All-girl ‘Lord of the Flies’? Author Golding would laugh at film

An all-female cast of “Ghostbusters” came out fine. But what if “Lord of the Flies” were remade to be all girls instead of preteen boys?

Before it became a movie, first in 1963 and then 1990, it was a shocking book by William Golding in 1954. It depicted how a couple dozen island-stranded boys devolved into evil little creatures, a reflection of human nature without societal norms.

The New York Times noted the “immediate scrutiny on social media” and skepticism over a film about girls written and directed by two men, Scott McGehee and David Siegel.

“It breaks away from some of the conventions, the ways we think of boys and aggression,” Siegel said. “People still talk about the movie and the book from the standpoint of pure storytelling. It is a great adventure story, real entertainment, but it has a lot of meaning embedded in it as well.”

Author Golding, who died in 1993, explained how boys instead of girls (or a mix of sexes) were chosen for the book.

“If you land with a group of little boys, they are more like scaled-down society than a group of little girls would be. Don’t ask me why, and this is a terrible thing to say, because I’m going to be chased from hell to breakfast by all the women who talk about equality. This has nothing to do with equality at all,” he said in a taped interview.

“I mean, 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, so to speak, into a set of little girls who would then become a kind of image of civilization, of society.”

The Times quoted Pamela Davis-Kean, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan who studies children and families: “It could be problematic if all they’re doing is switching out girls for boys and saying, ‘Well, girls would do this too.’”

Social media had its say.