I was in high school when I read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Three decades later, I still remember the disturbing experience and particular images and lines from the book (“Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!”). Watching the new Netflix limited-series adaptation brought it all back—but even more viscerally.
The four-part series, developed by Jack Thorne as a follow-up to his acclaimed Adolescence, is harrowing and haunting.
In both Adolescence and this adaptation of Golding’s 1954 novel, Thorne explores themes of childhood innocence lost and the perils of boys growing into men—especially without the intentional involvement of adult male role models. Also like Adolescence, Thorne’s Lord of the Flies is told in four parts, with four character angles on a tragic, escalating situation.
Visually stunning and stylistically daring, the series is a largely faithful adaptation of the novel. The few things Thorne changes, however, are interesting and often elevate the source material.
Quick Descent from Civilized to Savages
The big idea of Golding’s Lord of the Flies is simple—so much so that the title has become shorthand in popular parlance for any time group dynamics devolve into chaos, power struggles, or tyrannous violence.
J Redza/Eleven/Sony Pictures Television
The story focuses on British schoolboys during WWII whose evacuation plane crashes on a tropical island, leaving them stranded without any grown-ups. Early attempts at maintaining order quickly devolve, ultimately leading the boys to lose their humanity and basically become animalistic savages. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick” (Jer. 17:9). “Wicked” isn’t something we become or get labeled by prejudiced others; it’s what we are by nature.
Thorne and series director Marc Munden brilliantly capture these central themes of the book, taking full advantage of visual storytelling tools to show the ideas more than tell them. Constant in the series (especially in the first and fourth episodes) are bookend images and contrasting doubles that show the jarring “before and after” of the boys’ descent into barbarism:
Robe-clad choirboys walking in perfect line at the beginning; the same boys caked in tribal makeup, wearing pagan masks, and dancing in pagan ecstasy by the end.
Singing sacred choral liturgy (“Hosanna in excelsis!“) at the start; violent chants about spilling blood at the end.
A series of close-up portraits of the boys, capturing their innocence, in episode 1; a matching sequence of portraits in the final moments of episode 4, showing the boys filthy, scarred, disturbed.
Edenic island beauty in episode 1; eerily red-hued, fiery, hallucinatory hellish imagery as the series progresses.
The series is also rife with wildlife imagery that reminded me of Terrence Malick’s “war in the heart of nature” approach in The Thin Red Line. We see close-ups of crabs and caterpillars that should feel cute but come across as ominous, insects fighting to the death, vultures waiting to swoop in for a feast of carcasses. Nature is cruel. Cursed is the ground.
J Redza/Eleven/Sony Pictures Television
The boy whose arc most underscores the descent into savagery, Jack (Lox Pratt), slinks through the jungle at one point like a big cat on the hunt. “The Beast is a hunter,” Jack says at one point about the mythical creature he uses to weaponize fear and consolidate power. “And there’s only one thing to do with hunters. Hunt back! Kill or be killed!”
Nature is cruel. Cursed is the ground.
The “survival of the fittest” Darwinian vibes reminded me of the postapocalyptic genre of films and TV shows (maybe because of the makeup, I kept thinking of Mad Max especially). Once civilization’s comforts and strictures are stripped away, humans are often portrayed as animals who will do anything to survive. Kill or be killed.
The zombie genre especially shows this. By the end of The Walking Dead‘s 11-season run, the human characters are mostly as savage and scary as the zombies. The recent 28 Years Later films make the same point. If mere survival is all that drives humans, they inevitably become ruthless animals no better than monsters and ghouls.
But humanity, endowed by God with a dignity higher than beasts, consists in more than just survival. Human life involves community, caring for others, bringing order from chaos, cultivating the garden’s wilds, showing and receiving grace. Piggy (David McKenna) and Ralph (Winston Sawyers) try hard to keep the boys human in this civilized, Christian sense. They call meetings and attempt an orderly polis. To no avail, sadly. When Piggy’s glasses (“specs”) get shattered in the final episode, it both foreshadows his ominous fate and symbolizes the hopelessness of his crusade.
People in a Tragedy, Not Points in an Argument
Spoilers follow.
Even as this is a story of civilized humans devolving into animallike savages, the characters in Lord of the Flies are people with real stories and real emotions. One of the ways this TV series feels like it enhances the book is in how much the humanity of these characters comes through via the format of visual storytelling (close-ups on faces, intonation of voices, affecting music, the sights and sounds of expressed emotion). More than just plot devices or archetypes used to make a point (which is occasionally how they feel in the book), these are little boys whose real pain makes us grieve.
Each episode focuses on one of the four main characters: Piggy, Jack, Simon, and Ralph. In a divergence from the book, we get backstories for these boys that inform the decisions they make on the island.
J Redza/Eleven/Sony Pictures Television
Some of the biggest divergences involve Piggy. He is actually given a name in this version (“Nicky”), presumably as a way to dignify and humanize him. His death scene—shockingly abrupt in the book—is altered here to be a slow, drawn-out, agonizingly sad sequence in the company of his one faithful friend on the island, Ralph. It’s gutting.
In a divergence from the book, we get backstories for these boys that inform the decisions they make on the island.
Even Jack—ostensibly the story’s villain—is given a backstory (distant father, loveless upbringing) that psychologically explains some of his bullying aggression. Here, however, the series risks losing its grip on one of Golding’s key theological insights—the reality of universal human depravity. Do these boys become savages because that tendency is in their nature? Or are they just young souls particularly wounded by wartime life and the hard knocks of boarding-school life? Are they bad to the bone or just “hurt people who hurt people”?
Confronting the Beast Within
One merit of Golding’s novel is that it powerfully depicts our sinful nature. We’re not just a tabula rasa where we could go good or bad. We’re prone to wander. Inclined to seek power. Prideful and reckless. Naughty by nature. Without Christ and the Holy Spirit’s remaking of our dark hearts, our beastly tendencies will lead us to destruction.
Set in a tropical paradise, Lord of the Flies essentially recreates Eden’s fall. The titular character is a pig’s head on a stick who symbolizes Satan or demonic idolatry (Beelzebub is literally “Lord of the Flies”), and the “beast” motif captures the human tendency to deflect and externalize evil as something “out there” rather than confronting it within ourselves.
Simon (in the novel and in the series) is a sort of Christ figure who resists the tempting whispers of Beelzebub, recognizes sin for what it is (an internal problem first), and yet is “crucified” (speared) by his peers. Episode 3 tells his tragic story and largely does it justice, apart from some unnecessary and cringey hints that his character has romantic feelings for Jack.
Without Christ and the Holy Spirit’s remaking of our dark hearts, our beastly tendencies will lead us to destruction.
Much of the book’s Christian symbolism comes through in Thorne’s series. And where there’s virtue in the story, the series draws it from Christian morality. But this telling of Lord of the Flies also feels post-Christian in the way that it steers away from a direct confrontation with human depravity and more toward a psychological explanation for the boys’ actions. These children are simply traumatized, fatherless, lost. Not evil.
The final scene, when the surviving boys are rescued, should feel joyous but instead feels incredibly sad. The music that plays is John Tavener’s Funeral Canticle. But what exactly should we grieve as the series ends? Do we grieve over these particular boys and the trauma they’ve inflicted or suffered—especially the unlucky ones who don’t make it off the island? Or is it a more general, existential grief over the destruction wrought by our sin in a fallen world? Do we grieve for what happened to these boys or for what they did to themselves?
I hope viewers will feel both. This is how Golding describes Ralph’s grief at the end of the novel: “Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of a true, wise friend called Piggy.” We should feel sadness and empathy for what these characters endured. But we should also feel anger, grief, conviction, and horror (“The horror! The horror!”) over the grievous, corrupting sin in ourselves and in everyone, which turns every paradise into a nightmare.
But also hope. For there is a Redeemer who reverses the curse, a God of grace who can turn even the most savage sinner into a saint.
The Gospel Coalition