Lord of the Flies: Comparative Analysis

Lord of the Flies Movie/Book Comparative Analysis

By: Max Duckworth

The novel Lord of the Flies has been read by roughly fourteen-and-a-half-million people and has influenced the lives of many. It is on multiple ‘best books’ lists and had even been compared to JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye; a great accomplishment. It was inevitable that this huge success would hit the big-screen and—with in six years—it was at the cinema. The 1960 version of the film had very high reviews and was in black and white. Thirty years after this, Harry Hook decided it was time to remake the movie and bring the book back to life. However, although the movie and the book share the same name, they are very different. There are three—important—differences between these two tales of young boys forced to create a government and fight for themselves. The three differences are: the arrival, the symbolism of the Lord of the Flies, and Jack’s development and decent into savagery.

Firstly, the arrival plays a crucial role and helps the story-line develop as the book wears on. In the book, the arrival is made up of children (who had never before met) who were thrown into the jungle and had to find themselves. Ralph blew the conch which gave him leadership status and filled the conch with power and authority. In the movie, the boys have all been previously acquainted and arrived together—after having blown up a raft they salvaged from the plane making the blowing of the conch redundant. Ralph was the chief due to the boys’ previous knowledge of each other from military school and not chosen due to an election, or his calling together an assembly. This then, makes it unrealistic when Jack and the other children abandon him because they would have instilled trust in one another prior to the events in the novel. This implausible abandonment degrades the story as a whole.

The second difference is the symbolism of the Lord of the Flies. The symbol that bears the name of the book should have been included in the movie, but it wasn’t. The Lord of the Flies is the decapitated head of a boar that has been impaled on a stick that functions as an offering to a fictitious beast that one of the little’uns created. Although the Lord of the Flies was translated literally into the book (by which I mean it was there), the symbolism was lost. In the novel, the head symbolized the devil (Lord of the Flies can be translated to Beelzebub) and extended the Simon-Jesus metaphor. In the movie however, the head is nothing more than a head and does nothing to even indicate a satanic presence on the island, this creates a ripple effect which—in turn—remove’s Simon’s Jesus-like nature and greatly lessens his role in the movie.

The third point is the boys’ decent into savagery, to be specific: Jack Meridew’s decent into savagery. In the novel, it takes a while for the choir-boy to become a monstrous dictator. It happens after a long process of prioritizing hunting over survival and putting himself before others. In the novel, this is shown a lot, making the decent clear. In the movie, however, Jack seems to transform almost instantly. Golding wanted to show that savagery is a state of mind that surfaces after layers of intense stress building up inside, and revealing the evil evident in humans. In the movie, Jack seems to flip a (metaphorical) switch that instantly transforms him into a monster. This of course removes Golding’s desired point and a substantial part of the story-line.

All in all, the movie is worlds apart from the book. The book has reached out and touched the lives of millions, whereas the movie didn’t even clear fourteen-million dollars at the box office and has a six-point-two—out of ten—rating on IMBD (Internet Movie Data Base) . The book started differently, actually includes the symbolism of the Lord of the Flies and makes the decent into savagery more like a process than a sudden change. Despite their differences, they both tell a powerful, inspiring story.