What's wrong with being problematic? — a second look at the proposed "Lord of the Flies" with an all-female cast.

I started the day with a post about the proposal, and my take was cynical: The filmmakers are enjoying the publicity generated by the predictable criticism in social media.

Now, I'm reading a NYT piece about the proposal, and I see this:

What remains to be seen is whether the new “Lord of the Flies” will offer largely a mirror image of the novel, subbing in girls without changing the central plot points and behavior of the characters, or if it will wrestle with how girls would approach their fate differently.

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

Though many differences between boys and girls tend to be overstated, boys do tend to be more physically aggressive, she said. Some of the novel’s scenes of physical violence probably wouldn’t align with how girls would settle their issues.... The depth of collaboration could be another departure, she said....

But why shouldn't the filmmakers do exactly what is problematic? Why take a classic story and feminize it by making the girls less physically aggressive and more collaborative in their problem solving? That would only be interesting if you searched for ways to make the girls more evil than the boys. If girls just do better... what's the story? It's not like a season of "Survivor" where they have an all-male and an all-female tribe struggling to survive on an island and we're invited to enjoy seeing who does better and who screws up.

I think the new film should pretty much track the book. The fact that it's "problematic" to make the boys into girls is what's different and not the same. It's like that recent theatrical experiment that took a real Hillary Clinton/Donald Trump debate and gave the Hillary role to a man and the Trump role to a woman, with the 2 actors copying every intonation and gesture from the original. It was emphatically not the same, nor was it simply implausible (because how could a man speak and act like Hillary and a woman speak and act like Trump?). It was a revelation. The "female Trump" wasn't the most typical woman, but we could experience her as a particular woman, and — even more important — we could witness our own reaction to a woman like that.

So I think the proposed "Lord of the Rings" could be highly enlightening. Lean into the problem. Do not try to feminize the parts. Do not infuse the story with handed-down notions about what women are like stereotypically (which would probably be infected with the usual pro-woman propaganda*). Just make the boys girls and let's see how we feel about it.
__________________

* William Golding, the author of "Lord of the Flies," dished up the conventional propaganda himself:

“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. 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.”

That quote appears in the linked NYT article and other discussions of this film project. Golding is saying quite a few things about women there, both explicitly and implicitly. (Implicitly, he's saying he doesn't want to be bothered dealing with women!) But I scoff at that old idea that women are "far superior" to men. Notice how Golding used that as an anti-equality argument. It's interesting to read that his mother was a suffragist. It was once conventional to tell women that they should not have the right to vote because it would lower them from their superior position.