidious, and terrifying in its ability to instill a loss of respect for traditional culture.

The characters of this series are archetypes of the broad divisions to be generally found in American society.  Each of those archetypes is given an invidious portrayal.

The Skipper is an authority figure.  Though putatively endowed with years of experience at sea, he lacks the foresight to obtain a simple weather report that results in the crew being marooned.  In this we see the portrayal of the ruling class of America.  Though ostensibly in charge, they lack direction.  Their efforts are shown as ultimately counterproductive, leading us to destruction.

Gilligan is a lovable fool, the Skipper's “little buddy”.  He is also the point of humor, his lack of clear thinking the foil for many of the crew's misfortunes.  This is representative of those who support the ruling class in our society.  They are depicted as blind followers, essentially fools unable to discern the emptiness of our public policy.

The professor represents the class of technology and culture.  He provides the crew with small conveniences, but they, too, are essentially pointless.  He can make chemical batteries to run the transistor radio, but the radio itself serves to do little more than show the crew how isolated they are.  It intensifies their longing to return to a place from which they are forever cut off.  In this way, science and technology are shown to be morally empty and pointless.  The science of Gilligan’s Island is a science which can do little more than provide baubles, helpless to show society a way out.

The Howells are rich and influential.  Even in the stark barrenness of their isolation, they are comforted by material possessions far superior than those around them.  They are depicted as cruel, heedless to the misery of their fellow castaways, concerned only with their own comforts, speaking out only when those comforts are threatened.  What more needs to be said about this depiction of America's wealthy?

Ginger is the movie star.  She stands for the emptiness of popular culture.  Though talented, she is not smart.  Though presumably rich, she obviously does not deserve to be.  Her existence satisfies the ancient Roman formulation of the longing for “Bread and Circuses”, but little else.  She is vacuous and empty, like the popular entertainment culture she represents.

Mary Anne is the lovable everyman, or everywoman.  She is mainly silent, living her life in thrall to a situation created by others.  In this she is depicted as what Richard Nixon termed the “vast, silent majority” of Americans.  She does nothing, essentially playing her part as a sheep, or in this case, a lamb led to slaughter by others.  The fact that her situation is not her fault does not excuse her.  Because she does not attempt to participate in the governance of the group, she is as morally culpable as the rest.  Unspoken, yet clarion clear, is the idea that we are all as guilty as she is.

The negative depiction of the characters is equaled by the negative depiction of their situation.  They are a lonely band held together by hope for a rescue that we know will never come.  In each episode, an outside force comes in, bringing a situation that offers some prospect of return to the lives they once led, a clear reference to the “Golden Age” of America that many fantasize about today.

Their rescue never occurs, of course.  As the guest star leaves, the castaways remain behind, doomed to molder on an uncharted desert isle.  In the same way America is shown as doomed.  No matter what new situation or event transpires that promises a return to a better life, in the end we are left with only brief periods of hope; periods of hope which only serve as punctuation to a sentence of a dismal eternity.

This then, is Gilligan’s Island and the vision it represents.  Perhaps no other episodic television series has done more to undermine our vision of America, and the ideals that vision evokes.  In Gilligan’s world, that vision is an illusion, the ideals the empty ideology of a doomed band of misfits.

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