Patrick’s mind is vacationing in Wonderland this week. Please enjoy this autopilot psychobabble in his absence.
Précis:”Gilligan’s Island” is a microcosm of society. The individuals featured on the situation comedy are really representations of different character traits of the selves and the epic struggle of mankind against nihilism.
The Skipper, although apparently the commanding officer, holds no real authority. The Skipper is the man who carefully navigates his life and yet falls ashore on a deserted island and, caught by surprise to the entropy of life and lost in the sea of regret, blames himself for the rest of humanity’s painful mistakes. He is a Christ figure – the shepherd of the flock – one who feels personally guilty for the mistreatment of others, though the three-hour tour into oblivion was not his fault.
The Professor is the able-minded, scientific intellectual. A man prone to observation and invention, The Professor likes to test the limits of the physical world while under the false notion that he is trying to help the rest “escape” their island paradise. He will turn a coconut into a radio, all the while boasting of his scientific prowess, when he misses the simplest ways of escaping their peril – that merely being plugging a hole, for The Professor is too wrapped up in the egoism of his thirst for the limits of mankind, his Frankenstein complex, that he will not even acknowledge the simplest means of escape.
The Millionaire, a.k.a. Mr. Howell, is the exploiting bourgeoisie white male who makes the best of his situation and uses a cosmically unimportant commodity – money – to make others do his bidding. It is a singular failure of the other castaways that they do not realize his so-called richness is in the big scheme of things on a dessert island worthless. They too are overwhelmed by his “prosperity” and become essentially the proletariat slaves of the ruling class. Had the rest full knowledge of their absurd “debt” to The Millionaire (and His Wife), they might break free of their imaginary chains.
Likewise, The Movie Star, a.k.a. Ginger, is an excessive waste. After all, who needs a movie star, the epitome of cultural luxury, on a desert isle? She serves no basic function for their survival with her tired expression of glamorized Hollywood. In old age, her looks will fail her and her boobs will sag and even the false virtue of her beauty will be of no use to uplift the masses.
Maryann, on the other hand, serves a most viable position. Not only is she useful for procreation and masturbation, without which the predominantly male castaways would turn to homoerotica and thus not procreate, but being a farm girl, she has skills that are valuable for survival, and [looks] good [in] genes.
Gilligan is the leech of the micro-society so erroneously named for him. He serves no viable function, but is rather a hinder to every scientific and prolific advance. He is an obstruction to truth. Even more intolerable than The Millionaire and The Movie Star, Gilligan gives no motivation of escape, but rather becomes the ironic “comic relief,” irony being the nihilistic hindrance to any productive culture, becoming merely the laughing boy scapegoat for their lack of progress. A civilization that can only laugh at its attempts at progress, its attempts to challenge irony with sincerity, is doomed. We viewers are not guiltless, for we are propelled by our overseeing peers, the laugh track, to laugh along. Gilligan dashes all hopes of productivity like the metaphorical Sisyphusian rock “on the shore of this uncharted desert isle”.
The island is at both times a paradise and a Darwinian cesspool, full of preying headhunters, doppelgangers and Russian spies. It is an Eden propelled into purgatory by entropy; the “Big Bang Theory” of modern science, a priori.
Gratuitous Matrix Metaphor: The castaways are inhabitants of a “candy-colored” reality, of which the only apparent escape is to wake up from their diversions and embrace the realistic world.
Hence, or wherewithal, the castaways cannot escape because The Millionaire (and His Wife) are too greedy, The Movie Star too vain, The Professor too ideal. In their living theatre of the absurd they struggle and climb and strive with human ambition, only for it to be ruined in the end by an episodic intercourse with Gilligan, the Socrates of civilization, who, in acknowledging he knows nothing, foresees the nihilism of morality and the vanquishing of True Virtue. Escape, via the Minnow, is right there in front of the castaways and yet they cling onto the most complicated and arbitrary ideals. To escape the island of domesticity and cultural inertia, one must fix the boat; revere the simplest essence of the self; reconstruct the building blocks of foundation.
Without the cooperation of such a diverse group of social others, both leaders and thinkers and followers alike, the castaways are forever lost in the miserable rerun of daytime television. The purgatory of “Gilligan’s Island” teaches us that the repetition of life is all there is as long as we follow our own selfish desires, bow before the Neon god and relapse into the clown foolery of ironic absurdity, which, incidentally, is what you just wasted your time reading.
Patrick May, a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press.
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