Hooptober XII | 16/31 | Decades 8/9 | 1960s | Post-Apocalypse 1/2
"It's a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." — Every 9th-Grader forced to read Lord of the Flies.
We see an English school for boys, portrayed through photographs. When a photo of a cricket match comes up, it flashes between it and pictures of missiles and bombs. An air raid strikes, forcing the school to evacuate. One group of boys boards an aircraft with boys from other schools to escape, but a fighter plane brings it down in the ocean, near a remote island.
Ralph navigates a forest on the island, ducking under branches and forcing himself through thick undergrowth. From behind a tree comes another boy, who suggests they look for others. Ralph runs, but the other boy can’t because of his asthma. The other boy also has thick glasses, which he needs to wear. Finally, for whatever reason, when exchanging names, the boy in glasses asks to be called anything but Piggy, which was his nickname at school.
On the beach, they see no one, nor do they see the plane anymore. Walking along the coast, they come across a conch shell. The boy, not wanting to be called Piggy, heretofore called Piggy, tells Ralph to blow into the conch. Doing so summons other boys from the woods. They also see a small group of boys from the choir walking on the beach and singing. As they assemble, they realize no adults have survived.
The head boy, Jack, wants to be appointed chief. They hold a vote and choose Ralph instead. Ralph appoints the choir boy hunters. Ralph, Jack, and a boy named Simon go out to determine if they are, in fact, on an island. During their expedition, they find wild pigs. Jack draws a hunting knife, toying with a baby pig. They report back at an assembly and determine their next steps for survival.
The film follows the boys as they attempt to build and sustain a society while they work out how to get rescued.
Like the book many US citizens read in school, the film is about a particular brand of behaviorism. Namely, that humanity organizes itself along the same deterministic processes as animals, and as such, is inherently and invariably doomed to descend into violence and chaos.
This Western notion of humanity ignores the thousands of years of Homo sapiens’ existence, during which war and contestations of power were not the dominant ways humans organized themselves. Talk to any expert on Native Americans, and you will learn that the Americas, for the most part, survived without war throughout most of their history. Hell, look at the real-life case of the Tongan castaways, who were also boys stranded on an island for 15 months, and they managed to thrive in cooperative harmony.
Also, it is worth stating that the book does not, in fact, reflect this inherent darkness, despite what the text says. What it gives us is an evil lunatic named Jack, whose charisma drags the boys into the world as he would like it. As one review states, “Take Jack out of the picture and these kids get rescued in like a day or two, the whole ordeal nothing more than a dinner party story that only the older kids can even remember a few years out.”
But these are flaws inherent to the novel and not based on filmmaking choices beyond adapting the source material. Also, cooperation doesn’t precisely make compelling cinema.
None of the boys in the cast was a professional actor, nor had any of them read the book. Rather than follow a strict script, the filmmakers would explain a scene to the actors, allowing them to act it out and improvise dialogue where needed. The result is a mixed bag. Like, congrats to the director for corraling them, but their delayed responses while waiting for cues from behind the camera are too apparent to ignore.
The filmmaking itself is pretty routine. It has the flatness of television or amateur documentary, and the clunkiness of a film without strong direction. Part of it, I’m sure, is that the first cut of the movie was four hours long and the distributor insisted on a 90-minute cut. That said, this minimal style also more directly conveys the content of the book translated for the screen.
That’s not to say the movie doesn’t have its moments. The scene with Roger and the pig head is quite disarming. And the moments where they let the kids cut loose have an earnest charm.
So, as an exercise of adapting a book as “purely” as possible, this film does okay. As a reflection on humanity, it falls as flat as the bloodthirsty fable on which it is based.
Tags:
criterion-channel, hooptober, hooptober12, criterion, coming-of-age, britsploitation, post-apocalypse