Jack Thorne's Lord Of The Flies finds fresh terror in a familiar story
Adolescence's co-creator delivers a striking miniseries.
Lord Of The Flies (Photo: J Redza/Eleven/Sony Pictures Television)
Like many novels taught in American schools, William Golding’s Lord Of The Flies has been flattened, simplified, and divorced from its original context. According to plenty of classrooms, the book is about the inherent cruelty of humankind, implying that we’d revert to our natural state of beating each other over the head with rocks if it weren’t for authority figures and a strong government. Life would be “nasty, brutish, and short,” as Thomas Hobbes put it. It’s the broadest and least interesting take on a story written as a specific critique of imperialistic Western adventure tales like The Coral Island, where a group of shipwrecked British boys brought civilization to a supposedly “savage” corner of the globe. When the kids in Golding’s novel turn on each other, he wasn’t critiquing humanity writ large; he was taking a more precise shot at his own country’s double standards and how it fancied itself a bastion of decency while carrying out brutal acts of colonialism. As a teacher, he also drew on personal experiences with nightmarish English boarding school students.
Thankfully, Jack Thorne’s miniseries is much more interesting than the flat primary school explanation of this story. Instead of reducing these characters to abstract symbols, the show deftly engages with the humanity and deep-rooted flaws of these stranded children, something that makes it all the more crushing when things inevitably go south. Between sharp writing, a fantastic crop of young actors, and Marc Munden’s masterful direction that captures naive wonder and unspeakable horrors, you’ve never seen this familiar tale quite like this.
All the major plot points are the same—after a plane crash, a group of British boarding school boys are left alone on a tropical island without adults—but the biggest difference is the structure. Instead of entirely following the book’s protagonist, Ralph, each of the show’s four episodes follows a different kid (Piggy, Jack, Simon, and then Ralph). This isn’t a superficial change, but one that Thorne uses to meaningfully dive into each character’s inner life. For instance, Piggy (as his bullies cruelly nickname him) is still an intelligent asthmatic who broadly represents ideas like order and wisdom, but David McKenna and the script get at his underlying empathy to go beyond these metaphors. Frankly, he’s just very likable. The camera captures his first stumbling steps through the jungle while he sings a little tune to steady himself, as cinematographer Mark Wolf’s well-placed fish-eye lens visualizes his initial disorientation. There’s a ground-level perspective here that fills in the little moments in between the carnage, like when Piggy delivers bedtime stories to the younger kids, adding depth without losing the novel’s punchy pacing. One choice in particular sums up this humanizing approach: We eventually learn Piggy’s actual name, something the source material never divulges.
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