All-female adaptation of book won’t fly

William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies is iconic — largely thanks to high school required reading, but the novel is one of the first of its kind to explore the now familiar question of what happens when a group of students gets stranded on an island.

They descend into savagery, obviously.

But because leaving well enough alone is not a concept Hollywood understands, Warner Bros has just greenlit a new film adaptation of the novel. This time, however, the film will feature a female cast instead of male. The novel was adapted for film in both 1963 and 1990.

Deadline reports Scott McGehee and David Siegel will write and direct. They previously collaborated on What Maisie Knew, Bee Season and The Deep End — so nothing remotely encouraging.

McGehee said the subject “is aggressively suspenseful, and taking the opportunity to tell it in a way it hasn’t been told before, with girls rather than boys, is that it shifts things in a way that might help people see the story anew. It breaks away from some of the conventions, the ways we think of boys and aggression.”

So here’s where things get a little fuzzy (and where social media quickly found fault on Wednesday): it’s difficult to envision an all-female version of this particular story, since women don’t have a parallel dynamic to patriarchy and masculine toxicity (prevailing themes in the novel), and because having two men pen that vision seems a little contradictory and very likely to lead to stereotypes and more than a few inaccuracies.

As writer Roxane Gay pointed out on Twitter, “An all women remake of Lord of the Flies makes no sense because ... the plot of that book wouldn’t happen with all women.”

Several Twitters also pointed out that a female version of Lord of the Flies already exists in movies like Heathers, Mean Girls and Jawbreaker — just in a different setting, but with a similar style of warfare.

Golding himself said he chose to focus on boys instead of girls because that is, obviously, a perspective he knows, and because “a group of little boys are more like scaled down society than a group of little girls will be ... This has nothing to do with equality at all. I think women are foolish to pretend they’re equal to men — they’re far superior, and always have been. But one thing you cannot do with them is take a bunch of them and boil them down into a set of little girls who would then become a kind of image of civilization, or society. That’s another reason why they aren’t little girls.”

And considering the backlash that rose after the all-female reboots of both Ghostbusters and Ocean’s 11 were announced, it’s only a matter of time until Lord of the Flies fanboys start speaking out (if they, too, exist).