Posted on 12/03/2001 3:38:23 PM PST by Chuckster
Why do they hate us? Here are some of the usual answers: Israel. McDonald’s. The Gulf War. Infidel American women who run around in short skirts with heads uncovered. Hollywood. U.S. arrogance. U.S. naiveté.
To all that, I suggest another deeply though-out reason: Gilligan’s Island. Shakespeare scholar and literary critic Paul Cantor wrote Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, although the book hit stores in November. But his argument – that Gilligan’s Island was really, at it’s core, not just a silly ‘60s sitcom but a paean to American democracy is particularly noteworthy right now, in the wake of the disaster.
Gilligan’s Island premiered in 1964 on CBS, to almost uniformly terrible reviews. But since then, it has never, not even once, been off the air. For 12 years, Gilligan’s Island: The Musical (Co-written by the TV show’s creator Sherwood Schwartz) has been touring theaters across the United States. On Oct. 14, CBS presented the latest in Gilliganiana: A TV movie called Surviving Gilligan’s Island: The Incredibly True Story of the Longest Running Three-Hour Tour in History.
Gilligan’s typically clueless comment when a visiting banana republic dictator proposes making him the puppet leader of the island (“I was the president of the eight grade camera club”), Thurston Howell III’s lament about the possibility of an island election (“The whole thing sounds so darn democratic”)…all this and every other bit of Gilligan’s Island political philosophy has been dubbed into 30 languages.
Somewhere in the world, someone right now is absorbing the show’s central premise that, as Cantor puts it, “a representative group of Americans could be dropped anywhere on the planet – even in the middle of the Pacific Ocean – and they would still feel at home – indeed they would rule”. Unfriendly countries probably find this infuriating. But friendly ones don’t seem to mind.
At the Surviving Gilligan’s Island press conference, a British journalist plopped himself down next to me and began happily singing his version of the theme song: “Just sit roight back and ‘ear a tile, a tile of a fightful trip…”
If the Gilligan theme song is so embedded in viewers’ minds, so, too, perhaps, is its subliminal message to an entire generation around the world. As Dawn Wells (who played Mary Ann) remarked as she surveyed a room packed with reporters: “We raised you!”
Perhaps especially annoying to anti – Americans across the globe, the castaways have little regard for whatever indigenous culture they find on the island. When they put on a show, it’s a festival of Dead White Males: a musical version of “Hamlet”, to the tune of “Carmen”.
Academics are famous for reading all sorts of strange ideas into texts. But in the case of Gilligan’s Island, Cantor is not simply projecting images onto an inkblot. Creator Sherwood Schwartz notes in his own book about the series, Inside Gilligan’s Island, that “I know about the social content of my show, and the seven characters were carefully chosen after a great deal of thought.”
Schwartz wrote that he named the castaway’s ship, the S.S. Minnow, as a jab at then FCC Chairman Newton Minow, who’s famously characterized television as “a vast wasteland.” He recalls CBS chief William Paley’s horror – “I thought it was supposed to be a comedy!” – at Schwartz’s description of Gilligan’s Island as a social microcosm.
Schwartz’s response is classic, let’s save the pitch quick thinking: “It’s a funny microcosm!”
Viewed through the prism of America’s enemies, it’s easy to see how the Gilligan’s Island gang represents everything Muslim fanatics and their sympathizers hate. As Cantor describes it, “The Skipper embodies American military might, the Professor represents science and technological know-how and the Millionaire reflects the power of American business…the presence of the Movie Star among the castaways even hints at the source of America’s cultural domination of the world – Hollywood.”
Extending this trope, I would add that the Millionaire displays an unseemly Western uxoriousness to wards his one wife – insulting to societies where women are fourth class citizens, after the children and the camels. Mary Ann, besides her fondness for short-shorts, is offensively spunky to anyone who thinks women belong in robes and headscarves. She’s the type of virgin who offends the fantasies of suicide bombers everywhere, as she obviously wouldn’t even give them the time of day in paradise.
And then there’s Gilligan, the essence of the naïve, childish American – as Americans are so often described, ad nauseum, abroad. But bumbling, unsophisticated Gilligan has a way of ruining the plans of every Soviet cosmonaut or Third World Dictator who drops by. “Representing the average citizen at his most ordinary,” Cantor writes, “Gilligan presides over a kind of democratic utopia on the island and is repeatedly called upon to act as its savior.”
What’s more, he always prevails
Why do they hate us? I just may be because of Gilligan’s Island.
Yes, this is sort of a silly answer. But it’s still smarter than the question.
Well, it was a pretty good piece, but it lost me here. If the Skipper represents the military, then he destroyed the navy (wrecked his boat), is bloated, not too bright, and is more of a buffoon then a might.
Of all the characters, the most competent, sensible, and attractive was the least important. Mary Ann. And, in deed, she was the character the fans liked the most. But she was suppressed beneath the weight of military, scientific, economic, and entertainment elites, barely being allowed to get a word in edgewise. Obviously she represented the masses of working people who have the ability to rule but not the confidence to speak up for themselves.
Add the fact that she did not have a navel. This clearly and obviously symbolized her lack of nurture from modern society
The plane hit ground on a Pennsylvania field.
No one survived the crash.
But the courage of the men who fought that day
will stand for a long, long time.
We'll have to make the best of things,
It's an uphill climb.
The President and Americans too,
Will do their very best,
To live up to this act of heroism
And smite the vipers nest
.
few phones, few lights, few motor cars,
Not allowed any luxury,
The Afgan Taliban,
Are as primitive as can be.
So join us here each week my friends,
You're sure to get a smile,
As we smash the evil Taliban,
Here on "America's trial."
I haven't seen that word in print since, in 1969, my Latin III teacher gave up on us and decided we brave four who had, in theory, made it that far would be better off starting all over again with Latin I.
And no,I will not decline uxor for you.
"Last night you were, unhinged. You were like some desperate, howling demon. You frightened me. ...Do it again."
- Morticia Addams
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