One of my favorite books is Lord Of The Flies. I’m not sure if that is still a book that schools may require students to read or not but I remember it was one we had to when I went. I believe it was 7th or 8th grade when I read it. Perhaps it was the symbolism within the story that I found interesting. Mainly the symbolism of the “fair haired boy” which is revealed to be the protagonist of the book Ralph. He was written in with that description as a symbolism of innocence and also to foreshadow him as the protagonist. The antagonist in the book is Jack, whom is described as having red hair, this was to symbolize and foreshadow him as being savage and devilish. I believe most of us who were required to read it had been taught of this symbolism as well, or I should say I was by my English teacher I can only presume most others had been given that indication as well if as a reader it was not already picked up on. I mention the above as that is the back drop for what I am about to rant about. I was on Netflix and noticed that they just dropped a limited series of Lord of the Flies. Seeing that, I was intrigued so I figured I would try it out. It starts off with one of the main characters, Piggy. Starts off with him waking up and then he starts going through the jungle yelling out to see if there is anyone else there with him. About 10 minutes in, maybe less he comes across a boy with dark colored hair and it turns out to be Ralph. I turned the fucking thing off immediately, for one it was starting slow to my liking, but they lost me, when once again, they fucked up and cast someone with dark hair to play Ralph. I will admit as a movie, I did like the 1990 film adaptation but they fucked that one up too, as well as the original black and white film version where Jack had blonde hair and Ralph had brown but it looked black due to being black and white. With something that is truly significant in that book to symbolize something I find it disgusting and fucking ridiculous that nobody can fucking get it right. I don’t give a fuck if they need to throw wigs on the characters for it to be right but it really fucking pisses me off that they can not get, what to me, is a major detail of the book right in any film versions of it. It’s disgusting and I don’t know why they keep fucking this up it’s a fucking disgrace and frankly disrespectful to the book and to William Golding’s writing in it. Often times readers of books that see a film adaptation of a book they read, they say ah, the book was better. There are things in writing that can be hard to translate into a film, for example emotion or how someone may be thinking in a scene may be difficult to truly translate into film but c’mon when film makers that do adaptations fail on something so simple as fucking hair color on characters it just shows how fucking lazy they are and how horrible their true attention to detail must be. Anyways, I think that is about all I can say right now but it is frustrating when they can never get something like that right for this particular book. Hey Hollywood, if you want a good proper adaptation of it in the future, I’m your huckleberry and I guarantee it will be better than all the others so far. If it isn’t well one thing will be for certain. Ralph’s gonna have fair fucking hair and Jack’s is gonna be red. That is all.
Basket of Thoughts 