A ‘Lord of the Flies’ for Our Time

In North America right now, Netflix has the conch. The phrase “lord of the flies” has been deployed by hacky comedians to describe brutal, survival-of-the-fittest violence for so long it’s almost lost its power. (I can’t remember who said it, but the description of the group dressing room at Loehmann’s department store as “Lord of the Flies in pantyhose” sure brought the house down for my grandmother and her friends.) The BBC’s new, robust adaptation of William Golding’s book reclaims the title’s urgency. In North America right now, Netflix has the conch. The phrase “lord of the flies” has been deployed by hacky comedians to describe brutal, survival-of-the-fittest violence for so long it’s almost lost its power. (I can’t remember who said it, but the description of the group dressing room at Loehmann’s department store as “Lord of the Flies in pantyhose” sure brought the house down for my grandmother and her friends.) The BBC’s new, robust adaptation of William Golding’s book reclaims the title’s urgency. Created and written by Jack Thorne and presented in four hour-long episodes on Netflix in the United States, it is a terrific work that expands the original text in ways that range from thought-provoking to quite brilliant. And while there’s never been a period when this tale of what Theodore Dalrymple has called “the fragility of goodness” hasn’t been relevant, with current world leaders growing more frank in their bullying, there’s no better time than now to revisit the uninhabited, fruit-and-pig rich island that quickly turns from paradise to hell for a group of stranded English schoolboys. If it’s been a while since you picked up the 1954 novel that quickly became enmeshed in school curricula, it functions as both a grand metaphor for the darkness of human existence as well as a ripping good yarn—which is precisely what Golding had in mind. As a schoolteacher in the early 1950s, the World War II veteran and scholar of Greek literature was annoyed by adventure stories like R. M. Ballantyne’s Coral Island, a popular castaway adventure. He had witnessed unspeakable horrors in combat but also had few illusions about the way boys—even supposedly well-heeled boys—really behaved. (Having once been a boy myself, I can confirm that the on-off switch of group behavior when an adult is around is not dissimilar from the menagerie of toys when a human steps into—or out of—the room in Toy Story.) With this in mind he created his marooned, archetypal characters: heroic Ralph, brainy Piggy, cruel Jack, and sensitive Simon, as well as the other “biguns” and “littleuns,” who work together for a while under a reasonable system of rules until base impulses and power dynamics turn the lagoon red. The book has been translated to film twice before—a very good though understandably muted 1963 version, and a not-so-good, Americanized (and somewhat modernized) version in 1990. I think the new series is the best, thanks to its rich cinematography, enveloping tone, and fantastic and perceptive performances. A still from Lord of the Flies.J Redza/Eleven/Sony Pictures Television Much as Golding’s background led him to put pen to paper, this is the perfect project for the prolific and in-demand writer-producer Jack Thorne. Among his many successful previous works is Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the blockbuster play sequel to J.K. Rowling’s franchise, and his most recent hit is Adolescence, the harrowing four-part series examining the murderous effect of school bullying, which was actually shot concurrently with Lord of the Flies. If the guy has a brand, it’s British kids in dorky uniforms and British kids who kill one another, so why not put the two together? Thorne first wanted to adapt the story 15 years ago and it is clear he’s lived with the material a long time. Though it flows nicely as one four-hour piece, the episodic breaks allow for chapters dedicated (and named for) each of the main characters. While individual moments are not replayed, we view the scenario from each of their perspectives, in addition to a few precisely inserted pre-island flashbacks. Short of a blink-and-you-miss-them sentence or two about Ralph’s home life in the book, the backstory elements are new from Thorne, but they feel so right, I had to double check the novel. Assuming no one will get too upset about spoilers for a 72-year-old book, here are some specifics, and why they are notable. Ralph, the boys’ initial chief, is still the heroic figure in Thorne’s version, but it’s a little unclear if he is the protagonist. We meet Piggy first, unlike in the book, and though the bespectacled intellectual can be a little bit of a nuisance with his frequent calls for meetings, he is far more sympathetic here. In the book, Piggy—an overweight, asthmatic, deeply vision-impaired kid with lower class sentence structures—is a character to be pitied then eventually admired; readers—and Ralph—come to recognize that Piggy is smart and ought to be lis

A ‘Lord of the Flies’ for Our Time

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