Gilligan's Island

© 2012 by Wayne State University Press,

Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Metz, Walter, 1967–

Gilligan’s Island / Walter C. Metz.

p. cm. — (TV milestones)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8143-3372-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8143-3647-2 (e-book)

1. Gilligan’s Island (Television program) I. Title.

PN1992.77.G53M47 2012

791.45’72—dc23

2011030712

GILLIGAN’S ISLAND

Walter C. Metz

TV MILESTONES SERIES

Wayne State University Press    Detroit

Gilligan’s Island

TV Milestones

Series Editors

Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

Jeannette Sloniowski

Brock University

TV Milestones is part of the Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu

General Editor

Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

Advisory Editors

Robert J. Burgoyne

University of St. Andrews

Caren J. Deming

University of Arizona

Patricia B. Erens

School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Peter X. Feng

University of Delaware

Lucy Fischer

University of Pittsburgh

Frances Gateward

Ursinus College

Tom Gunning

University of Chicago

Thomas Leitch

University of Delaware

Anna McCarthy

New York University

Walter Metz

Southern Illinois University

Lisa Parks

University of California–

Santa Barbara

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction: A Minimalist Allegory

The Existential Island

A Boy and His Whale

Studying Gilligan

An Industrial History of Gilligan’s Island

The Narrative Innovations of Gilligan’s Island

Gilligan’s Cave

The Skipper’s War Trauma

Gilligan Fights the Cold War

Gilligan and Identity Politics

What Great Books Would You Bring to a Desert Island?

To Be Gilligan, or Not to Be

Prospero’s Children

A Poke in CBS’s Eye: The Aesthetics of Gilligan’s Island

Gilligan Goes to Carnival

Gilligan and the Short Story

Gilligan’s Island and Film History

Gilligan’s Island and Performativity

Gilligan, the Natural Man

The Afterlife of Gilligan’s Island

Conclusion: Television in the Age of the DVD

WORKS CITED

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is dedicated to my three children, Alex, Emma, and Charlie. They were the willing subjects of my crazy research experiment to see if they would love Gilligan’s Island as much as I do. I am delighted to report that, despite being taken off the air, the allure of this deceptively simple show continues to hold the next generation spellbound, now through DVDs instead of broadcast airings. Much of this book’s content is inspired by their astute observations about their favorite episodes. In particular, Charlie’s obsession with Pass the Vegetables, Please led me to write my favorite section of this book, on the Bakhtinian, carnivalesque dimensions of Gilligan’s Island. I find it awe-inspiring, and encouraging for the future, that a little boy’s endless rewatching of an episode could teach me so much about the media landscape that I have scrutinized with adult eyes for twenty years.

I, of course, owe tremendous debts, both personal and professional, to far too many people to enumerate here. Most important, my wife, Anneke, continues to inspire my creativity and put up with the drudgery of being married to a neurotic writer. My new colleagues at Southern Illinois University, through their kind collegiality, have renewed my enthusiasm for an academic administrative career. One of them, Sue Felleman, kindly led me toward Lynn Spigel’s work on television and art history, which solved one of the many blocks I was having in finishing this book.

Finally, I owe many thanks to my students, who have endured endless lecture digressions about Gilligan’s Island in courses as far ranging as those on the American West in the nineteenth century and the theater of ancient Greece. I have learned a tremendous amount about Gilligan’s Island from my students at the University of Texas at Austin, Montana State University, the Free University Berlin, and Southern Illinois University.

Introduction: A Minimalist Allegory

At the end of the episode Gilligan Goes Gung-Ho (season 3, episode 83, December 26, 1966), the Gilligan’s Island castaways decide they need a police force. Due to the duplicitous machinations of the other petty, self-promoting male castaways (the Skipper [Alan Hale Jr.], Mr. Howell [Jim Backus], and the Professor [Russell Johnson]), young Gilligan (Bob Denver) is elected deputy. At first, the boy rises to the task, but by mid-episode, he is unable to distinguish between minor infractions and major transgressions. Gilligan locks all six of his compatriots (the men as well as Ginger [Tina Louise], Mary Ann [Dawn Wells], and Mrs. Howell [Natalie Schafer]) in a cave with bamboo bars serving as a jail. As the episode continues, the castaways attempt to trick Gilligan in an escape plot but only succeed in luring the lad into the cave himself, after which he throws away the key, trapping them all inside. Fatefully, an airplane flies over the island at this exact moment. Because they are all locked in the cave, none of the islanders are able to light their SOS signal made from wooden logs. As a consequence, not of anarchy, but of law and order—that is, the imposition of hierarchical civilization on the natural order of the island—the castaways are once again forced to live in exile for at least another week.

This episode is emblematic of the cultural importance of Gilligan’s Island (CBS, 1964–67). While typically reviled for its episodic inanity—stupid Gilligan yet again keeps the castaways from being rescued—it is my contention that this narrative minimalism (how many times can Gilligan do something stupid to keep those poor people from getting rescued?) is the source of the show’s startling invention. Instead of imbecility, the show produces a vibrant critique of dominant American values. The repetition encourages the posing of a very different question: Why would the castaways want to be rescued when they in fact live in a utopia far away from the dysfunctions of mainland America? Or, as Laura Morowitz puts it in her study of the episode Goodbye, Old Paint (season 1, episode 34, May 22, 1965) in which a Paul Gauguin–like primitivist painter depicts Ginger as a Balinese dancer:

The hope of rescue raises another essential meta-theme of the series: the castaways’ constant desire to return to Western civilization. We might well wonder why the castaways would want to leave the island; material abundance, companionship, and an absence of the stresses and dangers of civilized life render Gilligan’s island a tropical paradise. Yet the castaways are forever in search of a way home. The reality of elsewhere can never match the dream, as Gauguin knew all too well. . . . As postindustrial Westerners, they cannot remain in the realm of the timeless and ahistorical (a realm reserved only for natives). Movement is a prerequisite of their condition. . . . Capitalism always seeks an elsewhere. (122)

Morowitz forwards a way of thinking about not the simplicity but the complexity of Gilligan’s Island. The issue is not so much about how repetitive the episodes are but what interest that repetition produces. The contradiction of the show is that its long-term narrative obsesses about rescue, whereas the themes of its individual episodes scream out an intense regard for the island’s utopian isolation from a corrupt mainland civilization. Not only is this Gilligan’s Island’s central motif, as Morowitz observes, but television’s itself. Lucy Ricardo (Lucille Ball) on I Love Lucy (CBS, 1950–59) is stuck on her island, an apartment in Manhattan where she can never break into Ricky’s show; Frank Furillo (Daniel J. Travanti) on Hill St. Blues (NBC, 1981–87) fights a crime-riddled city from his island office in the midst of an overburdened police precinct; and Jerry on Seinfeld (NBC, 1990–98) is confined to his apartment like a Samuel Beckett prison, as the finale of that series makes quite explicit. All television allegorizes the isolating nature of American island life and our communal attempts to overcome its consequences; Gilligan’s Island is simply the most explicit show in the history of the medium concerning these circumstances.

Over the course of many years, I came to fall in love with the seven castaways on Gilligan’s Island as a special experiential part of my love of television itself. Seeing the islanders in syndication each weekday afternoon after school became a refuge from the troubles of real life. Coming into our homes with familiar characters who, if a show is successful, visit us for many years, television provides the possibility of coming to live with fictional characters on a symbolic island utopia. Whether Morowitz is correct or not in arguing that the contradiction of Gilligan’s Island is reducible to capitalism’s foibles is one of the projects of this book. Drawing from Morowitz’s and similar insights into the cultural possibilities engaged by the show, this book offers a passionate defense of Gilligan’s Island, a seemingly idiotic 1960s telefilm sitcom, from a perspective emphasizing the narrative and social productivity of its obvious minimalism.

The Existential Island

By placing seven stereotypical characters on an isolated island, the show’s creator, Sherwood Schwartz, is able to engage in absurdist comedy that interrogates without distraction basic questions of human behavior. As such, the show’s primary intertext is, unexpectedly, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953), a play in which two characters stand on a stage waiting to be rescued by Godot, and yet he never arrives. Similarly, the seven castaways on the island try to get rescued for ninety-eight episodes only to be forever stranded in the South Pacific when the show was canceled by William Paley’s wife, Babe, who enjoyed Gunsmoke (CBS, 1955–75), even though that western series was, by 1967, poorly rated and equally exhausted of new ideas, Dodge City being just one more 1960s televisual island (Stoddard 306).

Even the afterlife of Gilligan’s Island testifies to its radical endorsement of perpetual stasis: in the three made-for-TV movies released years after the cancellation of the show—Rescue from Gilligan’s Island (1978), The Castaways on Gilligan’s Island (1979), and The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island (1981)—the castaways almost immediately return to the island from which they purportedly were so desperate to escape. At the end of Rescue from Gilligan’s Island, the castaways find mainland America so corrupt that they take another cruise to escape and are once again shipwrecked on their