Vanity Fair: Gender-flipped remakes aren’t a new concept in Hollywood, but they have been popping up with surprising regularity. Last year brought us the Ghostbusters redux that made trolls cry crocodile tears. Next year will bring us the glamorous Ocean’s Eleven remake, starring Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Mindy Kaling, Rihanna, and more. One hopeful day, Jillian Bell’s gender-swapped version of Splash, co-starring Channing Tatum, will hit our screens. All of these films make perfect sense, re-fitting modern classics to a female perspective and, frankly, giving actresses juicy roles that typically go to their male colleagues. But not every story makes sense to gender-flip. Particularly if that story is William Golding’s classic Lord of the Flies, a vicious tale about a barbaric boy-made society.
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My biggest criticism of this reimagining of Lord of the Flies is not the gender swap, but rather that it is wet to be adapted by two men. To say that an island inhabited by a colony of stranded girls would not become so aggressive or stratify socially as intensely as boys is still a misogynistic statement. Girls, at that point in their social development, would definitely form a society with the same hegemonic groups because girls are also human beings. I worked on a production of Lord of the Flies that was double cast; one night would be the traditional casting, and the next would be gender-swapped. We did not adapt the script in any way for the female cast. Both casts were equally as intriguing, but the female cast's show was definitely more talked about. I think we were drawn to that interpretation because we rarely see girls in popular media without a strictly feminine identity. Even though the girls didn't have that feminine identity, their reading of the script was no less believable.
I'm not going to talk about the troubling fact that this adaptation is being created, written, and directed by men. I hope other commenters will cover that for me. I want to address how I don't understand the point of doing an all-female adaption of Lord of the Flies because, as the author of this article points out, the entire concept of the book is to examine toxic masculinity and systemic male violence. I am not trying to say that women are perfect and not capable of violence, but the systems of feminity embedded in our culture and in ourselves would not make for this kind of expression of that violence. If this piece was being created simply as an exercise to give women a chance at these roles, I guess that would be fine, but the story itself being constructed around female characters just doesn't make sense. My freshmen year CMU did a production of Lord of the Flies where the character of Jack, the instigator of much of the violence, was one of the only women in the cast, at the time that choice seemed off to me. Now I am able to better articulate why, turning Jack (or the entire cast) into women makes the story seem like it is just about violence for violence sake, rather than violence as a troubling expression of a self-perpetuating cultural system.
Honestly I am intrigued to see how this new version of Lord of the Flies will turn out. I can't deny I am skeptical to see how well two men can do to depict the inner depths of females and the outcome of them being stranded on the island. I hope they realize that every change they make from the original to adhere to the gender change will be them walking on a tedious line of being sexist. I remember reading Lord of the Flies and the only memories I have of the story are the brutal animalistic ways the boys lived and fought with each other. Women were raised to be submissive, gentle, and kind, so it is hard to imagine how similar the stories will be when the original focuses on boys being boys on a deserted island.
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