By now, you’ve all seen the documentary from 1964, featuring 14 kids. Here are some of the notes I took while watching it. Many of the themes and comments in the documentary match Lord of the Flies, simply because Golding is dealing with the same issues the documentary is.
The 14 kids:
- John, Charles, Andrew: 3 posh boys on the sofa
- Paul, Simon: the two boys in the orphanage
- Bruce: the boarding school boy with blond hair (has a girlfriend in Africa)
- Suzi: the posh boarding school girl who takes ballet classes
- Tony, Susan, Jackie, Lynn: the kids from the East End of London
- Neil, Peter: the two boys from Liverpool who talk about “catchable, kissable” girls
- Nicholas: the little boy from Yorkshire who doesn’t want to answer “those kinds of questions”
Connections to Lord of the Flies:
- school bells in the East End school and at the Boys’ School dinner table represent authority/power, just like the conch
- the posh boys would be from the same social background as Ralph
- the boy leading the exercises (who kicks the younger kids in the ankles) would be like Jack leading the choir
- the boy named Tony from the East End would have the same background as Piggy
- when you see the boys fighting on the steps of the East End school and being ignored by the teacher, that’s the background Piggy would have come from; he would have been bullied and ignored
- Bruce, the boy who wants to be a missionary, is very much like Simon in Lord of the Flies; almost identical temperament
lllThemes:
the themes in Apted’s documentary can be found in Lord of the Flies, either in a subtle or a clear way
WatsonWork11 