Despite incredible performances by actresses like Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, Daisy Ridley and Gal Gadot proving — as if it even needs proof — that women and female-centric narratives deserve equal representation in film, women still only received 31 percent of speaking roles in the films of 2016.
Representation is even worse for female directors, LGBTQ+ women and women of color. The recent trend of making all-female remakes of classics, however, may be missing the point. Especially when that film is based on William Golding’s 1954 novel “Lord of the Flies.”
The novel, which follows the chaos and cruelty of a group of British schoolboys stranded on an unpopulated tropical island, was written to represent a specific brand of masculine aggression similar to that seen in the Stanford prison experiment or the recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Golding said in an interview that the book wasn’t written from a female point of view for two reasons. The first was that he simply didn’t have the authority or perspective, as a man, to write from a feminine point of view. Scott McGehee and David Siegal, the film’s directors, are obviously less hesitant about such a practice.
The second reason is, to me, more important. Golding said that one cannot “take a bunch of women and boil them down, so to speak, into a set of little girls who would then become a kind of image of civilization; of society.”
He isn’t implying here that women are not integral parts of society, but instead that they can’t be solely representative of a society that is historically patriarchal, especially a British one founded on colonialism and military conquest.
The proposed all-female remake of the novel takes these masculine issues and attempts to transplant them into a group of girls who would have entirely different societal experiences and expectations. As writer Roxane Gay tweeted: “An all women remake of 'Lord of the Flies' makes no sense because... the plot of that book wouldn't happen with all women.”
Similar to the whitewashing of films such as “Ghost in the Shell” or “Dr. Strange,” an all-female remake of “Lord of the Flies” simply ignores the cultural context and core social commentary that such a narrative attempts to make. I would be excited to watch a movie about a group of girls in the same initial situation, but the subsequent events should depart from what occurred in the novel so that Golding’s allegory is not miscommunicated or entirely destroyed.
In fact, this may be the direction the directors end up pursuing. In a recent interview, McGehee said that the retelling “breaks away from some of the conventions and the ways we think of boys and aggression.”
While they do a good job at creating more roles for actresses, these kinds of remakes create the unsettling implication that women have no stories of their own and can merely retell ones that men have already told. They become caricatures or nostalgic descendants of preexisting film.
Instead, why don’t we allow more women to write and direct their own films and tell their own personal, historical or literary stories?
“Hidden Figures,” Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and the forthcoming “A Wrinkle In Time” show that these kinds of narratives not only exist but can also have profound socio-cultural and political value. I can think of many more stories like this, and I sincerely hope that Hollywood continues to invest in equality.
jhoffer@indiana.edu
@jhoffer17
