LORD OF THE FLIES
[Spoilers]
A film review by Eric Schrager
Copyright 1990 Eric Schrager
I've read the book, I've seen the film. If you've missed out on either and don't want to hear about them yet, then don't charge into this.
I've found many of the comments on the new remake of Golding's LORD OF THE FLIES quite relevant. Personally, I was thrilled to discover that someone had remade the film. Rather film oriented myself, I often read books while trying to imagine a cinemagraphic approach to them, and (already having seen the original black-and-white film version) I felt all through reading the novel that it should by all means be remade. I liked the original for the most part, but the novel immediately suggests itself to color. It's a lush, colorful island, and modern film could bring many of the aspects of the book to greater life than the original did. The original also failed to show sufficiently the character of Simon, and his visions, and I don't think anyone who saw the first film could figure out what it was the boys mistook for a "beast." I, for one, went to the film with eager anticipation, hoping the book would be rendered more skillfully and in some ways more faithfully than the first film had.
My first disappointment was when I was told this would be about modern American boys rather than British boys of the period, but I reserved judgment. I watched the film, and saw that much of what I thought was right. A modern film *did* bring the island into greater vividness. Color WAS needed. And I must admit that both Simon and the Beast were better explained than in the first film.
But.
I must agree with those who hated the Americanization of the film. I thought about it as I left the theatre. What was it about the American academy cadets that was so inferior to the British upper-class schoolboys? One thing struck me immediately: the *language*. The vocabulary of the American boys is essentially different, and that hurts the newer film. For one thing, the profanity. I thought the profanity and everything about the American boys' dialogue was plausible. As American boys. But as the characters of LORD OF THE FLIES, it didn't ring true. For one thing, modern American children are too articulate. The essence of LORD OF THE FLIES, what made the boys' degeneration possible in the novel, was the inability the boys had to communicate their fears. "Things are breaking up," Ralph said, but he couldn't explain quite *why*. Piggy, as an American child, was simply whiny rather than dry and overly intellectual. But there's something about the American boys that casts a pall over the degeneration that happens to them.
For one thing, it isn't complete. In the novel, the boys actually become savages, and Golding calls the member's of Jack's tribe nothing else from the moment Simon is killed until the boys are rescued. The point-of-view of modern American children is too sophisticated, too jaded. There is too little purity to corrupt. The mores of civilization don't rule and haunt modern American boys the way they did British boys of 1960.
And again, the language. The writers had to change the basic terms, to accommodate an American audience. It was a "monster" in the remake rather than a "beast," offered "presents" instead of "gifts." The terms "chief" and "tribe" were only used half-jokingly near the end, rather than with increasing seriousness throughout. It makes sense, Americans don't say things like "gift for the beast" or "chief of the tribe," certainly not kids. But those terms help make the story work, turn Jack's tribe into something actually savage and nightmarish. The *chant* was lost in this film. "Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!" The build was lost. In this film, we watch the kids simply become more-than-normally cruel little bastards. In the novel, they become personifications of evil.
I could go on and on, but I guess I wanted the filmmakers to be *true* to the book because the book *worked*. They compromised it. Making the adult Captain escape (presumed dead) and become the Beast was, I suppose, about as plausible as a dead parachutist caught puppetlike in the parachute lines, but it misses the point. There *are* no adults on the island of the novel, so far as the boys know. And the "Beast" *should* be a puppet, the irony is brilliant. The paint! The boys aren't just putting on cute Indian paint, they're hiding their consciences behind anonymous masks. (And why were Sam and Eric, the twins, such total assholes? They represented the last bastions of civilized innocence in the novel.) Everything was there, it was just approximated, simplified, condensed, cheapened. The people who put this together sadly underestimated the American audience's appreciation of Art for Art's sake, rather than money's sake. The book, even thirty years old, even British, reads beautifully for any reader with the guts to accept the ugliness it recounts.
In fairness, I repeat that modern film methods did some beautiful things, but there's nothing it did well that it couldn't have done better playing truer to the novel. Ralph could have been flawed, could have begun to forget what the purpose of the fire was except for Piggy's prodding. The conch could have played the essential civilizing part that it did in the novel, could have been shattered to pieces by the boulder that killed Piggy. The pig's head on a stick could have *spoken* to Simon, confessed that evil is a part of mankind and cannot be exorcised (Damn, we have modern animation methods and the *second* movie blows this chance too!). This film could have *been* LORD OF THE FLIES. Instead, it was a rather skillful if overly commercial approximation of it.
By all means, see it if you like. But I can't help but hope that you're not satisfied with it. If you are, you've missed much of what makes the novel great.
Eric Schrager (MMJ@PSUECLA)
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