Gilligan’s Island

Skipper beating Gilligan––for stupidity––with his hat.
Gilligan running from a gorilla, sped-up film 
yanking synapses with comic amphetamine pacing.
Ginger’s overstated glamour, somehow maintained
by undying makeup and wardrobe, and framed
against Mary Ann’s cozy girl-next-door-ness.
The transparent pomposity of Thurston Howell III,
his wife, their hard-wired loyalty to their social status
even in the absence of market forces—
always gnawing the bone of economic destiny…
that was the joke, of course.
And the Professor—doomed to keep inventing
medieval doohickeys from coconut shells and bamboo
while invoking Faraday and Einstein––
couldn’t fix a boat and invented the Frisbee too late.

Gilligan’s Island was the nitwit grandfather of Lost.
People ripped from their lives by weather, by forces
beyond human control, but always lured into thinking
they could claw their way back to life’s steering wheel,
only to find that life has no such interface:
The tiny ship was tossed, 
and the island on Lost
could be relocated—
perhaps re-fated—
with, yes: a giant subterranean captain’s wheel pinned 
in bedrock, grinding stubbornly not in space but time,
twisting every castaway’s lifeline into a Gordian knot.

Russell Johnson, before Gilligan’s Island was filmed
on a beach in Hawaii, had been a WW2 bombardier—
shot down by the Japanese in the Philippines,
breaking both ankles, his co-pilot killed,
in a war that bloodied continents and led somehow
to the same man being awarded a Purple Heart
and someday returning to the Pacific Theater 
to play a child’s idea of a science genius in an epic farce
where surfers, robots, gorillas and sailors
all vie for the attention of Ginger and Mary Ann,
in the silliest rough draft of postmodernism, which is to say, 
life.