Remaking ‘Lord of the Flies’ with female leads won’t solve Hollywood’s diversity issues
PERSPECTIVE | Bring us new ideas
Earlier this week, news broke that two men are working on a screenplay for a “Lord of the Flies” remake — but with girls.
The news was not met kindly on Twitter, where it was swiftly raked over the coals both because of the gender of the screenwriters and the idea of remaking a classic (but with girls).
If you are one of the few who managed to make it through middle school without having read the original “Lord of the Flies,” the basic premise is this: a group of British schoolchildren find themselves stranded on a desert island. Things quickly deteriorate as the boys lose all connection to civilization and turn to their base instincts.
So why can’t you just take the same book and remake it with female characters? Well, other than the fact that boyhood is an integral part of the dynamics of that story, dropping in girls instead of boys doesn’t solve Hollywood’s diversity problem.
In 2017, audiences want stories beyond those that highlight the struggles of white men. There will always be room in entertainment for these stories, but audiences want to see other people on screen, too.
The proof is in the receipts. Just look at the financial success of “Wonder Woman” and the critical success of “Moonlight.” These are two very different stories but ones that may not have been made 20 years ago. “Wonder Woman” was the highest-grossing film of the summer and “Moonlight” brought home a surprise best picture Oscar.
Besides both being well-told stories, “Wonder Woman” and “Moonlight” told original stories. There is no “Wonder Man,” but there have been countless movies featuring male superheroes, and it was time for something different. “Moonlight,” meanwhile, was the first movie I recall with a young, gay man of color as the lead in a story that was uniquely his own.
“Lord of the Flies” is a boy-centric story. I’m sure the brains behind the project, Scott McGehee and David Siegel, will make efforts to change this into a story with a female point of view. But will they handle it tactfully?
David Siegel, told Deadline Hollywood: “We want to do a very faithful but contemporized adaptation of the book, but our idea was to do it with all girls rather than boys.”
So what’s the value added? How does changing the gender make a meaningful difference in the story? What new insights do you have?
In seventh grade,”Lord of the Flies” left me shook. It was a glimpse of what would happen if all the adults were gone, and also a glimpse into the friendship and relationship dynamics of boys. Would girls respond the same way to being left on a stranded island with no adult supervision? It’s an interesting question to explore that would take a deft hand to execute well. It’s more sophisticated than just contemporizing the setting.
For what it’s worth, the author of “Lord of the Flies” William Golding addressed why he didn’t set the story with a pack of girls.
“Girls say to me, very reasonably, ‘why isn’t it a bunch of girls? Why did you write this about a bunch of boys?’ Well, my reply is I was once a little boy — I have been a brother, a father, I am going to be a grandfather. I have never been a sister, or a mother, or a grandmother”
He also says that: “if you, as it were, scaled down human beings, scaled down society, if you land with a group of little boys, they are more like a scaled-down version of society than a group of little girls would be.”
The gang in the novel “Lord of The Flies” is meant to be a microcosm of society at that time (the book was published in 1954), meaning this is a society run by men.
Doing a “find and replace” for the boy names in “Lord of the Flies” and making “Jack” into Jenny and “Simon” into “Simone” just won’t do it. You have to change the motivations and backstories for these characters, and their dynamics. It would also be difficult for the screenwriters to not grab from the old bag of stereotypes about girls (that we’re catty etc.).
Given that as of now no women are involved in the writing, they’d also have to do a dynamite job of understanding what it’s like to be a middle school girl without having had that experience.
Quite frankly, audiences don’t trust Hollywood to do this the right way. We’ve been given no reason to think that the old machine will get it right. A perusal of McGehee and SiegeI’s IMBD history indicates that the filmmakers have primarily written thrillers like the 2001 film “The Deep End” about a woman who “spirals out of control” in the course of a murder investigation. Not exactly a project that inspires confidence.
Yes, audiences are thirsty for more underrepresented groups in film. That doesn’t mean just remaking old stories on the surface level (but with girls).
Bring us some new ideas. Adapt some original novels featuring women and girls. Hire women in production roles.
We don’t need “Stand by Me,” but with girls. We need stories like “Mean Girls.” Stories about women from the inception. That’s how those stories get told.
The “find and replace” method is nothing but a cheap ploy to try and get socially-conscious women to buy movie tickets. I’m not falling for it.
