Lord of the Flies

You probably read the Lord of the Flies in high school — and now you can watch it on Netflix. It follows a bunch of British schoolboys who get stranded on a deserted island and descend into violent tribalism. Lord of the Flies is made by one of the creators of the Emmy-winning Adolescence, another grim meditation on youth and violence and masculinity. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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  Lord of the Flies. You've probably read it in high school. A bunch of British schoolboys get stranded on a deserted island and descend into violent tribalism because humanity. Am I right? There's a new adaptation of William Golding's classic 1954 novel on Netflix, and it's made by one of the creators of the Emmy-winning Adolescents. Another grim meditation on youth and violence and masculinity. Guy's got a niche. You may know the story, but does this new, unflinching take on the material resonate more deeply today, given, you know, the world? I'm Glen Weldon, and today we're talking about Lord of the Flies on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.

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• 2:02Speaker 01

  Joining me today is NPR Culture Desk correspondent Neda Ullaby. Hey, Neda.

• 2:06Speaker 03

  Hey, Glenn.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Welcome back. Also with us is Walter Chow. He's a writer, critic, and film instructor at the University of Colorado. Hey, Walter, welcome back. Hi, everybody. Great to have you. So, Lord of the Flies. Sometime in the early 1950s, a bunch of British schoolboys crash on a deserted island. With the adults dead, the boys pick a chief, Ralph, a charismatic and empathetic leader. His right-hand guy is Piggy, who is smart and practical.

• 2:31Speaker 04

  Important thing is to think about the littlins. Why should we care for the littlins, Piggy? Because they can't care for themselves, Jack. We need to think about food and shelters and toilets, of course. Toilets? We're on an island.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Ralph's leadership is challenged by Jack, a sneering, brutal figure who rules his own tribe through fear. And there's Simon, a sensitive kid who's torn between the two leaders with tragic repercussions. Writer and creator Jack Thorne fleshes out Golding's story with some flashbacks to the boys' lives before the island in a bid to provide some extra layers of characterization. But don't get it twisted, this four-episode series is otherwise faithful to the book's story and its tone and its incredibly bleak message. Lord of the Flies is streaming on Netflix. Neda, I'm going to hand you the conch. What'd you think?

• 3:19Speaker 03

  You know, I'm going to start off, if you don't mind, by taking some issue. I did not actually find it was particularly faithful in some ways. I thought it was a very superficial, somewhat-on-the-nose adaptation that did actually veer in some very important ways from the book. First of all, the book isn't really long enough to fill up four hours. Jack Thorne has said, oh, it's perfect for television. There's actually these really long stretches where not much happens. They padded out by taking us back into the backstories of the boys, which the book does not do. They divert from the book in some really surprising ways, with some very iconic moments in the book are very different, when the boys are

• 4:01Speaker 03

  rescued, when Piggy dies. The sense of danger and dread that permeate the book, I found to be quite lacking. I thought it was, Glenn, a somewhat Spielbergian adaptation. I'm just going to say one thing before handing the conch over to Walter, which is, for me, one of the deepest examples of that is when the boys kill a pig. And in the book, that is a horrific moment. I'm still scarred by it from having read it when I was 13 years old. It's also very sexualized in the book. It's so sanitized in this adaptation. There's something cleaned up about this version. It lacks the kind of rawness and dreadfulness that I think made the book so powerful.

• 4:45Speaker 05

  Okay, interesting. What about you, Walter? Well, you know, I wrestled with the same kind of frictionlessness of this, and I couldn't tell if it was because of, you know, as you so eloquently stated, Glenn, you know, the world. That maybe this has kind of fled its sell-by day in a way. And so I went back and I revisited, you know, not the book, I should have read the book again, but I did watch the Peter Brook version of this again, and it is so economical and short, like the book is. The escalation seems to be, well, terrible, genuinely awful in a way that, again, I thought this new Lord of the Flies, it was not only protracted, but it was self-consciously beautiful, even more than not disgusting and vile.

• 5:25Speaker 05

  It actually is so enhanced to make it look lush and gorgeous, and the reds are hellish and the greens are verdant. You know, it's like the whole thing is that tiger scene from Apocalypse Now. But for no reason, just to be beautiful. And the score, similarly, is saccharine and expository and in every sort of crevice in this. You know, it guides you through this, but I, you know, I think that's bad enough. Worse, I think, is it tries to drag the story into relevance when it's already relevant. Okay. Now you're making this a white supremacy thing and an Aryan thing. All of these things are kind of comfortably in the subtext, but across four hours and across sort of

• 6:08Speaker 05

  heavy hand, it becomes just the text. And I don't really need help understanding an allegorical novel. Sure. Which is what this seems dedicated to doing. You know, that we are the slowest students in class. We're probably on our cell phones or folding laundry, as I do when I watch Netflix. So it needs to punctuate and enhance. The end of it, for me, just felt like I've been preached to by a first-year philosophy student. Or a entry-level critical theory student who's reading Lord of the Flies for the first time, and I feel like You know, something short and savage, you know, something one hour long. And that's all you need is this quick stab, if you will, this quick penetrating stab.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  Tell the beast.

• 6:51Speaker 05

  Oh, and there is, I think, a lot of homoeroticism in this adaptation. That's what they want to put into the subtext. And I feel like, why is this now back into the subtext? Where all of the subtext is now into the text? What has changed about us? So, you know, in a film that's kind of a criticism of our current fascist state and maybe puritanicalism? It is actually puritanical and a little bit fascist in what it wants us to think about this. Deep ironies, I think. It's ultimate, for me, failure. There are great things about it. I love the kids, I love, you know, a lot of stuff, but ultimately, I think they're all at the service of a misguided production.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Interesting. I am coming at this from a different place than y'all. And I think I feel about the final product a little bit differently because I hated this book, man. I, now, how much of that is tied up with the fact that, you know, it was required reading? And that we all in ninth grade got frogmarched through it collectively through the very narrow lens of its allegory, right? Because pedagogically, this book gets presented to kids as like babies first symbolism, right? What do piggies' glasses represent? What does the conch symbolize, right? 500 words. You know, something happened to me at ninth grade. Between that and Animal Farm and Narnia, I grew to hate any book that was presented to me as a puzzle to decode. And that's not the book's fault, I want to make that clear. I used to teach, Walter, you teach now.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  I know firsthand what happens to books when they go from being, you know, read for pleasure to being taught. And that's nobody's fault. Everybody has good intentions. But my memory of this book is as this thing that you're talking about this show being a very high-handed, didactic moral lesson. And I did go back and read that book for this episode because it's been decades and I still hate it. I still find it. Incredibly kind of hilariously manipulative and hamfisted and all those allegorical elements. I mean, my teachers didn't make them up, right? They're in there because this book wants to deliver a message, which is its right, but I don't got to sit still for a lecture. I'm not a ninth grade anymore. So what I liked about this, when I did like

• 8:54Speaker 01

  it, and you know, it's still the source material, so it's, there's a bar there, was that when I felt the pedantic qualities and the characters fall away and, and the characters were kind of allowed to just be characters, I almost forgot that I was strapped into this ride and I knew where it was headed. And those moments, I think just because of the source material, they never had anything to do with the characters of Ralph or Jack, right? The people on the either end of the moral spectrum. They always came from Piggy and Simon. The performances of David McKenna as Piggy and Ike Talbot as Simon, there is in those performances, there's a real naturalism, something kind of unforced and organic and real that I felt the rest of the story, and it's particularly those two characters of Ralph and Jack, the two leaders, kind of just stick thin. And so this whole thing felt

• 9:39Speaker 01

  kind of stick thin.

• 9:41Speaker 03

  I did not have the same response to the Golding original. As a horror lover, he was a portal into a very scary world that I couldn't get enough of. And I associate Golding with, you know, Shirley Jackson and Stephen King as one of these writers who just has this ability to stir up dread in the pit of your stomach. And the menace just steams off the page for me with Golding. This adaptation, I, with the characters, you know, I, I think it's very telling. I see, I, I felt lectured to by this mini-series. The very first image we see is Piggy reaching for his glasses. Guess what the glasses represent? Like, there you go. It's right there. One of the first thing Piggy does in the book is he evacuates himself. He has terrible diarrhea from the fruit. And that's the kind

• 10:26Speaker 03

  of like grossness that the book like traffics in. This is a clean adaptation. I agree with you about the child performances. And I was listening to the Morning Edition interview with Jack Thorne, whose adolescence, by the way, I loved.

• 10:40Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 10:41Speaker 03

  And he really identifies with the character of Simon, who's the sort of mystical one who has these ecstatic visions. And his interior life is by far the most interesting of the boys.

• 10:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, I really like what you said, Glenn, about naturalism. And those are the moments where the boys are just being boys. That's really effective, I think. And I don't mean that in the dismissive way that we talk about boys' violence. I just mean like, you know, boys at play, you know, boys like acting as actual people would act rather than allegorical pieces in a well-known passion play. I like that a lot. But I think that their performances are maybe betrayed by the direction and the way that they're presented. Simon is amazing when he's having these visions and but he's presented in such a way that it's like, you know, he looks like Joan of Arc. There are these trembling close-ups because that's very like pastiche-like and yeah, but you're shooting all of these characters as though they're holy relics.

• 11:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:32Speaker 05

  There's a really stark sort of wanting to beotify the actions of these things. Ironically, almost, this descent into tribalism and bestialism, that becomes kind of a holy human thing, right? Now, we're building a shrine to this meticulously colored, coordinated war paint.

• 11:50Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 11:51Speaker 05

  It's become a fetish of a certain ideal of whatever. And I'm applying subtext. And the subtext for me is like, oh, British people on and colonizing an island violently. I got it. But that's not it. You know, they're doing something else, but they're actually beginning to miss now what's actually interesting about the adaptation, the things that they are trying to pull out or have pulled out for whatever reason. Yeah, I think at the end of it, what you have is just a very Spielbergian, was that your term? A very sanitized vision of it, plus a pedantic one. Yes, this island is fascist and yes, there's horrible murders going on with it, but gosh, it's nice.

• 12:29Speaker 03

  And it's so polished. One of the notes I had for myself is it's like a costume drama.

• 12:33Speaker 05

  You know, I'm more with Nada about the book than you are, but I really think that I'm just thinking about better things. I'm thinking about things that do this already. That's better. I'm thinking about an entire culture that has embraced Hunger Games. Sure. I wonder if our culture has actually passed by the resonant horror of this premise. We look at the Lord of the Flies situation in Washington DC. This is my buddy and this is my other buddy. We're all white and strong and we don't like intellectuals and we don't, you know, I got it. In fact, I'm tortured by it. In fact, it's a daily thing, you know, we are all piggy, aren't we? And I wondered if it was the source's fault, but ultimately I just feel like this doesn't do anything to make me feel anything like the way that I felt the dread, the doom, the idea that it could in fact be worse.

• 13:17Speaker 05

  You gotta decide, these guys are either single dimensional, flat representations in a passion play, or they're deeply nuanced, traumatized children of the 21st century. And I think by not making that decision, because they try to go both ways with it, you really create a mess. In my head, anyway.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:37Speaker 05

  I got it already, you know, the whitest kids, the village of the damned versus Ralph and Piggy, who doesn't fit the body type. So I get it. I don't need to go back and say, well, you know, actually white supremacists are cowards. He's actually the most afraid kid. Stop. I don't need to know why. I don't need to know this. I get this already. And again, that that kind of pedantry that you got a glimpse from this, I really got from the show.

• 14:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, the racial politics of this, it felt very informed in some ways. And there were some Asian characters, but they were, and so often are completely unimportant and marginalized. You know, there's a black character and a bunch of white characters and. You know, the South Asian characters, the Asian characters, they were kind of just props.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  There is one major moment of sanitization that I'm just remembering now, which is in The Death of Simon. In the book, both Piggy and Ralph are part of that, and that has real moral repercussions. This series goes out of its way to remove them from that process, to draw the lines even more starkly. Simon becomes a much more point of view character than he is in the book, in a more sustained way. They introduce a homoerotic, maybe homo-social element that I'm not entirely sure they're in control of. Because at this age, these kids are, you know, girls, girls are awful. And strong feelings for another boy are kind of to be expected.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  And so I didn't really know what I was getting besides sensitive kids are sensitive. You know what I mean?

• 15:13Speaker 05

  You know, this idea that they're not really in control of any of their messages. I was really interested in the scene where they find luggage, you know, they're all in a plane crash, right? And they try on furs and they're kind of parading around each other with them. And this is immediately after they kill the pig. And there's this, trying to make this sort of strange connection about hypermasculinization as a mask for maybe, you know, homoeroticism or homo-social. They're, they're opening all of these cans without any idea about how they're going to serve. What would they find on the inside of it? They either did it accidentally or they're not aware what to do with it either. There's so many sequences where the boys are lying next to each other in bed and looking at each other, sometimes longingly, I think.

• 15:55Speaker 03

  You know, I didn't find it particularly homoerotic at all, to be honest. Partly because the kids were so young, but I didn't find it even remotely sexual. The parts when they're finding the clothes and trying them on, I found that just more as, you know, flaunting taboos. I didn't get that vibe. In the Brooke version, by the way, they're older.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:14Speaker 03

  I would say that there's a little bit more of that in the Brooke version. But, you know, I think this is also one of those things that's open to interpretation.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  It's the one piece of nuance that's left in a very unsubtle adaptation. All right. Is there anything else we haven't covered that you want to touch on?

• 16:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, there is something, Glenn.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 16:29Speaker 03

  One of the reasons why I was really looking forward to Lord of the Flies was it was created by Jack Thorne, who was the co-creator of Adolescence. And both of those stories are nightmares about the kind of violence that boys are capable of. You know, one of them, the adolescence actually seemed far more political and of the moment to me. It's about systems of surveillance. The crime is recorded by CCTV. There are schools and there's therapists and there's police and there's even personal computers that are monitoring the actions and the behaviors of the boy in question and his family. Lord of the Flies takes place in a place with zero surveillance, where individuals can run amok without any repercussion.

• 17:10Speaker 03

  There's nothing holding them back, where children are attempting to replicate social structures. But the protagonists are stymied by, you know, the most childish form of government of all, which is fascism.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  And I also thought I picked up in the book this idea of they institute these rules about the conch and all that kind of thing. I always thought that that was a thin thread of humor that Golding was inserting to say, here's how British these kids are. They want to institute Robert's Rules of Order.

• 17:35Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Or some kind of thing. I thought that was a thread of humor that this show at least is completely lacking.

• 17:43Speaker 03

  Or like, you know, the fact that the most savage of the children are the ones who belong to the church choir.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  There is also that.

• 17:49Speaker 05

  I see they bring that up in the epilogue too, right? With the British Navy guys saying, you're all British, aren't you? You're British boys. I expected more from British boys. I got it. That's interesting.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Each in our own different ways, we're saying to this show, we get it. Thank you. All right, well, this was a meaty discussion about a show we kind of all had different, but similar reservations about. That brings us to the end of our show. Neda Ullaby, Walter Chow, thank you so much for being here.

• 18:15Speaker 03

  Thank you so much. This was fun.

• 18:16Speaker 05

  Such a pleasure.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  This episode was produced by Hutz Fathama, Liz Metzger and Mike Katsev, and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Ritty. And Hello, Come In provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Glen Weldon, and we'll see you all next time.

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