Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Lord of the Flies. You probably read it in high school. A bunch of British schoolboys get stranded on a deserted island and descend into violent tribalism because humanity. Am I right? There's a new adaptation of William Golding's classic 1954 novel on Netflix, and it's made by one of the creators of the Emmy-winning Adolescence, another grim meditation on youth and violence and masculinity.
guy's got a niche. You may know the story, but does this new unflinching take on the material resonate more deeply today, given, you know, the world? I'm Glenn Weldon, and today we're talking about Lord of the Flies on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. Joining me today is NPR Culture Desk correspondent Netta Ulaby. Hey, Netta. Hey, Glenn. Welcome back. Also with us is Walter Chow.
He's a writer, critic, and film instructor at the University of Colorado. Hey, Walter, welcome back. Hi, everybody. Great to have you. So, Lord of the Flies, sometime in the early 1950s, a bunch of British schoolboys crash on a deserted island. With the adults dead, the boys pick a chief, Ralph, a charismatic and empathetic leader. His right-hand guy is Piggy, who is smart and practical.
The important thing is to think about the little ones. Why should we care for the little ones, Piggy? Because they can't care for themselves, Jack.
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Chapter 2: What is the premise of Lord of the Flies?
We need to think about food and shelters and toilets, of course. Toilets? We're on an island.
Ralph's leadership is challenged by Jack, a sneering, brutal figure who rules his own tribe through fear. And there's Simon, a sensitive kid who's torn between the two leaders with tragic repercussions. Writer and creator Jack Thorne fleshes out Golding's story with some flashbacks to the boys' lives before the island in a bid to provide some extra layers of characterization.
But don't get it twisted. This four-episode series is otherwise faithful to the book's story and its tone and its incredibly bleak message. Lord of the Flies is streaming on Netflix. Netta, I'm going to hand you the conch. What'd you think?
You know, I'm going to start off, if you don't mind, by taking some issue. I did not actually find it was particularly faithful in some ways. I thought it was a very superficial, somewhat on-the-nose adaptation that did actually veer in some very important ways from the book. First of all, the book isn't really long enough to... to fill up four hours.
Jack Thorne has said, oh, it's perfect for television. There's actually these really long stretches where not much happens. They pad it out by taking us back into the backstories of the boys, which the book does not do. They divert from the book in some really surprising ways. Some very iconic moments in the book are... very different, when the boys are rescued, when Piggy dies.
The sense of danger and dread that permeate the book, I found to be quite lacking. I thought it was, Glenn, a somewhat Spielbergian adaptation. I'm just going to say one thing before handing the conch over to Walter, which is, for me, one of the deepest examples of that is when the boys kill a pig. And in the book, that is a horrific moment.
I'm still scarred by it from having read it when I was 13 years old. It's also very sexualized in the book. It's so sanitized in this adaptation. There's something cleaned up about this version. It lacks a kind of rawness and dreadfulness that I think made the book so powerful.
Okay, interesting. What about you, Walter? Well, you know, I wrestled with the same kind of frictionlessness of this. And I couldn't tell if it was because of, as you so eloquently stated, Glenn, the world, that maybe this has kind of fled its sell-by day in a way. And so I went back and I revisited, not the book, I should have read the book again, but I did watch the Peter Brook
And it is so economical and short, like the book is. The escalation seems to be terrible, genuinely awful, in a way that, again, I thought this new Lord of the Flies, it was not only protracted, but it was fantastic. self-consciously beautiful, even more than not disgusting and vile.
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Chapter 3: What are the character dynamics between Ralph, Jack, and Piggy?
You know, something short and savage, you know, something one hour long. And that's all you need is this quick stab, if you will, this quick penetrating stab.
Kill the beast!
Oh, and there is, I think, a lot of homoeroticism in this adaptation. That's what they want to put into the subtext. And I feel like, why is this now back into the subtext where all of the subtext is now into the text? What has changed about us?
So, you know, in a film that's kind of a criticism of our current fascist state and maybe puritanicalism, it is actually puritanical and a little bit fascist in what it wants us to think about this. Deep ironies, I think. It's ultimate for me, failure. There are great things about it. I love the kids. I love, you know, a lot of stuff, but...
Ultimately, I think they're all at the service of a misguided production. Interesting. I am coming at this from a different place than y'all. And I think I feel about the final product a little bit differently because I hated this book, man.
Now, how much of that is tied up with the fact that, you know, it was required reading and that we all in ninth grade got frog marched through it collectively and Through the very narrow lens of its allegory, right? Because pedagogically, this book gets presented to kids as like baby's first symbolism, right? What do piggy's glasses represent? What does the conch symbolize, right? 500 words.
You know, something happened to me at ninth grade. Between that and Animal Farm and Narnia, I grew to hate any book that was presented to me as a puzzle to decode. And that's not the book's fault. I want to make that clear. I used to teach. Walter, you teach now. I know firsthand what happens to books when they go from being read for pleasure to being taught. And that's nobody's fault.
Everybody has good intentions. But my memory of this book is as this thing that you're talking about this show being, a very high-handed didactic moral lesson. And I did go back and read that book for this episode because it's been decades. And I still hate it. I still find it interesting. incredibly kind of hilariously manipulative and ham fisted and all those allegorical elements.
I mean, my teachers didn't make them up right there in there because this book wants to deliver a message, which is it's right. But I don't got to sit still for a lecture. I'm not a ninth grade anymore. So what I liked about this when I did like it.
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Chapter 4: How does the new adaptation differ from the original book?
and, you know, it's still the source material, so there's a bar there, was that when I felt the pedantic qualities and the characters fall away and the characters were kind of allowed to just be characters, I almost forgot that I was strapped into this ride and I knew where I was headed.
And those moments, I think just because of the source material, they never had anything to do with the characters of Ralph or Jack, right? The people on either end of the moral spectrum. They always came...
From Piggy and Simon, the performances of David McKenna as Piggy and Ike Talbot as Simon, there is in those performances, there's a real naturalism, something kind of unforced and organic and real that I felt the rest of the story. And it's particularly those two characters of Ralph and Jack, the two leaders kind of just stick thin. And so this whole thing felt kind of stick thin.
I did not have the same response to the Golding original. As a horror lover, he was a portal into a very scary world that I couldn't get enough of. And I associate Golding with Shirley Jackson and Stephen King as one of these writers who just has this ability to stir up dread in the pit of your stomach. And the menace just steams off the page for me with Golding.
This adaptation, with the characters, you know, I think it's very telling. I felt lectured to by this miniseries. The very first image we see is Piggy reaching for his glasses. Can you guess what the glasses represent? Like, there you go. It's right there. One of the first things Piggy does in the book is he evacuates himself. He has terrible diarrhea from the fruit.
And that's the kind of like grossness that the book like traffics in.
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Chapter 5: How does the adaptation handle themes of violence and masculinity?
This is a clean adaptation. I agree with you about the child performances.
Chapter 6: What criticisms are made about the adaptation's faithfulness to the book?
And I was listening to the Morning Edition interview with Jack Thorne, whose adolescence, by the way, I loved. And he really identifies with the character of Simon, who's the sort of mystical one who has these ecstatic visions. And his interior life is by far the most interesting of the boys.
I really like what you said, Glenn, about naturalism and that those are the moments when the boys are just being boys. That's really effective, I think. And I don't mean that in the dismissive way that we talk about boys' violence. I just mean like, you know, boys at play. You know, boys like acting as actual people would act rather than allegorical pieces in a well-known passion play.
I like that a lot. But I think that their performances are maybe betrayed by the direction and the way that they're presented. Simon is amazing when he's having these visions. But he's presented in such a way that it's like, you know, he looks like Joan of Arc. There are these trembling close-ups. It's very, like, pastiche-like. But you're shooting all of these...
characters as though they were holy relics. Yeah. There's a really stark sort of wanting to beatify the actions of these things. So ironically, almost, this descent into tribalism and bestialism, that becomes kind of a holy human thing, right? Now we're building a shrine and To this meticulously color-coordinated war paint. Yes. It becomes a fetish of a certain ideal of whatever.
And I'm applying subtext. And the subtext for me is like, oh, British people colonizing an island violently. I got it. But that's not it. They're doing something else, but they're actually beginning to miss now what's actually interesting about the adaptation, the things that they are trying to pull out or have pulled out for whatever reason.
Yeah, I think at the end of it, what you have is just a very Spielbergian, was that your term? A very sanitized vision of it, plus a pedantic one. Yes, this island is fascist, and yes, there's horrible murders going on with it, but gosh, it's nice.
Ha ha!
And it's so polished. One of the notes I had for myself is it's like a costume drama.
You know, I'm more with Ned about the book than you are, but I really think that I'm just thinking about better things. I'm thinking about things that do this already that's better. I'm thinking about an entire culture that has embraced Hunger Games. I wonder if our culture has actually passed by the resonant horror of this premise. We look at the Lord of the Flies situation in Washington, D.C.,
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