directed by Peter Brook
from the novel by William Golding (1954)

Criterion #43.

I’ve always taken the classic status of Lord of the Flies for granted, but it’s actually sort of an oddity: this cynical poison pill of a book that has managed to become an institution. It’s a perennial: just watch the copies sprout every year on the assigned-for-summer-reading tables in bookstores. I may be wrong but I suspect this one book is singlehandedly responsible for the idea that one of the things a young adult novel can aspire to be is “devastatingly grim.” These days that may apply to all young adult novels, but of course it’s gotten pretty attenuated, go Katniss.

In the included 1983 interview, William Golding muses that people can only get satisfaction out of such a pessimistic book because they are fundamentally optimistic. People like to read such things, he says, because they feel it’s healthy to have a counterbalance to their basic inborn hopefulness. Then he likens it to Candide: an antidote to a specific species of over-optimism that the culture subconsciously wanted to see brought down a few notches, to bring their outlooks back into balance.

Good stuff, and the interview made me like Golding, but in reflecting on the meaning of Lord of the Flies my mind keeps getting snagged on this feeling that it’s actually sort of like Funny Games, which I’ve talked about here elsewhere (in particular here). Like that movie and other works of philosophical vengeance, Lord of the Flies conflates fear of people with fear of harm, because they are so conflated in the author’s psychology. It sets to work trying to prove by contrived example that fear of people is reasonable and necessary. This is a form of philosophical self-defense: if I can make you all feel my horror (of you), perhaps you will become fearful like me and I can then relate to you better and hopefully fear you less. William Golding as seen in the 1983 footage gives me exactly that same sense of vengeful meekness I got from the profile of Michael Haneke, the injured timid soul quietly sharpening the sword of art. For jabbing at ghosts.

Lord of the Flies is, he more or less says, his response to the shock of the revelation of the Holocaust, and the horror of trying to come to terms with the fact that he “had a Nazi in him” — that had he been born in Germany, he would surely have gone along for the ride. Everyone did, and still does, have to come to terms with that thought and the nausea it induces. But the important thing is that it is a thought, and it is nausea; it is a feeling, not an obligation. If you don’t have the feeling, lucky you, you don’t have to deal with it (and you still get to not become a Nazi!). Being a “highly sensitive person” goes beyond cultural borders. Golding spends the rest of his interview talking, in a sense, about how anti-social and basically shy he has always felt, which gives the lie to his fear that he would probably have joined up and been a Nazi under other circumstances. No, I suspect he would not have; he would have been preoccupied by how he didn’t feel he belonged, didn’t feel the “normal” urge to join up. Sucks to your ass-mar, mein Herr!

There is a dirty form of satisfaction that comes of having your righteous indignation stoked by a public call to woundedness. “Yeah, me too! They hurt my feelings too, those dirty bastards!” This is how Fox News works, as well as Upworthy: there’s enough to go around on Facebook for every creed. This sort of thing needs a name like Schadenfreude to remind everyone that it is dirty. For the purposes of the next few sentences I am going to coin, um, victimelation. That’s terrible. Please submit suggestions in the comments. Anyway Lord of the Flies is a classic work of victimelation (that really sucks, I’m sorry). It makes a great noise that it’s about showing us what evil lurks in the hearts of all men (hence the nods early on to our protagonist Ralph’s moral failings), but really it’s quite clearly for us to identify with Ralph and Piggy and say “Damn them! Damn those horrible, terrifying, murderous other boys.” And we do! I do! Certainly nobody reads it and thinks “hey, Kill the Pig! Cut Her Throat! cool!”

The book is really a bait-and-switch. Things really go wrong on this island not because of inevitable bestial cruelty inside everyone present, but because one of the little boys, Jack, is a thoroughgoing villain. There certainly are real villainous little boys, but they are all have their reasons, and the reasons aren’t the great inner darkness. At my high school reunions I keep having to face the fact that, oddly enough, even the most frighteningly messed-up of my classmates are now just, you know, messed up, which is not actually so frightening. If anything sad. Not a murderer among them, yet.

The book shows us people being whipped into a deadly frenzy by fear of an imagined beast… and then goes on to tell us that there is a beast and it is inside each of us, and we had better be wary of it. It is a scary story about the error of being scared by scary stories. Fear, fear the error! says the author, with feeling. So where is the Piggy to know better than William Golding?

I write all this because I am oh most assuredly one of these meek/bitter guys with an urge to show ’em all how awful they are. But I want to do better than that. Just because the other boys scare me, and being alone scares me, and civilization scares me, and war scares me, doesn’t mean than when it comes time to sit down and create something for the consumption of others I want make it a cautionary boogieman story about the horror, the horror, a candygram from hell from inside a rotting pig’s head. Maybe better would be to write something nice about the real possibility of not being scared of everybody.

So that’s that thread of my response. But please class all of the above as ambivalence, no worse. Because I still like this book, as an excellent crystallization of my personal fears, and thus as entertainment. Scary is fun if you understand it to be subjective; not how the world works but how we sometimes feel. And as Golding said, that’s essentially how it’s read. We all know not really to take the philosophy to heart, just sample its spice, go “ho ho! What if! What if!” and then cheerfully move on to the next course.

It’s a very good piece of single-image art; it has a fine unity. You can hold the whole notion of the book and its title in your head in one gulp. A perfectly-sized aesthetic/conceptual gulp. That’s a special kind of achievement, worth treasuring. “Iconic” we call it sometimes, but an ad campaign can make an icon; what I’m talking about is the thing itself. “Animal Farm” is another one, perhaps a bit underweight. “The Great Gatsby” is surely beloved for this reason above all others. It fits exactly inside its own cover.

I guess I can segue to talking about the movie by talking about the cover. The cover of the recent Criterion release is typically enticing and effective, even if it is rather obviously modeled on the classic 1980 paperback cover painting. (On a personal note: up until this very moment at some level I always quietly, very subconsciously, understood the thing in the lower right with the flies on it to be a large baguette. I realize suddenly now that I have been thinking this. And that it is not a large baguette. In a way I am sad to see that thought go. Come back, baguette! No no, I’ll be fine.)

And this is my segue because Criterion’s snazzy cover is a very misleading representation of this movie; it offers exactly what the movie does not, which is atmosphere, foreboding, a touch of mysticism. The movie pointedly does not have such things on offer, and so to my mind cannot live up to the promise of the material. Peter Brook took a bunch of kids to an island and got himself some nice black-and-white quasi-documentary footage of well-cast kids re-enacting the events of Lord of the Flies. It’s quite an achievement as far as it goes. But that’s essentially as far as it goes. The assembly has no sense of perspective other than a very few arty shots here and there, no throughline that conveys the ominousness of time, space, narrative inevitability, malign forces beneath the surface, any of what’s so basic to the flavor of the book. It lacks the ambiance of fear, which is the essence of fear. It just has events and “editing.” At times it feels, I am afraid to say, like a produced-for-school-use teaching tool, a filmstrip, a crusty old video. Something flavorless, educational, disposable.

On the commentary Brook says that his intent (determined in no small part by budgetary considerations) was to create a verite sort of Lord of the Flies because the great virtue of cinema was that photography could offer “evidence,” and that the book’s message would be substantiated in the audience’s mind by the undeniable reality of these boys in all their real boyish moral malleability, in cold documentary black-and-white, showing what this sort of evil might really look like. I think it backfired. The non-actor kids don’t act in a distractingly polished way, but neither do they reveal any of the truths that the book has in mind. Because those aren’t their truths to reveal; they might not be anyone’s. The things I actually see and actually believe have to do with these real live kids’ real live desires to do right by this movie they are being instructed to make. It looks like what it was, weird summer camp. And sure, weird summer camp is a little like Lord of the Flies, but not enough to film documentary-style and have one stand in for the other. Lord of the Flies is a nightmare parable of children, not the thing itself. But that’s the movie they made.

I’ll grant that the intermittently arty 60s low-budget thing does have its own sort of philosophical perspective, a new-wave-y one, but for me it’s a perspective incompatible with fear. “This all happened, or could have happened, or maybe didn’t happen,” it says to me with cool equanimity. Who cares? Behind the opening credits are some still images in the manner of La Jetée that efficiently establish the premise: English boys’ schools, war, a plane crash. The deadpan of this technique establishes the tone: consider this from on high. Prepare to sit here with the Fates and, perhaps, feel a pang. The film seems to think this is a tragedy rather than a cautionary tale.

Accordingly, the pivotal scene, when the Lord of the Flies speaks to Simon, has been omitted. The filmmakers address it briefly in the commentary as though they considered it an obvious aberration in the book, correctly done away with. They’ve made their own reading of the material. I can’t see what that reading sees or knows or offers that isn’t just a denuded form of my reading (i.e. the right one).

In addition to a commentary track, they also have a track that is an abridged version of Golding’s complete reading of the book. Listening to the text in (loose, awkward) conjunction with the movie brought into relief that the book places you among children; the movie documents children. What adults forget about childhood, and can never see again, is that when 10 year-olds are completely certain they are out of adult supervision, they have an intense and frightening confidence. Their dealings with one another have all the force and authority that adults sense in one another. When you are 10 and another 10-year-old looks you in the eye and challenges you, it is full. The film cannot find its way there. These children are playing at wildness on cue and the adult artists around them are all too ready to congratulate themselves for getting at the real nitty-gritty. Not even close. That locker room menace cannot be captured outside of the locker room. Kids know far too well. This is why, in fact, child actors ARE necessary; because the famous “beautiful lack of self-consciousness” of children is a sham, so you either need a child who is exceptionally good at mimicking authenticity, or who is exceptionally committed to revealing the real – just like adult actors. Children’s entire lives are about manipulating adults; the flimsy “it was like that when I got here” manipulations end up being a smokescreen for the real, highly nuanced ones. “We worked these kids into a real frenzy to film this scene around the bonfire; they were completely out of control!” Yeah sure. I’ll have what she’s having.

What the film does offer, like those filmstrips would, is a kind of uncanny avatar of the book. “Oh, wow, that probably is what Piggy would look like if he actually were, you know, a real person! Hm. I’m not sure I was supposed to see that.” Like Bob Hoskins playing Nintendo’s Mario — yeah, that’s probably the right casting, but then why does it feel so wrong? Brook had it quite backward: somehow seeing it all photographed deflates rather than substantiates; I came away believing this story much less than before.

Great packaging though. (This is Criterion’s 2013 revamping of the release.) And nice bonus features etc. as usual. A special highlight is the clip from a documentary about Peter Brook’s “International Centre for Theatre Research” with some 1973 footage of an old friend, apparently before her self-esteem had quite settled into its long-term configuration. (Or possibly just on drugs. Or on the natural high of experimental theatre work. Or, I think, all three.) And behind the scenes footage and interviews etc. There hasn’t been a one of these movies yet where the commentary and bonuses haven’t made me like it more. Or haven’t made me think I liked it more. Which perhaps is just an undesirable illusion. The length of this entry probably arises from my subconscious desire to give what I perceive to be “due consideration” to a movie that, had it not been ensconced in the DeLuxe Treatment and just been a thing I saw on TV, I probably would have been content to dismiss quickly as amateurish and unsatisfying. Quickly and perhaps with more spirit; “due consideration” is nearly the same thing as nerves.

Music: is by Raymond Leppard of all people. You will notice when reading biographies of Leppard that they never say “harpsichordist, conductor, AND COMPOSER.” The score is sorely clumsy and hurts the movie significantly. His thought process is all too apparent: “ooh, a movie about choirboys gone bad, delicious, well then, I will have some choirboy music for them, you know, some Kyrie eleison sort of thing, very proper and so forth, and then perhaps as a march, quite British, but then of course there will be another version of it, transformed into something all very brutal, you know, with timpani and such, boom boom boom, to show, you know, the horror of it all. And then I suppose some flutes and whatnot for, you know, the greenery.” That might have been a workable outline for the music (though I am skeptical) but it certainly can’t be the music itself. It is the music itself. Here is the end titles.