Lost Allegory

Lord of the Flies, in book form, was the eerie little novel by William Golding that replaced Salinger's long-loved Catcher in the Rye in undergraduate affections and book bags. It was an ominous replacement. On the surface, the story tells of a band of English schoolboys who are plane-wrecked on a desert island during a nuclear war, and describes how they regress from summer-camp camaraderie into savagery, sadism and murder. Between Golding's lines lies a frightening parable of evil, a strong case for the revival of the unfashionable concept of original sin, and an attempt, as he says, to "trace the defects of human society back to the defects of human nature." Students like it, Golding believed, because "here was someone who was not making excuses for society."

Much of Golding's novel is intact in the film version by Director-Adapter Peter Brook. The sight of black-robed choirboys marching up a tropical beach chanting "Kyrie eleison" in four-four time is properly bizarre; the initial attempts of the castaways to preserve decency and order ("After all, we're English, and the English are not savages") are ironic and touching. A leader, Ralph, is elected, his symbol of authority a white conch shell; Jack, the head boy of the choir, reorganizes his singers as a pack of hunters. With the sun and eyeglasses belonging to the fat and asthmatic Piggy, a signal fire is lit, in the hope of attracting rescue. Then the idyl--and the movie itself--begins to fall apart.

Jack, a crafty bully, stalks away in a sulk one afternoon, and most of the boys desert Ralph and Piggy to follow him and put on face paint, dance around fires and feast on roast pig. The new savages deify the beast that is supposed to haunt the mountaintop; as an offering to the terrible thing, a pig's head is struck on a sharpened stick and left in the woods. Readers of Golding's novel know the nature of the beast before the boys do; the movie audience is kept in witless suspense until it is revealed to be the body of a parachutist, shot down in an air battle high in the silent skies over the island. Golding gave a deeper meaning to this sky-fallen figure, for the boys' cowardice in not investigating may have cost the parachutist his life as he lay dying atop the tropical golgotha.

Little Simon, creeping away from the others, discovers the corpse and in the book's most terrifying and significant passage he encounters the pig's fly-infested head on the stick. In a delirium he hears it speak. "Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill. I'm the Beast. You knew, didn't you? I'm part of you? Close, close, close! I'm the reason why it's no go? Why things are what they are? Come now," said the Lord of the Flies. "Get back to the others and we'll forget the whole thing."

But in the film he hears no voice, there is no revelation of Beelzebub; indeed, the title is left unexplained. Simon simply sees a pig's head on a stick. The orgy at the fireside ("Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!") has swept the boys into frenzy. As Simon scrambles out of the woods, they fall upon him and, making him surrogate for the beast, kill him. A brief and poignant scene follows: in the warm cradle of the surf Simon's small body is rocked to and fro, swaddled in a glimmer of phosphorus until it is carried out to sea.

Flies is flawed in many ways. The 34 amateur actors with British accents rounded up for the filming in Puerto Rico are perfectly type-cast as English schoolboys, and when they open their mouths they sound suitably English--but like schoolboys putting on a play for old boys' day. Their acting, for the most part, seems to be of the old Robert Flaherty documentary school --partly improvised, partly directed through a megaphone--and the read-along quality of the dialogue suggests that part of the picture was shot silent, dubbed later.

Perhaps it was impossible to film Lord of the Flies and keep Golding's harrowing allegory intact. In reducing the novel to a grisly, occasionally shocking adventure story, the producers have chosen not to risk failure. And so they have failed.

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