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[ Line of Sight ]
DATE: July 20, 2002

[Author's Note: This is a term paper I would like to have written in college. It comes from a conversation I had with my really smart and really funny friend, Jeff Quick.]

Gilligan's Island: A Descent Into Madness

Isolation, malnutrition, exposure, and overall deprivation can lead to a total mental breakdown. No better evidence exists of this than the documentary series Gilligan's Island.

When the series begins (in black and white, a stark and jarring cinematic technique to show the transition to the more "colorful" world of madness later on), we see seven castaways shipwrecked on a desert island in the South Pacific. We learn their names and get an idea of their personalities--each reacts differently to the idea of being stranded. In the first few episodes, they struggle to survive and to get off the island. They attempt to fix their transmitter, they build a raft, they secure shelter. In these early scenes, we see signs of aberrant behavior only infrequently, and some of them are understandable mistakes or the result of panic and confusion. They begin to worry about headhunters, but soon realize that no such headhunters exist. They attempt to make glue from tree sap to fix their wrecked boat. They stop calling each other by name, but instead use strangely distant titles like "Skipper" and "Professor." Then things quickly begin to degenerate.

Perhaps the last vestige of sanity begins to slip away, however, when the castaways stumble upon the remnants of a Japanese outpost from World War II. At that point, their joint hallucination begins, because one by one, they begin to believe that a Japanese soldier remains on the island with them. They fight against this foe, who clearly represents the island itself as well as the oppression and fear of isolation for the castaways. Their battle against the illusory foe reflects their struggle for sanity. In the end, though, it is a losing battle.

Soon enough, the delusions set in with great fervor, each one seemingly taken right from tawdry headlines or pulp fiction. They all jointly see a young "jungle boy." They believe that a surfer has come to the island on a "reverse tsunami." A note here should be made about the character known most often as "the Professor." This man clearly lost his grip on reality far sooner than the rest. His "scientific" explanations for the group's hallucinations only serve to feed their delusions. This pathological liar's actions clearly account for the entire group's quick descent into madness. The fact that the other castaways believe he can make a lie detector out of bamboo but cannot fix their smashed transmitter shows either their willingness to fall into a fantasy world or their extreme lack of scientific knowledge -- perhaps both.

In an interesting examination of the growing insanity of each individual castaway, one episode "revisits" the point of their mental breakdown -- the appearance of the Japanese WW II soldier. Interestingly enough, we see the delusion from the point of view of each individual, and the details differ wildly. This suggests that, while they all share a basic delusion, the details of the hallucinations and experiences diverge substantially. We can assume that what we see each week is the perception of one figure. Taking the show's name into account, it seems reasonable that this figure is indeed Gilligan. Clearly he is the catalyst for most of group's joint hallucinations, for he experiences most of the delusions first (he sees the meteor that supposedly ages the castaways fall to the island, he discovers the island is "sinking," and so on). Gilligan shows all the signs of a truly deranged mental patient.

We are also allowed to see a number of Gilligan's fever-mad, malnutrition-driven dreams, in which he views himself as a pirate, a cowboy, a spy, Jack the Giant-Killer, a Central American dictator, and so on. These comprise a fascinating look into the mind of someone with both delusions of grandeur and a massive inferiority complex.

Understandably, many of the fantasies that grip the minds of the poor castaways involve escaping their island prison. Their delusions include airplanes flying overhead, ships in the distance, and even absurdities such as telephone lines washing up on shore and setting signal flares to alert space vehicles overhead.

Things only get worse from here. The documentary filmmaker's decision to switch to color provides us a clear transition to demonstrate that now that castaways' lives have become entirely delusional. The headhunters they feared early on (whom they determined did not exist) show up--multiple times. Even though the previously agreed that the island harbored no major animal life, they begin to interact with various gorillas, a monkey, a wild boar, a lion, and ultimately, a giant spider in a cave.

Perhaps understanding the false reality of their madness and the harsh, true reality around them, the castaways experience a surprising number of hallucinations involving multiple versions of themselves. No fewer than three doubles (identical versions of Mr. Howell, Ginger, and Gilligan -- notably twice) "come to the island." Or at least, they come to the shared delusion. Similarly, the castaways imagine themselves switching minds or switching identities (usually through hypnosis) or simply imagining that they are something they are not.

One clue that shows definitively how early on their psychological break begins is the portrayal of the radio the group has with them on the island. In an early, mostly delusion-free episode, the radio is lost. Later on, it is found--in the mouth of a fish who supposedly swallowed it. Like the proverbial Jonah, the radio is rescued from its captivity inside a sea creature. This is a fate the mentally crushed castaways know they will never share. The radio henceforth becomes the starting point of many delusions: the fact that the Howells are not actually married, or the notion that one of the SS Minnow passengers is a murderer. It also feeds preexisting delusions: that Harold H. Hecuba is the smash of Broadway with the castaway's production of "Hamlet," or that world-famous pilot Wrongway Feldman, who "comes to the island" twice, returns to civilization unable to remember how to get back. When someone on the island turns the radio on, it always plays the news exactly when the castaways wish it to, covering topics they wish to hear about. The announcer even pauses to let the insane listeners make comments. Clearly, the radio, if it exists at all, never actually functioned past the first one or two episodes. It's all in their sunstroke-addled minds.

In the end, however, we begin to realize that many of the final episodes may be the psychotic outpouring of just one person--a young male fixated on comic-book-style fiction. The other castaways become mere caricatures, exhibiting only one facet of a personality. They themselves begin to resemble hallucinations, or manifestations of an individual with multiple personality disorder. As we watch through Gilligan's eyes, we see how sad things have become for the hopeless first mate, and we worry about what has happened to the other castaways.

A robot "comes to the island." It is followed by a Mars probe, a missile, a NASA space capsule, Russian cosmonauts, two different Russian spies, a mad scientist able to control and switch people's minds from body to body, Zsa Zsa Gabor, a Beatles-esque rock band, gangsters, radioactive seeds that grant superpowers, a magic amulet that grants wishes, and so on. These are clearly just Gilligan's delusions. One can imagine, in fact -- at the end -- Gilligan lying on the beach by the lagoon, dehydrated and suffering badly from exposure. The last castaway alive, he imagines fevered scenarios of rescue, after which he turns the island into a resort where the Harlem Globetrotters come to play.

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