Are those criticising a new female interpretation of Lord of the Flies being sexiest pigs (or Piggys)?
Hollywood reports reveal that directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel are boldly tackling William Golding’s classic 1954 novel for Warner Bros. They say it will give modern audiences a chance to cast a fresh eye on the seminal source material and “help people see the story anew”.
Critics and an extraordinary explosion of Social Media responses do not agree. At all. Golding, himself, had very strong views on the subject.
Yet, Wonder Woman recently showed that female characters can be physically strong and even dominant, brave, aggressive and war-like.
So, who is right?
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The famous story is about a group of British schoolboys stranded on an island after a plane crash. The veneer of civilisation is peeled back to reveal the basest behaviour lurking within.
Poor Piggy, of course, has the most tragic end, but the tale is an unflinching examination of young masculinity. And therein lies the problem.
Siegel tried to explain how the new version would work and said: “It is a timeless story that is especially relevant today, with the interpersonal conflicts and bullying, and the idea of children forming a society and replicating the behavior they saw in grownups before they were marooned.”
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McGehee added: “The opportunity to tell it in a way it hasn’t been told before, with girls rather than boys, is that it shifts things in a way that might help people see the story anew. It breaks away from some of the conventions, the ways we think of boys and aggression.”
Twitter was soon swamped with furious responses.
One female writer said: “GOOD: A female-centric Lord of the Flies! BAD: A female-centric Lord of the Flies written by… two men.”
Another was totally unimpressed and said: “The Lord of the Flies movie feels like a studio had a big jar of ‘Make with Chicks?’ ideas and just picked the one that made the least sense.”
One commentator said: “Um, lord of the flies is about the replication of systemic masculine toxicity. Every 9th grader knows this.”
Another added: “Lord of the flies, but girls instead of boys: potentially interesting, even if it does seem to be missing part of the point.”
The point was hammered home in the post: “Lord of The Flies remake coming out, but it’s an all-girl cast? The book about the dangers of toxic masculinity? How will that work at all?”
Interestingly, many of the comments come from women, making valid and frequently amusing points.
Golding, himself, spoke before his death in 1993, and clearly explained why the story could only work with a male cast.
He said: “Girls say to me, very reasonably… ‘why did you write this about a bunch of boys?”.
“Little boys… are more like scaled-down society than a group of little girls would be… this is nothing to do with equality at all. I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been. But one thing you cannot do with them is take a bunch of them and boil them down, so to speak, into a set of little girls who would then become a kind of image of civilisation, of society.”
That certainly seems clear enough.