Had Lois Lowry published her celebrated dystopian story The Giver today, it might have been totally forgotten. Not because the 1993 book is forgettable---it would be simply be lost in the the current sea of not-that-innocent YA fiction. Compared with high-adventure successors like The Hunger Games and Divergent, which take their anti-conformist allegories to death-defying heights, The Giver is a quiet pastoral about the heartbreaking realities of being human. It's a slim book—at 192 pages, really more of novella—about a community that has opted to filter out the extremities of human nature. There are no televised death matches, no potential coups. It's easy to see how Jonas, the book's gentle protagonist, might get overshadowed, even ridiculed by today's hardened YA-loving crowd for the simplicity of his story.
The Giver's film adaptation is far more likely to appeal to younger fans, those who might have found the book quaint when forced to read it in school.Thankfully, the book, whose film adaptation hits theaters today, emerged nearly 20 years before the young-adult fiction world and Hollywood became consumed by flashier, more brutal stories. That publication date made it possible for the book, so atypical at the time, to be added to junior high reading lists across the nation. (And it continues to be, according to my own junior high English teacher.) But The Giver's film adaptation is far more likely to appeal to younger fans, those who might have found the book quaint when forced to read it in school. And while twentysomethings who hold their * Giver* memories dear may be unsettled by some of its on-screen updates, the differences between the two versions are so stark that they might be a blessing. Even the book's biggest fans will have a hard time totally condemning this new version, because it's an effective reminder of how much has changed in such a short time within the genre (even if "dystopian YA" wasn't even a genre at the time), and even within our own lives.
Lowry's original story portrays Jonas as a 12-year-old boy who---thanks to an annual job recruitment rite called the Ceremony of Twelve (which Divergent author Veronica Roth may have borrowed for her story's Choosing Ceremony)---is chosen as the next Receiver of Memory. The gig, handed down once a generation, requires the former Receiver to expose him to foreign concepts like "suffering" and "love" and even "color" via transferred Memories. This then prompts the revelation that the Receiver's hometown has for many generations lived by a policy called Sameness, under which the Community's Elders medicate and organize their citizens—while monitoring them à la Big Brother with speaker systems and a strict code of Rules that are followed unquestioningly to the letter.
No one in Jonas' Community has read a book that does not pertain to the Rules or civil policy, nor do they have any concept of life outside of Sameness---except the Receiver of Memory, whose job it is to safeguard institutional knowledge of the outside world in case the Elders need wisdom to make policy decisions. The Receiver is greatly burdened, and---as Jonas learns---incredibly lonely, as the one person who is aware of the wonderful and terrible things the Community has opted to forget in return for stability. In the post-Hunger Games world of 2014, however, Jonas is no longer a delicate, prepubescent child; instead, he's played onscreen by the very adult 25-year-old Brenton Thwaites portraying an 18-year-old. The choice means he's more relatable to the film's target audience—and his crush, a gentle girl named Fiona, is able to be roped into his ensuing subterfuge without any moral guilt—but his maturity also seems to strip away much of the tragic fall-from-grace agony that made the book so celebrated. (Imagine if Ender's Game had starred a 25-year-old.)
>In many ways, Lowry's Sameness is quietly revolutionary.
The Elders are harder-edged, too. In their original incarnation, they were mostly faceless authorities who have little part in the narrative other than to kowtow to the Receiver of Memory (played in the film by Jeff Bridges); now they take a turn for the sinister in the form of Meryl Streep's fascist Chief Elder. Her character is so stern, so dedicated to the hierarchy of Sameness, that it seems as though she has experienced what the Receiver has: the pain and suffering that birthed the totalitarian Community she so closely monitors now.
The puritanical world in which The Giver takes place sounds ominous---without question, it's horribly racist and ageist at its heart. But through the eyes of the Giver (as the Receiver becomes known when he begins training his successor), the reader comes to understand his Community as a collective of naïve, easily frightened people---Elders included---who should be pitied for their emotional fragility rather than despised. It's an empathetic, complex view of a societal archetype that has become cartoonish and utterly vilified in more recent works (Hunger Games' Capitol citizens come to mind).
In many ways, Lowry's Sameness is quietly revolutionary: Masculinity is not as sharp-edged in the Community, and womanhood is not defined by motherhood. The Community takes care of one another in a closed ecology, self-governing through public shame rather than punishment. If you take away the more fascist aspects, one can easily see what would be attractive about living without pain or chaos in a world like this. We see its grave flaws, but we understand the unbearable pain of death and loss that would drive a community to want to feel nothing. That's what the film version—coming at a time when emotional nuance gets lost in life-or-death struggles in YA movies—can't help but lack.
>through the eyes of the Giver (as the Receiver becomes known when he begins training his successor), the reader comes to understand his Community as a collective of naïve, easily frightened people.
But if The Giver's Hollywood adaptation is less merciful and more rigid, it's because its audience lost as much innocence as the story's now-older protagonist. The new film blows its quiet source text into gorgeous, daring high-definition, making aesthetic and character choices that veer from the book's simplicity, but those choices more effectively reflect the technological realities that have developed over the past two decades; they actually serve the Community and its goals better than a strict interpretation might have. Streep's Chief Elder can now rival the effectiveness of Kate Winslet's Jeanine in Divergent and The Hunger Games' President Snow in representing the dangers of ignorance and oppression, the way that The Giver of 1993 probably could not have.
The movie's new severity is probably necessary as well; while young people may still read the same, older classics in school, they're being confronted earlier and earlier by those severe, ugly realities of life. It's only logical that the culturally significant fiction that aims to reach them should similarly accelerate. Between 1993 and today, most kids—most people, really—enjoying dystopian fiction have lost that part of them that believed the comfortable safety of the Community might have ever been possible in the first place.
