Critique: Boys, Beasts, and a Bloated Lord of the Flies

Source: jacobin
Authors: ByEileen Jones
URL: https://jacobin.com/2026/05/lord-flies-netflix-golding-thorne

## What the article reports

Eileen Jones reviews Netflix's four-part adaptation of *Lord of the Flies*, written by Jack Thorne and directed by Marc Munden. The piece critiques the adaptation's visual excess, its structural departure from Golding's novel, and Thorne's stated intent to reframe the story away from Golding's essentialist view of human nature. Jones also challenges Thorne's broader concern for boys and masculinity, expressed in interviews, treating it as culturally retrograde.

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## Factual accuracy — Shaky

The piece contains one notable factual error: throughout a key passage about Golding's biography, the author refers to him as "Goldman" — twice — apparently a careless substitution. This is not a stylistic choice; it names the wrong person ("Goldman claimed his bleak tale of kids gone primitive…"; "Goldman was aiming at a realistic portrait…").

Beyond that error, verifiable details hold up reasonably well. The novel's publication year (1954) is correct. The "Tongan castaways" reference — six teenagers shipwrecked in 1965, rescued fifteen months later — is accurate in its broad strokes. The reference to *The Coral Island* (1857) as a target of Golding's critique is standard literary history. Golding's Royal Navy service and D-Day participation are accurate. Thorne's quotes are attributed with sufficient specificity to be checkable.

The Golding quotation about "beasts in the human psyche" is presented without a source citation (no interview, no essay title), which is a minor but real gap.

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## Framing — Polemical

This is, structurally and tonally, an opinion piece, though Jacobin does not label it as such with any editorial tag beyond the byline. Given that context, neutrality is not the appropriate standard — but transparency about stance and coherent argumentation still are. Several framing choices go beyond evaluation of the adaptation and into open cultural argument:

1. **"No wonder its audience scores are rotten."** Stated as self-evident vindication of the author's view, with no audience-score figure cited, no Rotten Tomatoes or similar source. This positions crowd sentiment as confirmation of the author's taste without evidence.

2. **"Critics, who are falling all over themselves praising the script."** The construction reduces all positive critical reception to uncritical fawning, with no specific critic or review cited. It forecloses engagement with any positive argument.

3. **"Nobody named in the Jeffrey Epstein files brought to justice?"** This appears without setup or argumentative connection. It follows a paragraph about toxic masculinity and reads as a rhetorical flourish rather than an analytical claim, importing a separate controversy to darken the cultural association.

4. **"Which is so pitiful a directive to hold onto for life, I feel a bit sorry for him."** A direct personal judgment on Thorne's psychology from his tattoo — goes well beyond craft criticism into mockery.

5. **"Do we, though?"** Authorial-voice rhetorical question deployed against Thorne's "prism of masculinity" quote, asserting the author's conclusion rather than presenting it as a perspective.

6. **"Looking at the world today, Golding's fundamental allegory seems pretty spot on."** The closing sentence, entirely unattributed, converts a literary-critical review into a political assertion about the present moment.

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## Source balance

| Voice | Affiliation | Stance on adaptation / Thorne |
|---|---|---|
| Jack Thorne (quoted multiple times) | Screenwriter/subject | Presented as target of critique |
| William Golding (quoted once) | Novel's author | Used to contradict Thorne |
| David McKenna, Winston Sawyers, Lox Pratt, Ike Talbut | Cast members | Mentioned descriptively, not quoted |
| No critics named or quoted | — | Referenced dismissively as a bloc |

**Ratio:** The only substantive external voices are Thorne (as subject of critique) and Golding (invoked to undercut Thorne). No critic who praised the series is named or quoted; no defender of Thorne's interpretive framework is given space. The "critics praising" the piece are treated as a collective error rather than as sources whose arguments could be engaged. **Supportive-to-critical ratio for Thorne's position: approximately 0:3.**

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## Omissions

1. **No named critical voices in favor of the adaptation.** The piece claims critics "are falling all over themselves praising" it but quotes none of them. A reader cannot evaluate whether those praises rest on arguments the author has failed to address.

2. **No audience-score source.** "Audience scores are rotten" is a factual claim without a citation. Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb, or Letterboxd scores would be easily checkable.

3. **Thorne's broader body of work.** *Adolescence* is mentioned but not described in enough detail for a reader unfamiliar with it to assess whether Jones's characterization of it as companion piece is apt or contested.

4. **The "toxic masculinity" debate context.** Thorne's quoted concern about the phrase is treated as self-evidently retrograde. The piece does not acknowledge that this is a contested semantic and sociological debate with a range of positions — it simply rebuts Thorne with reference to the Epstein files and "the manosphere."

5. **Golding's own contested legacy.** Golding's personal life — documented misogyny, admitted assault — is relevant to any discussion of what his novel "really means" and has been extensively discussed in literary criticism. Its omission here is notable given the piece's interest in gendered politics.

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## What it does well

- **The adaptation's formal properties are described precisely.** Phrases like "distorting fish-eye lens shots, blurred-out flashbacks, extreme slo-mo, many choppy montages" give the reader a concrete sense of the aesthetic without requiring they have seen the show.
- **The Golding-vs-Thorne interpretive disagreement is clearly staged.** Placing Golding's own words about "beasts in the human psyche" directly against Thorne's counter-thesis ("This is not about who we are when we're at our essence") gives the reader the genuine crux of the adaptation's argument.
- **"McKenna manages to be both officious and adorable"** — the acting assessments are specific and grounded, and represent the most straightforwardly craft-focused section of the piece.
- **The Tongan castaways reference** is a legitimate and underused counterpoint to Golding's realism claims; its inclusion adds genuine intellectual texture.
- **The Coral Island context** ("a children's adventure novel that suggested that a group of British kids, cast away, would inevitably establish a lawful, rationally ordered Christian democracy") correctly situates Golding's novel in its literary-polemical tradition — useful background.

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## Rating

| Dimension | Score | One-line justification |
|---|---|---|
| Factual accuracy | 6 | "Goldman" error is a clear factual mistake; most other verifiable claims hold, but the Golding quote lacks a source citation |
| Source diversity | 4 | Only voices are the subject (Thorne, as target) and Golding; praised critics are invoked but unnamed and unquoted |
| Editorial neutrality | 2 | Openly polemical throughout; moves from film review into cultural argument without signaling the shift; several claims are authorial assertions rather than attributed positions |
| Comprehensiveness/context | 6 | Strong on literary-historical background; weak on the adaptation's defenders, audience data, and the broader masculinity debate it engages |
| Transparency | 7 | Byline present, outlet's political orientation (Jacobin) is well-known to readers; no disclosure of whether the author watched the full series or correction policy link |

**Overall: 5/10 — A knowledgeable but openly partisan review that conflates adaptation criticism with cultural-political argument, at the cost of engaging seriously with the case for the series.**