CAREW Lord of the Flies

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Screen Education 97 I © ATOM

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SCREENS IN THE CLASSROOM

The Mark of the Beast

MY SS

Peter Brook’s adaptation of ­William Golding’s classic novel faithfully represents its tale of a group of English schoolboys’ descent into savagery after being left to fend for them­selves on an unpopulated island.

As ANTHONY CAREW finds, the film’s deceptively complex allegory raises as many questions – including about free will, res­ponsibility, masculinity and human nature – as it answers.

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CIVILISATION AND MORALITY IN LORD OF THE FLIES

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illiam Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies is a perennial staple of required-reading lists in secondary schools. And, with it, Peter Brook’s 1963 cinematic adaptation of the book is routinely wheeled out in front of classes. Unlike the book, the film isn’t exactly an unimpeachable classic. It’s slightly clunky, and often poorly acted; there’s a reason why Hugh Edwards, the ten-year-old who plays Piggy in the movie, never appeared in another film. And where the book is hailed for its timelessness, this movie feels dated – the music, mise en scène and, uh, full-frontal boyhood nudity very much of their day.

The production itself sounds as wild as the story, in which a group of schoolboys survive a plane crash and end up stranded on a deserted island; there, they form a society, only to slowly watch it descend into anarchy. To capture this, Brook scouted for non-professional English actors, then flew them off – without parental accompaniment – to the tiny island of Vieques, off the coast of Puerto Rico. There, in 1961, they lived for a summer at an abandoned pineapple cannery that had been turned into a veritable summer camp.1 Rather than forcing the children to learn lines, the filmmakers staged the scenes shot in groups as a form of play.

Brook and cinematographer Tom Hollyman shot handheld, in an observational fashion, decades before digital technology made such a documentary-style approach easy.2 Sixty hours of film were shot, and it wasn’t until post-production, back in England, that all this footage could be combed through and cut all the way down to a ninety-two-minute picture.3

Despite some of these modes of realism and improvisation, this Lord of the Flies still feels very true to the novel – especially in comparison to Harry Hook’s awful 1990 Hollywood adaptation, which introduces colour, swearing, all-American militarism, an adult character (which suggests a complete misunderstanding of the premise) and already-outdated-upon-release references to late-1980s sitcom ALF. In its eerie, vintage black-and-white form, Brook’s adaptation has its own sense of unease about it: something echoing a novel that acts as a parable about human nature and social structures.

The book’s initial premise – boys wash up on the shores of a deserted island – is hardly revolutionary. This is, effectively, the same starting point as nineteenth-century novels like RM Ballantyne’s The Coral Island and Jules Verne’s Two Years’ Vacation. But where those were works of boyhood adventure and derring-do, Golding’s text takes a far darker view of human nature, and of what would happen if a group of children were forced to found their own micro-society on a Pacific atoll.

In Brook’s adaptation, the particulars of the plane crash are told in an eerie opening with grainy black-and-white stills set to martial drums; this slide show of stark images is similar to that in the contemporaneous La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962). From there, we come to on a beach, with the gormless Piggy and handsome, dashing, posh-voiced Ralph (James Aubrey). After blowing a conch to summon any survivors, Ralph calls for a meeting.

Quickly, democracy and order take hold: each says his name (as the camera tracks across their faces), and they then vote on who should be leader: Ralph or his insta-rival Jack (Tom Chapin), the head of a boys’ choir. A search party is soon dispatched to explore

the island, and the boys swiftly discover that they are alone; without adults to guide them, they must govern themselves.

At first, there’s idealism about the society they’ll construct, a sense of jolly old adventure, these young Englishmen (‘We’re not savages, we’re English!’ Jack exhorts, ‘and the English are best at everything!’) out to have a cracking good time. A firstact montage is filled with fun and games: boys playing, racing crabs, wrestling in the waves, building shelters. But, soon, the thin veneer of civilisation begins to crack. Kids forget their addresses and phone numbers. Stories from back home seem like of another time, another world. These schoolboys shed their uniforms like cloaks of respectability, their remaining clothes increasingly torn and ragged. Piggy serves as both moral conscience and moral scold (and, for Australians, an ­archetypal ‘whingeing Pom’), appointing himself the quasiadult figure, and offering laments like ‘Just like kids, like a crowd of kids!’ and ‘What’s grown-ups going to say? Look at ’em!’ His glasses are another emblem of society and order; when they’re first cracked, then later broken, the symbolism

Jack, spinning the mythology of the beast with ad-hoc babble, uses this fear of the ‘Other’ to agitate for power, and separatism, eventually founding a splinter society for ‘hunting and fun’ on some very symbolic sharp rocks. They leave the head of a pig on a spike as ‘a gift for the beast’, but, soon, swarming with flies (it’s from this event in the original text that the book takes its title), it seems monstrous itself. The beast turns out to be the pilot of a crashed plane, who hangs, dead, from a parachute caught in a tree. But, of course, the real monster is man: there naught more monstrous than patriarchal structures replicating themselves anew.

In short: soon come abuses of power, then violence, then death. The first to die is sweet Simon (Tom Gaman), who is mistaken for the ‘beast’, slaughtered by the hysterical mob in the midst of a bloodthirsty frenzy, sacrificed – with due Christlike symbolism, floating angelically in the water to ‘Kyrie Eleison’

Soon, the thin veneer of civilisation begins to crack … These schoolboys shed their uniforms like cloaks of respectability, their remaining clothes increasingly torn and ragged. is obvious (when I was forced to read the book in Year 7, my copy came with a pair of cracked specs on the front).

An inextricable division sets in between Ralph, who hopes to maintain proper rigmarole (‘The rules are the only thing we’ve got’), and Jack and his choristers, who buck against any imposed strictures. The split is symbolic: it’s order vs chaos, apollonian vs dionysian, moral vs immoral, societal vs primal.

The choir appoint themselves hunters, paint their bodies and faces, pretend to be apes, stalk the island’s wild pigs: this group returning to a pre-human state (when Ralph calls Jack ‘a beast and a swine’, the choice of epithets is telling). When they slay a pig and cook it over an open fire, they tear into the meat with bare hands and animalistic fervour. Brook and his sound designers4 amplify and isolate the sounds of the boys sucking on meat and bones – an effect echoed, nearly half a century later, in a scene from Lord of the Rings.5 Empowered by their wild-boy state, the choir gin up bloodlust (chanting, ‘Kill the pig, slit her throat, bash her in!’), wield self-made spears and fire, and become wildly superstitious, believing that there’s a ‘beast’ on the island who stalks at night.

PREVIOUS SPREAD: The rebel tribe guard their territory THIS SPREAD, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Ralph (James Aubrey); Jack (Tom Chapin, left); Piggy (Hugh Edwards); Ralph

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THIS SPREAD, CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE: Jack’s tribe in the cave; Simon (Tom Gaman); the boys keep a lookout; the pig’s head that serves as the titular ‘Lord of the Flies’

– to sate macho mania. Piggy rationalises the killing (‘He was batty. He asked for it. It was an accident’), but, as figure of rationalism, ends up the next to go at the hands of irrational

This sudden, unexpected rescue – hopes to escape having been forgotten long ago – gives the boys a harsh return to reality.

As Ralph weeps for their lost humanity, the horrors of their

Are the kids just expressing the violence, fear and cruelty wired into human beings? … Or are they essentially play-acting, mimicking that which they have been shown – or, even, explicitly taught – by adults back home?

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fear, panic and distrust. He confronts Jack with a simple moral proposition – ‘Which is it better to be: a pack of painted savages, like you are, or sensible, like Ralph is? Which is better: to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill?’ – only to be squashed by a boulder pushed upon him.

By this point, all the children have abandoned Ralph, defecting to Jack’s ever-growing army. In turn, they set out to hunt down this final holdout, the ultimate outcast. They start a fire to smoke him out from hiding in the jungle, an idiotic act of selfsabotage. As Ralph flees from the flames, he’s chased by an angry mob brandishing spears and torches. He trips and tumbles into sand, falling, in a moment of climactic irony, at the white-booted feet of a naval man: a symbol of law, order, society, Englishness.

­ ehaviour are put into stark relief by the genial, paternal b ­comforts of the sailors.

The reason that Lord of the Flies has persisted as such a timely text is how portable those horrors are, as metaphor.

This violent, vengeful, power-mad micro-society stands in for so many macro-societies. Foreign-landscape adventure books were, before Golding, so often works romanticising the expansion of the British empire. But Lord of the Flies can be read as a parable for colonialism: a tropical idyll transformed into a bloodthirsty nightmare by the founding of a new society on the bedrock of old English hierarchical patriarchy. Boys will be boys, but then they’ll become men, and the whole cruel cycle will start all over again.

Moral questions

plane has been shot down in some unnamed war. If the world around them is literally at war, is it any surprise that the children descend into conflict?

And then there are thorny questions of gender. Obviously Lord of the Flies issues a dark portrait of toxic masculinity and destructive patriarchal structures. But is this story wholly gendered? Are these dark, disturbing elements of human behaviour limited to young boys? And, if so, are they innately wired in their chromosomes, or are they behaviours that boys are taught, and conditioned to, from an early age? The children stranded on the island appear to be private schoolboys, which means that the gendered counterpoint would be a class of private schoolgirls – a social group that is, unto itself, renowned for being a microsociety breeding distrust, cruelty and exclusionism.10

Ongoing cultural influence Given its place on required-reading lists – and, thus, its opportunity to lodge in the formative memories of adolescents – it’s no surprise that Lord of the Flies has been hugely influential, having been referenced, reimagined, riffed on and parodied plentifully (including the obligatory Simpsons episode, 1998’s ‘Das Bus’). You can see its influence in films about cruel, horrifying, violent groups of teenagers – River’s Edge (Tim Hunter, 1986), Bully (Larry Clark, 2001), Mean Creek (Jacob Aaron Estes, 2004) – and in dystopian movies in which adolescents are forced to compete for survival, from Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000) to popcorn series like The Hunger Games (2012–2015) and The Maze Runner (2014–2018).

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Lord of the Flies is, clearly, a chronicle of the horrors of man, but it poses plenty of questions that are more open-ended, and can result in philosophical, moral and ethical conversations. Could the boys have lived a harmonious life, chosen to treat each other better, lived up to their ideals? Or are they just slaves to human nature, and the more the trappings of polite society fall away, the more their behaviour is governed by those base instincts? This is, essentially, the age-old debate between the ideals of free will and the edicts of determinism – the latter of which theorises that moral choices aren’t choices, but things determined by previous experiences and prior causes.6 Does the nature of humankind, then, lean towards harmony, or towards conflict? Towards order, or chaos? Traditional huntergatherer societies are often lionised – in our metropolitan, latecapitalist, removed-from-the-Earth now – for having lived in harmony with nature;7 but they were routinely at war with neighbouring tribes, fought over territory and livestock, and were, like Jack and his followers, prone to superstition and fear.8 Humans are at once communal animals and conceive of themselves, in their sentience, as individuals.

There are also questions left unanswered that persist after the close of the narrative. Two children die – are killed – while they are on the island. Are the boys responsible for these deaths?

And, if so, as a collective, or as individuals? Is the fact that Simon is slain in the throes of collective madness, amid the frenzy of an emboldened mob, something that can condone the killing? Or does that make it even worse, more horrifying?

If these are considered to be crimes, should the boys be tried for them? At what age are children responsible for their own behaviour? In 1963 in England – the same year Brook’s adaptation of Lord of the Flies came out – the Children and Young Persons Act raised the age at which a child can be tried for a criminal act to ten years old, the belief being that, due to an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, a child cannot carry true criminal intent, nor fully comprehend the impact of their actions.9 Are the children herein, then, responsible for their actions?

Is their behaviour an innate expression of the animalism of humankind, or something that they’ve been taught? Are the kids just expressing the violence, fear and cruelty wired into human beings? Acting on things sown in their genes, instinctive behaviours passed down through millennia? Or are they essentially play-acting, mimicking that which they have been shown – or, even, explicitly taught – by adults back home? The inciting incident in the plot of Lord of the Flies is a plane crash, but the

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But, recently, the influence of Lord of the Flies has been absorbed into strange, surreal works of global art cinema, and the results have been fascinating. One of the 2010s’ best barely seen, micro-budget oddities, Bloody Beans (Narimane Mari, 2013), finds a group of kids play-acting out the Algerian independence struggle across one night. With its evocation of children as pack animals, poking at pliable group psyches and collective hysteria, the film has real resonances with Golding’s text – the whole descending into a hallucinatory reverie vividly co-scored by French synth-pop outfit Zombie Zombie.

The acclaimed Monos (Alejandro Landes, 2019) depicts a troop of teenage guerrillas tasked with holding a Western doctor hostage in the Colombian mountains. But, as camaraderie falls away, the troop begins to fracture and the group psyche deteriorates, the movie descending into both the jungle and a kind of primal madness. As such, it’s no surprise when the young soldiers turn into a body-painted tribe, nor when they stick a pig’s head, swarming with flies, on a stake.

Ladyworld (Amanda Kramer, 2018) traps eight teenage girls alone in a home buried by an earthquake in Los Angeles. Stylised and stagy, it plays as a piece of absurdist theatre, a work of heightened sound design and performances wholly unmoored from reality. It, too, bears Lord of the Flies references: a crystal from a fallen chandelier functions as the ‘conch’ in meetings of the tribe; people say things like ‘This is just as oppressive as school’ when anyone suggests rules or order; and the mysterious presence of a man – perhaps alive, perhaps dead, perhaps imagined – divides the group, this interloper functioning as an ‘Other’ who both provokes fear and serves as leverage for a power grab. Interestingly, Ladyworld arrived a year after Warner Bros. was criticised for announcing a Lord of the Flies reboot in which the castaways would be a group of schoolgirls.11 While the majority of the ire targeted the appointment of male writer/ directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel, there were ripostes that a micro-society of young women would turn into something more like a utopia.12 Kramer hoped her film – in which, of course, the group turns on each other, and fissures and class divides appear – could be a corrective to clichés of femininity, harmonious womynhood and you-go-girl sloganeering; in Ladyworld, she says, ‘women appear as disgusting, disturbed, manipulative, lustful, voracious, willful, over-attuned, vindictive’.13 After the obligatory descent into madness, the jolt back to reality is just as vivid, and grimly ironic, as the finale of Lord of the Flies.

Those wanting to see Lord of the Flies used as a spur for exploring contemporary ideas on gender can turn to the surreal, psychedelic, slippery The Wild Boys (Bertrand Mandico, 2017).

In this film, a group of disobedient schoolboys – who’ve raped a teacher while in thrall to a malevolent demon named Trevor! – are sent off for a reformatory stay on a distant, mystical island.

There, gender fluidity, hyper-erotic plant life and psychedelic visions await, this island a place where the fecund flora can turn a wayward boy into an erotic woman (the film’s cast of boys are all played by female actors). It’s a work of queerness in gender, artistry and sensibility: a lurid, luminescent fever dream of hyperstylisation and inspired low-budget visuals. It also addresses the problematic-patriarchy theme that sits at the heart of Lord of the Flies. Here, we have a host of entitled, violent, predatory boys whose natures wholly change when their genitals fall off; perhaps Jack and his choristers wouldn’t have been such dicks if they didn’t have dicks?

Anthony Carew is a Melbourne-based critic. SE

ABOVE, FROM TOP: Bloody Beans; Monos; The Wild Boys; Ladyworld OPPOSITE: Ralph and Piggy 38

Endnotes See Robert Wallace, ‘A Gamble on Novices Works Almost Too Well’, LIFE, vol. 55, no. 17, 25 October 1963, pp. 100–5, available at <https://books.google.com.au/books?id=UlIEAAAAMBAJ>, accessed 17 December 2019.

2 See Matthew Dessem, ‘#43: Lord of the Flies’, The Criterion Contraption, 30 November 2005, <http://criterioncollection. blogspot.com/2005/11/43-lord-of-flies.html>, accessed 18 December 2019.

3 See Peter Brook, ‘Peter Brook on the Making of Lord of the Flies’, The Criterion Collection website, 13 March 2000, <https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/56-peter-brook-on -the-making-of-lord-of-the-flies>, accessed 18 December 2019.

4 Namely, sound recordist Carter Harman, sound supervisor James Townsend and sound assistant Leslie Colombani.

5 I think it was in the third film, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Peter Jackson, 2003), but don’t make me remember these horrifying fucking movies.

6 See Timothy O’Connor & Christopher Franklin, ‘Free Will’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, updated 21 August 2018, <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/>, accessed 18 December 2019.

7 See Helen Gardner, ‘Explainer: The Myth of the Noble Savage’, The Conversation, 25 February 2016, <https://theconversation. com/explainer-the-myth-of-the-noble-savage-55316>, accessed 18 December 2019.

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See, for example, Lawrence H Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, Oxford University Press, New York & Oxford, 1996.

9 See Ben Darlow, ‘Age of Criminal Responsibility’, English Legal History, 25 May 2013, <https://englishlegalhistory. wordpress.com/tag/children-and-young-persons-act-1963/>; and Elena Papamichael, ‘Doli Incapax: Why Do We Hold Our 10 Year Olds to Have Criminal Responsibility?’, Hodge Jones & Allen Solicitors website, 31 January 2019, <https:// www.hja.net/doli-incapax-why-do-we-hold-our-10-year -olds-to-have-criminal-responsibility/>, both accessed 18 December 2019.

10 See Margaret Talbot, ‘Girls Just Want to Be Mean’, The New York Times, 24 February 2002, <https://www.nytimes. com/2002/02/24/magazine/girls-just-want-to-be-mean.html>, accessed 18 December 2019.

11 See Steph Harmon, ‘“Someone Missed the Point”: Lord of the Flies “All Girls” Remake Spawns Social Media Backlash’, The Guardian, 31 August 2017, <https://www.theguardian.com/ film/2017/aug/31/lord-of-the-flies-remake-to-star-all-girl -cast>, accessed 18 December 2019.

12 See, for example, Daniel Victor, ‘In Lord of the Flies Remake, Girls Survive Instead’, The New York Times, 31 August 2017, <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/31/arts/lord-of-the-flies -girls.html>, accessed 18 December 2019.

13 Amanda Kramer, quoted in Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, ‘Filmmaker Amanda Kramer Talks Ladyworld – Alexandra Heller-Nicholas Interviews’, Alliance of Women Film Journalists, 15 October 2018, <https://awfj.org/blog/2018/ 10/15/filmmaker-amanda-kramer-talks-ladyworld-alexandra -heller-nicholas-interviews/>, accessed 18 December 2019.

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