no longer with an all-female cast

May 4, 2020 10:07 AM

'Chaos Walking' Author Patrick Ness Tackling 'Lord of the Flies' Adaptation (Hollywood Reporter): "'Call Me by Your Name' director Luca Guadagnino is already on board to helm the adaptation of the influential 1954 novel for Warner Bros. [...] The studio at one point was developing a female-skewing version of Lord of the Flies but has changed course and is aiming to hew closer to the original novel with this feature project. ¶Ness has twice won the Carnegie Medal, which recognizes literary work for children and young adult, for Monsters of Men, his third book in the Chaos Walking trilogy, and A Monster Calls. Both stories focused on young adults and children facing impossibly adult situations and forced to take on unbearable burdens."

Previously: "wait this is the start of wonder woman"

posted by not_the_water (16 comments total)

It would be nice to see a take on the material that addresses the elephant in the room - that the boys in the book were the product of the notoriously abusive British boarding school system, which teaches those subjected to it to be abusive and savage.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:19 AM on May 4, 2020 [20 favorites]

In the general sense, it is addressed. Lord of the Flies was written specifically in response to the 19th century novel Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean and other stories like it that praised the civilizing effects of British imperialism and Christianity on the "savages" of the world. Lord of the Flies was about how the "civilized" are just as prone to barbarity as the so-called "savages".

In the specific sense, it would undermine the message of the book that all people have the capacity for violence and evil if it's depicted as something the children learned or had thrust upon them.
posted by star gentle uterus at 10:35 AM on May 4, 2020 [3 favorites]

In the specific sense, it would undermine the message of the book that all people have the capacity for violence and evil if it's depicted as something the children learned or had thrust upon them.

That would be the point of the exercise, yes. Swinging the pendulum the other way is just as much of an error, and trying to argue that a group of children literally conditioned to be savage (the culture and abuse of the British system is well documented today) demonstrates that the book's argument that savagery is just under the veneer of civilization rings hollow, especially when there have been so many demonstrations that people are inclined to be supportive.

Sometimes the ideas in a story don't hold up, and that's okay - history and society move on.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:48 AM on May 4, 2020 [2 favorites]

that the boys in the book were the product of the notoriously abusive British boarding school system, which teaches those subjected to it to be abusive and savage.

I think a lot of my distaste for this book when I read it in high school would have been avoided if someone...anyone...had put it into this context for me.

As it was, presented as some timeless tale of The Way People Are, it was just unbearably cynical and sad and offered me nothing of value to take away other than "People: don't they just suck?" which I could have more easily (and entertainingly) learned by hanging out with the stoner kids in the parking lot.
posted by emjaybee at 1:23 PM on May 4, 2020 [4 favorites]

Lord of the Flies was about how the "civilized" are just as prone to barbarity as the so-called "savages".

This is something I think a lot of people miss in the book - at the end, the boys are rescued by a warship. The man who rescues them expresses horror at the fact that two children have been killed in the fighting on the island, while he's actively participating in a war that has killed millions. It's meant to be bitterly ironic.

If I remember correctly, the boys were travelling in the first place to escape the bombings in London as well. The entire book is about World War II, really.
posted by showbiz_liz at 1:24 PM on May 4, 2020 [4 favorites]

If people were hoping for an all-female adaptation of Lord of the Flies, might I suggest Ladyworld, which came out two years ago, written and directed by a woman, featuring eight actresses.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 2:43 PM on May 4, 2020

Chaos Walking felt like a way more brutal read to me than Lord of the Flies. I had to put it down at some point in the second book and never picked it up again.
posted by BrotherCaine at 4:21 PM on May 4, 2020

godDAMMIT I hated! this book in high school!
posted by hearthpig at 6:09 PM on May 4, 2020

I hated this book in high school, I still hate this book, and I hate that teachers seem to think it's so damn important.
posted by jordemort at 6:28 PM on May 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

To me, Lord of the Flies falls into the same category as The Cold Equations - a polemic written in response to literary trends, written to be as brutal as possible to denounce said trends, and winding up with plot holes you can drive a semi through because the author wasn't examining their priors too closely.
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:40 AM on May 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

I'm a big fan of Patrick Ness's books (particularly More Than This), but boy has he had some bad luck with film and TV adaptations.

His promising Doctor Who teen spinoff Class was canceled after just 8 episodes, and the upcoming film version of Chaos Walking, with Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley, has been called "unreleasable."

I've met him and he seems like a really good guy, so I hope his luck turns around.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 8:16 AM on May 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

I loved Lord of the Flies in middle school and was happy to expand on my essay, “People Are The Worst”, when I reread it in high school. But then I was (and possibly still am) Piggy.
posted by betweenthebars at 8:49 AM on May 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

I and my whole class loved it in middle school (all us girls had crushes on Simon), and I wound up writing my senior thesis on it. I think it's beautiful, but - based on conversations with other people over the years - I think it's generally poorly taught. I don't find it to be a story about mankind's irredeemability. If it were, every character would be Jack or Jack's toadies, which would be boring. To me it's about how society is a choice we all make together, and how fragile but also precious society is because of that, and what a monstrous waste it is to destroy it with war.
posted by showbiz_liz at 8:56 AM on May 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

Read it at about the same age as the lead characters in an all-girls British private school. Our near-universal opinion on it was that boys are useless - not because of the violence and savagery, but because it took so long for them to sort themselves out. By day five the nerds and Girl Guides would have had a functional settlement, the hockey team would have taken down at least one pig, and then we would turn on each other, starting with brutal emotional abuse and then likely quasi-judicial killings. I think it's really interesting that we thought that our version of the island would be horrible, but thought the island of the book was horrible and pathetic. All very much in line with the achievement ethos of the school - we could easily accept that we were filled with violent impulses overlaid with only a thin veneer of civilisation, but not that we would be anything other than competent.

(They did not teach the book at the boys' school.)

I also agree that it sounds like it's very badly taught - Golding's view of the world and human nature is very negative and one that I now broadly reject, but the book has got lots of interesting depths and nuances to it. Like, if you read Simon as a Jesus-figure you can just about turn the arc of the story on its head and read it as redemptive.
posted by Vortisaur at 4:12 AM on May 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

we could easily accept that we were filled with violent impulses overlaid with only a thin veneer of civilisation, but not that we would be anything other than competent.

My middle school friends and I decided that a mixed gender situation could have been resolved asap by one of the girls pretending to seduce Jack and then slitting his throat in the night
posted by showbiz_liz at 8:32 AM on May 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

This recent FPP reinforces my earlier statement, as it seems that Golding and Campbell were very much two peas in a pod. It seems that horrible people have an innate need to argue that their horribleness is just a reflection of the world to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:02 AM on May 9, 2020