Sunday Night as I surfed through available and suggested videos from Amazon Prime I stumbled across a very different documentary The Gilligan Manifesto.

The central argument of the documentary is that the television show Gilligan’s Island was actually well produced propaganda for Marxist Communism. The argument is built around several central premises mostly dealing with the castaways farcical attempts to recreate the society that has been lost to them and to inevitable collapse that follows these futile attempts to recreate class, money, markets, and the like. While there are interview clips from Sherwood Schwartz and cast members it seems clear to me that the subjects of the interviews are not advancing the same conclusion as the documentarians making these quotes border on dangerously out of context. The conclusion that Gilligan’s Islanddepicted communism’s idyllic promise strikes me as something more of the documentarian’s interpretation that anything intended by the producers, writers, or cast of the series. It reminds me of the kerfuffle a few years back between John Carpenter and Neo-Nazis over the intent of They Live. Yes, if you choose to ignore central conceits it is possible to view Gilligan’s Island  as a communist parable  just as it possible to view The Lion Kingas a critique of a social welfare safety net that dooms the society that attempts it. (Scar comes to power by promising an underclass that they shall never go hungry again and when he institutes that policy the system crashes. However because I can read it that way does not mean it was intended that way.) Communism can work on the castaway’s island because the show itself is a fantasy, recourses are plentiful, without limit, and obtained with very little effort while the population, even the ‘greedy’ millionaire, is composed of entirely good, ethical, and moral people. A community of angels has no need of government or markets.

As a cinematic product The Gilligan Manifesto  is deeply flawed. With a relatively brief running time of 95 minutes the film still feels quite padded and bloated. Many of the clips used to illustrate premises or arguments run far too long, dragging out an argument that doesn’t require such detail. Between the padded running time and the misuse of the interview clips the documentary carries a feeling of dishonesty never presenting its argument with enough authority to rely on its logic and strength but rather a facile facsimile of an argument that in the end is rather unconvincing. While for baby boomers there is nostalgia in watching these clips from the hit series the documentary itself o vapid and empty, scarcely worth the time.