Paradise Lost: “Lord of the Flies”

The British seem to have a special talent for creating TV miniseries. I was awed (as were most Emmy voters) by last year’s Adolescence. So when I heard that Jack Thorne, who had created that show along with Stephen Graham, was behind a new BBC adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, I had to watch.

 Like most in my age group, I read Golding’s 1954 magnum opus when I too was an adolescent. This story of young British boys stranded on a tropical island introduced all of us to the darker side of human nature. Lord of the Flies can be viewed as a canny parable of the fall of civilization. At first the pre-adolescent English boys, survivors of a plane crash that has wiped out their teachers and guardians, seem to have found themselves in a paradise: lush foliage, lots of fruit and fresh water, no obvious danger. But a crisis is brewing: while some of the boys, led by the sturdy and rational Ralph, are ready to accept a sensible form of self-government, others look to the mercurial Jack for leadership. And Jack, drunk on his own power, obliges by dividing the castaways into friends and enemies. Brutality ensues. (If any of this sounds like the current American political scene, I suspect that’s not an accident.)

 There have been films made of Golding’s novel, but I’ve never seen them. I’m also told that Yellowjackets, the recent Showtime miniseries, about a stranded girls’ soccer team, was directly influenced by Golding’s timeless work. What I can say is that the new BBC series, available now on Netflix, is well worth watching. Like Adolescence, it’s presented in four parts, with each episode focusing on one of the central boys. The first features the hapless Piggy who has accepted his lot in life as the butt of everyone’s jokes. Piggy, as his nickname implies, is short, pudgy, and slightly dazed-looking (he wears thick glasses that play an important role in the story). But despite the unfortunate nickname, Piggy is by no means stupid. He’s the most analytic of the boys, and one of the most generous, taking it as his obligation to look after the “littl’uns” who can’t fend for themselves. In subsequent episodes we focus on the increasingly maniacal Jack and on poor, addled Simon, who begins as Jack’s protector but then finds himself increasingly isolated. The final episode is dedicated to Ralph, a natural leader forced into an awkward and even dangerous position. Who eventually gets off the island? That’s not for me to say.

 This Lord of the Flies was filmed on location in Malaysia, and the beauty of the surroundings plays an important role in the drama. One of its most arresting elements—the fact that trees and other foliage sometimes take on eerie shades of red—turns out to be explained by practical considerations. Because of rules designed to protect child performers, there could be no filming after dark. So cameras were sometimes outfitted with infrared filters for day-for-night shooting. The result was a phantasmagoric color palette well suited to such a nightmarish tale, in which reality and fantasy become inevitably fused.

 A behind-the-scenes video suggests that the children in this cast—most of them new to professional filmmaking—came through their on-camera ordeal with their values intact. (Phew!) But it’s striking that the one cast member with a Wikipedia entry is Lox  Pratt, who will follow up his creepy performance as Jack by playing Draco Malfoy, boy bully, in the upcoming Harry Potter TV series. Clearly it pays to be evil. 

 

Growing Pains: Exploring “Adolescence”

Adolescence is a bland-sounding title for a limited TV series out of Britain that has accumulated eleven Emmy award nominations. Winners in this prestigious category  have included, over the decades, some of TV’s best dramas, including   Angels in America, The Queen’s Gambit, and several of Tom Hanks’ historical re-creations, including Band of Brothers and The Pacific.

 I have no crystal ball telling me who will take home the Emmy on September 14. I’m sure there are good things to be said about the other nominees: Black Mirror, Dying for Sex, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, and The Penguin. But I’ll be rooting for Adolescence to nab the top prizes in this category, both because of the importance of its ideas and the excellence of its craft.

 Adolescence has been widely described as a psychological crime drama, and this is accurate, as far as it goes. At its center is a murder, and the killer’s motives are certainly open to question. But there’s no emphasis here on tracking down the bad guy; this is not a case of rising suspense as the noose tightens. First of all, we know almost from the very beginning that the killer is an innocent-looking 13-year-old boy, who has dispatched a female classmate with multiple stabs of a knife. The real question is: why did this happen? Over the course of four one-hour episodes, the impact of the killing is approached from four very different angles. What makes for exciting television is the fact that each of the four has a different focus, requiring us to see a bloody but straightforward deed from very different perspectives.

 And, thrillingly, each of these four episodes is shot in a single (though very complex) take, which has the effect of drawing us into what seems like a televised reality program. This is especially true of Episode 1, in which—without preliminaries—a heavily armed police squad bursts into a working-class English home, terrifying its occupants. They head directly for an upstairs bedroom where a boy cowers in bed, in a room brightly decorated with outer space images. Jamie is told to get dressed, then is hustled out of the room, leaving his well-worn teddy bear behind. The murder charge seems as impossible to us as it does to his parents and sister, and Jamie denies everything. Throughout we can’t help admiring the professional way the British cops make sure his rights are protected.

 Episode 2 is led by a police detective who visits the school attended by both killer and victim. Again the emotions are raw, as students mourn their dead classmate and try to avoid being in any way implicated in the tragedy. But Detective Bascombe’s own son, an older student at the school, clues his father in to Instagram practices that may hold a clue to what’s going on.

 The heart of the drama is Episode 3, entirely devoted to a session between Jamie and a forensic psychologist. Here for the first time we grasp the complexity of the young man’s emotions  (Owen Cooper became the all-time youngest Emmy nominee in this category for this episode), and also the toll they take on his professional but kindly questioner.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is Episode 4, in which Jamie (facing trial) is only a voice on the telephone. That’s because we’re focused entirely on his well-meaning parents, who feel tremendous guilt for their son’s actions. The father, movingly played by Stephen Graham (also the co-author of the series) is a kind, serious man devoted to family life. Could he have stopped this tragedy? Could anyone?