Benedict Spence on the reported new movie retelling the story of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies from a female point of view:
It’s not always beneficial to know what an author thinks of his or her own work (J.K. Rowling demonstrates how infuriating this can be on a daily basis). But before his death, Golding specifically said that the characters in Lord of the Flies were supposed to be all boys, because: ‘I didn’t want this book to be about sex.’ ‘It’s too trivial a thing to get into a book like this, which was about the problem of evil’, he said.
You would have thought that Golding’s reasoning would make sense to feminists, who often argue that maleness (especially white maleness) is evil. So, if a matriarchal society would be more pacifist and just, how could an island of little girls descend into the same chaos as happens to the boys in Lord of the Flies?
None of this is to say that remakes are always destined for mediocrity. But when remakes set out to make a political point, as is clearly the case here, the result is often cringe-inducing and lacking in artistic merit. Worse still, in this case the remake entails ripping out a core part of the story for the sake of mere virtue-signalling. There’s nothing interesting or daring about that.
I don’t know why people are freaking out about this … clearly just changing one element of the original story (swapping out all the boys for girls) is going to change the outcome: that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?
As we all know, a society composed only of males will naturally collapse into barbarism due to a massive overdose of toxic masculinity. On the other hand, a society composed only of females will have zero conflict (because women are naturally co-operative), and all issues will be dealt with democratically and fairly, with equal sharing of burdens and outcomes. I’m not sure where they’re going to find any kind of conflict to build the storyline around, as by definition there can’t be any conflict in the absence of a toxic male influence and systemic patriarchal violence, so the movie may just be three hours of heartwarming sympathy and tolerance, sharing and caring, mutual respect and egalitarian problem-solving. Where’s the drama going to come from?
Of course, not everyone agrees. Here’s Heather Wilhelm to ruin everyone’s egalitarian dream:
Women Are Never Evil, You Sick Chauvinist Pigs
“An all women remake of Lord of the Flies makes no sense because…the plot of the book wouldn’t happen with all women,” New York Times columnist Roxane Gay declared on Twitter, making me wonder if she’s ever been to a sixth-grade slumber party. (If you haven’t been to one, know this: They almost always degenerate into a pillow-strewn wasteland of popcorn, treachery, and copious weeping.)
Other writers joked that a female Lord of the Flies would obviously and inevitably morph into a peaceful island paradise — you know, like the very real place where Wonder Woman grew up. By my personal scientific assessment, there is a 99 percent probability that anyone who makes this point has never spent significant time in a sorority house, where there is often unlimited cereal, a frozen yogurt machine, and occasional tales of terror that would make your hair stand on end.
“Not every story makes sense to gender-flip,” wrote Yohana Desta at Vanity Fair. “Particularly if that story is William Golding’s classic Lord of the Flies, a vicious tale about a barbaric boy-made society. The concept alone,” she continues, “disregards the point of the book!”
Get it? “The point of the book” is that boys — just boys! — are inherently bad.
