It looks pretty close to the book: Wartime evacuation of a rich British boys’ school. Some of the background characters may be Indian or Asian, yet I find it plausible whether or not Golding made mention. Ralph, Piggy, and Jack are white kids.
On another site, it said it was unknown when it would be shown in the USA and on which streaming service.
Sorry for announcing the premiere of a TV series that most of you can’t yet watch. And I know many here despise the book. IIRC, in the USA, it was part of English class, circa 9th grade - the age of the boys - to read it. Horrific, yet again quite plausible. I remember when I saw Princess Bride and William Golding as the author, thinking, “This is the guy who wrote Lord of the Flies?”
I’m not sure if you meant this as a joke or not, but William Goldman was the author of The Princess Bride. Although, he did also write Marathon Man, so the point about his incongruous works does still stand.
The Guardian is usually a fair reviewer. I’ll post a link presumably before it’s shown. Yet four hours gives a lot of time to cover the main points. I first thought it’d be the usual BBC six, so this might be just enough screen time.
I read it at the time, but I didn’t hate it. I remember that “Sucks to your ass-mar” caught on for a while after we read that book I guess because “sucks to your…” Was such an alien Britishism to us
I was 14 when the original movie came out. Then I read the book, which the movie seemed to follow pretty well, but the written narration added some, especially to the ending – as Ralph was weeping on the beach for “the fall through the air of a true, wise friend called Piggy.” I was very down for a while afterwards, it was a shock to me that adolescent boys might behave like that. I had not known anyone like Jack or his henchmen, who seem to me now to have been psycho- (or socio-) paths.
I think the point is that you don’t - can’t - know that when you first meet the characters. Given the time in which Golding was writing, and the world had lived through, it’s not surprising that was why it was a set text in my school, as a warning.
I don’t know if the book remains in the curriculum in the UK. So the term would be borderline extinct, though the series might bring it back temporarily.
If said to someone (not in the loop), it would sound like an insult, and only possibly like a Golding reference.
It was *schoolyard slang not adult slang
It peaked mid-20th century
It depended on:
Kids weaponizing mispronunciation
A shared cultural cruelty that’s mostly gone or transformed
I agree it’s highly anachronistic now. Unless LoTF is still prescribed literature in some secondary schools. As it was in my high school in 1970s SoCal USA.
But I think this last bit
might fly in the face of actual kidly practice. I don’t deal with the ~6 to ~12yo set very often. And certainly not in large groups. But I bet they’re exactly as selfish, heartless, and casually cruel as they ever were.
I was glad they didn’t think, "Movie? It’s been done, and decided to modernize it somehow to demonstrate what you say - kids are not really different now.
I don’t recall the length of (days passed) in the book from the crash, yet if a group of rich kids flying in a prop Beechcraft were island hopping in the Pacific and had to make an emergency landing, there may not be enough time to fall from civilization to savagery before rescue arrives.
ETA: Though The Simpsons did a take on the book and it was like a few days before the separate groups of savages.
Elevator pitch: Group of high school kids, one of them a qualified junior pilot, steal a small prop-job plane and are last tracked in the Pacific 300 miles from San Diego.
I don’t know. Kids seem more pro-social than they used to be, to me. Just based on how they have treated my son, who is not an easy kid to get along with.
I always thought the point of Lord of the Flies is that these kids were coming from a culture at war and thus their behavior was influenced by the violence around them.
Kinda like Hobbes wrote back in 16xx. Humans are naturally brutes. Civilization is the process of training them to subordinate those impulses for the good of all. Which also mostly accrues to their own advantage even if they can’t quite see that. Coupled with government enforcement to make sure the lesson stays learned.
If the enforcement vanishes for whatever reason, brutishness will start emerging immediately and will overwhelm civilized impulses pretty quickly. Then if the next generation doesn’t teach civilization, the accumulated gains of millennia are swept way in two generations.
I guess because “sucks to your…” Was such an alien Britishism to us