Wizard

Opinions on the Lord of the Flies Adaptions

Introduction

It is highly recommended that before reading this opinion article, the reader is first familiar with Lord of the Flies published by William Golding in 1954, as it will provide a better idea of the original plot of the book which will be referenced greatly throughout the article. However, most people, even ones who have not read the book, know it for exposing the fragility of society, as schoolboys stranded on an island quickly follow each other into savagery once there are no adults to stop them. This is meant to show that there is an inherent evil inside of humanity that is merely suppressed by a societal structure that punishes wrongdoers, and once that structure and the enforcers of punishment are gone, a beast within is quick to reveal. 

However, there are just so many interpretations of this seventy-one year old book, so many essays written on it by students and professors, that I can only really state my interpretation as my own, and not as a fact. What helps to understand is that Golding published Lord of the Flies soon after the second World War, and the horrors of which greatly influenced his perception of society, especially the “defects” he mentions in a quote: “The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature... The whole book is symbolic in nature except the rescue in the end where adult life appears, dignified and capable, but in reality enmeshed in the same evil as the symbolic life of the children on the island.” 

He was right in that last line, for the entire novel is ridden with symbolism: from a conch symbolizing a structured society, to Piggy’s glasses symbolizing a clear, factual view on the world, even Jesus and the Devil being portrayed by the character Simon and the pigs-head-on-a-stick namesake Lord of the Flies. Of course, the symbolism is subjective and interpreted differently by everybody, for example many say that Piggy’s glasses are actually symbolism for scientific discovery; personally, I don’t agree, but everyone is entitled to their own opinion. The point is, every detail in the book carries a lot of meaning, and I believe that this may be part of the reason why adaptations of the book are so hard, because it is impossible to capture all the details in full without making an impossibly long movie, but it is also impossible to capture a deeply symbolic story in full without all its symbolic details. Despite this consideration, most adaptations have been positively awful. In this article, I will largely be complaining about Lord of the Flies’ movie adaptations, including the one made in 1963 and the other in 1990, and trust me, newer is not better. 

1963

The 1963 movie directed by Peter Brook is the first Lord of the Flies adaptation to my knowledge. It is an old movie filmed in black and white, with only a few thousand dollar budget, no professional actors and a largely improvised script. Despite this, it still manages to offer a fairly accurate portrayal of the book’s events, especially compared to the 1990 movie.

For the casting, it seems to take on the common misconception that the boys on the island solely consisted of white British boys. While the boys do talk a lot about being English, especially in the line, “We're English, and the English are best at everything”, Simon and Roger are actually specifically stated in the book to be black. This is shown in the lines “The dark boy, Roger, stirred at last and spoke up”, “Always darkish in color, Simon…” and “Simon stayed where he was, a small brown image”, along with multiple other instances. Other than this, the casting is alright, with each character fitting their part suitingly enough. Roger’s actor, who coincidentally is also named Roger in real life, is especially unsettling, and Piggy definitely looks like Piggy. However, even though most of the lines are taken word-for-word from the book, the monthly film bulletin reviewer stated that “One wishes … that the performances that Brook has drawn from his inexperienced cast came a little closer to conveying the subtlety of the original characterisations.” The boys had no previous acting experience, and their performances often felt choppy, with it being clear that they were reading lines off of a script. 

One of the movie’s great deficits was that Simon’s interaction with the Lord of the Flies is not adequately shown on screen. There is no attempt of visible conversation, instead Simon only stares at the pig’s head with a few eerie closeups and music playing. Viewers that haven’t read the book still have no idea what actually happens in that scene, despite it being a crucial point in the book where Simon finds out the beast’s identity as a part of the boys themselves, which solidifies the notion of an inherent evil inside of humanity. Again, the interpretation is subjective, but every interpretation still agrees this was an extremely pivotal point of the book, and so leaving it out removes a large chunk of symbolic meaning from the story. 

Another event that was left out of the movie was the mulberry boy’s disappearance and probable death in Fire on the Mountain. In the book, the boy’s negligence and careless setting of the forest on fire results in a boy with a mulberry-coloured birthmark going missing, likely perishing in the fire. It is an important scene for two reasons. One, it is the first marking of danger on the island, according to Nicola Presely on the William Golding website. Two, it highlights the connection between the boy’s inability to organize themselves as children and the resulting consequences of that. Therefore, the scene definitely should have been kept in the movie due to its role in driving the important, prevailing theme of the plot towards danger and chaos.

Even another important event that was left out, moreso a change in timeline than a specific event, was the lack of a visible timeskip between Jack’s initial inability to kill a pig to the frenzied hunt that originally occurs in Painted Faces and Long hair, as well as the shifting of the face painting scene to much later in the movie. In the book, talk of having adjusted to life on the island in the first part of the chapter, along with multiple mentions of tanning and grown hair, make it clear that time has passed from Huts on the Beach. In fact, it has likely been many months on the island before the first hunt. This is a crucial nuance in showing that the boys needed a lot of time for the conditioning of their old, structured life to wear off before they descended into savagery; it wasn’t an immediate effect. This makes the extent of their inhumanity later more meaningful because of how much time it took them to get to that point. Furthermore, before the hunt, there is first a scene where they apply face paint to themselves. My personal interpretation is that because a person’s face is a major part of their identity, masking it with the paint was their way to dissociate themselves from the deeds they committed. Indeed, the paint is initially described in the book as “...a thing on its own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-consiousness.” However, in the movie, the timeline is drastically shifted. There is no timeskip shown; Jack goes from being unable to bring his knife down onto the piglet to wildly hunting pigs in the forest with the rest of his choir while wearing face paint in the span of around 10 minutes of the movie. Additionally, it is also not shown how the paint ends up on their faces in that first hunt, no scene is shown that marks the self-enablement of their descent into savagery. There is still a face painting scene, but it occurs much later after Jack has already broken off from Ralph’s tribe. This makes whatever enablement it provided almost insignificant compared to what Jack’s group had already accomplished at this point, ruining the scene’s contribution to the story. 

One may argue that the removal of these scenes was necessary to cut back on time. But then what is to explain for added scenes such Piggy’s lengthy and detailed recount of Camberly’s naming history, a town in England where he apparently grew up? This story is told to the littluns and stretches for over a full minute in movie time, despite contributing nothing to the plot aside from showcasing Piggy’s affinity for looking after the littluns. If this scene, and others like it, were substituted for more time to develop important, symbolic events such as the mulberry boy’s disappearance, Simon’s interaction with the beast and the face painting scene, this movie could have retained more of the original story’s impact on the audience.

On the positive side, there were still many things about the movie that I enjoyed. Although it may just be a matter of poor audio quality, and more of an accidental symbolism than something purposefully created, I really liked how in the scene where Jack and the choir bring back their first pig, it is unclear whether they are chanting “Kill the pig!” or “Kill the beast!” To me, it is as if the boys do not differentiate the victim of their kill, they just kill mindlessly whether it be a malicious beast or an innocent pig. It’s definitely unlikely to be done on purpose, but it was still a detail that I appreciated. Additionally, the music that plays throughout the movie whenever Jack’s choir is on screen is very unsettling in a good way. As a Youtube comment pointed out, the music starts as an innocent chanting and then gradually intensifies with violent drumming and trumpets, which is accurate to the shift of the boy’s behaviour from innocent to savage and violent over the course of the story. It’s almost a sort of foreshadowing, and also just sounds really good. The lyrics are a repetition of “Kyrie Eleison”, which is Greek for “Lord have mercy”. Audio-wise, another thing that added to the story was the overlapping audio of the boys whenever they were chattering amongst themselves, playing, or screaming during a hunt. It really helped to convey an atmosphere of disorganization and chaos, especially in the scene of Simon’s death with the chanting of “Kill! Kill! Kill!”

Overall, while there were some things left out that could have really contributed to the movie’s impact, it still followed the general plot and I enjoyed it a lot.

1990

The 1990 Lord of the Flies movie is a colour film created by producer Harry Hook. It had a considerably larger budget of 9 million dollars, and taking account the technological advancements that had occurred in the filmmaking industry since 1963, a reasonable person could assume that the 1990 movie must be a better film than its predecessor. However, they would be wrong. This movie is so bad that it is mocked throughout the Lord of the Flies fandom on Tumblr, and I myself could not even bring myself to finish it.

Before anything else, the casting has the same problems as the 1963 movie, if not worse. The British boys are American now, and come from an unnamed American military school in this altered reality. Jack lacks the red hair that symbolizes his fiery personality, and Ralph is made a brunette instead of blonde. Ralph also begins with a cast around his arm, although this was actually because his actor Paul Balazar broke his arm a week before filming. Both Simon and Roger, the canonically confirmed black boys, are cast as American like everyone else once again. Piggy is the only one still recognizable from the book. Michael Greene acts out the role of Captain Benson adequately.

“Hold on. Who the heck is Captain Benson?” you may wonder. “Isn’t the entire plot of the story that the boys are trapped on an island with no adults to rely on?” Unfortunately, this is one of the movie’s biggest deficits: the introduction of an adult figure to the island. Although Captain Benson is incapacitated due to a head injury suffered shortly before the movie began, his presence still gives the boys an authority figure to rely on initially. It removes the boy’s sense of responsibilities of looking out for themselves, instead placing it upon the captain that they believe will get better eventually. This means that there is less of an initial power struggle and struggle to organize themselves, as they are still under the influence of relying upon an adult figure.

Another thing that I highly disliked about this film was the way it completely altered the timeline and events of the original book, everything is only very loosely strung together to bear some resemblance of the plot. There are too many instances to list, so here are only a few examples: First, the boys already seem to know each other from the unnamed military school, and arrived on the island together. Second, the conch was found after the boys had already organized themselves to the point of initiating a search, which defeats the conch’s entire symbolic purpose as the former of a structured society. Third, during Fire on the Mountain the boys attempt desperately to put out the fire after it gets out of control, and even though their attempt is futile, in the original book the boys are not meant to realize the dangers of their actions until it is too late and the mulberry boy has already perished. Speaking of the mulberry boy, his presence is omitted once again, and I have already explained before the importance of his death in the book. 

The dead pilot, who is what the boys originally considered to be the beast, is replaced by corpse of Captain Benson, who was stabbed by one of the boys after mistaking him for a bear in the darkness of a cave. While this does make more sense in the adapted version, the dead pilot almost certainly held a lot of symbolic meaning in the original book; for example, it could have represented the destruction or loss of life from war, since the pilot died in an air battle above the island. This theory may only be a wild speculation, but Golding certainly had some sort of symbolic intent behind the addition of such a prevalent character, an intent that the movie fails to respect or understand by removing it.

A visual annoyance for me is the boys having possession of these long, green glowsticks. The resulting bright green lighting makes the set feel very artificial, and they quite frankly look like lightsabers which doesn’t fit the nature-like theme at all. It’s an unnecessary addition that only makes the movie difficult to take seriously.

Despite advancements in computer effects since the 1963 movie, there is once again no attempt to portray the conversation between Simon and the Lord of the flies. Instead, he only stares at the pig’s head on a stick for a while. There is no indication of Simon hearing something, or conversing at all. While the 1963 film still succeeded in the eerie close-ups and sound effects of the flies flying around the decomposing pig’s head to mark its disturbance and significance, the 1990 film has only two brief, plain shots to show for itself. This is honestly disappointing, as the scene is once again meant to be at the very core of the story’s theme, yet the moviemakers pay no attention to it every time.

Most of the lines are made up, in contrast to the largely canon script of the 1963 movie. There is a lot of swearing which implies that it was targeted towards a more mature audience, and this is further reinforced by the very gory shots of Simon’s dead body and Piggy’s death. Furthermore, according to Nicola Presely, the script was also tailored to the time it was filmed, meaning that Piggy’s nickname is now acquired from Miss Piggy from the muppets, which was popular in the late 1970’s and 1980’s. It is also made up by Samneric, instead of it being an old nickname that Piggy trusts Ralph with only for Ralph to immediately tell everyone. In fact, Ralph in the movie defends Piggy when he is initially called such. Personally I think this makes their friendship a lot less meaningful, as there is no character development for Ralph to gradually mature and realize Piggy’s value, shown in the lines from Beast from Water: “Once more that evening Ralph had to adjust his values. Piggy could think. He could go step by step inside that fat head of his, only Piggy was no chief. But Piggy, for all his ludicrous body, had brains.” 

Another difference between the book and the movie is Jack’s immediate acceptance that they would be stuck on the island. He has no faith that they will ever be rescued, and goes around telling this to all the other boys too. This might help explain his savageness as he gives up on ever needing to return to civilization, but it differs wildly to the book, where his hope in being rescued is shown in the line “‘We'll get food," cried Jack. ‘Hunt. Catch things. until they fetch us.’” The movie Jack is much too logical for someone whose behaviour is meant to represent the crazed and illogical demeanor of savages, and in this way it is almost replacing Piggy’s role in the story as the voice of reason. In fact, it is Piggy who wildly believes they will be rescued in the beginning, even going so far as to try and shut Jack down when he disagrees with him. For example, Piggy says “...once we get rescued” and Jack responds with “You better start learning to live with yourself, ‘cause we ain’t getting rescued.” To this, Piggy demands, “What are you talking about?” and Jack says, “Just being logical” and explains why it wasn’t possible to be rescued. Piggy then tells him to shut up, be more positive, and stop scaring people. This entire conversation just doesn’t make any sense for either of their roles, and honestly it's a huge mischaracterization of them both.

There are a lot of other things I disliked about this film, and I’m sure that if I could actually bear to finish it I would have even more to record here. I hate this film. A lot. I am trying to end this with things that I liked, to end on a lighter note, but I can’t even stand the background music of an adult chorus singing, since it just makes it feel like there is still an essence of an adult presence on the island. Oh wait, there is an adult on the island, because they decided to add Captain Benson. This movie is a joke. 

Conclusion & Thoughts on the Graphic Novel