The Kiddy Pool: Feeling and Memory in The Giver

Every Tuesday in The Kiddy Pool, Erin Newcomb confronts one of many issues that parents must deal with related to popular culture.

For a story purportedly about the importance of memory, Phillip Noyce’s The Giver seems remarkably forgetful of its origins. In “The Searcher,” Robin Wasserman indicates the place that Lowry and her 1993 novel merit within the young adult canon: “It’s difficult to imagine, in our post-“Hunger Games” world, how unusual and unsettling it was then for a children’s book to touch on euthanasia, suicide and murder, to couch it all in a bleak vision of political and emotional oppression and to leave its protagonist’s ultimate fate undecided. In many ways, Lowry invented the contemporary young adult dystopian novel.” Yet despite the story that started it all, the film falls aptly into its own trap of “sameness,” as Slate’s L.V. Anderson aptly describes.

Indeed, though Lowry is known for respecting her audience, and Dan Kois hails her as “The Children’s Author Who Actually Listens to Children,” Noyce’s film adaptation expects little of its audience and erases much of the ambiguity that makes the novel haunting (and, as one of my fellow moviegoers pointed out, a lot more depressing). Kois cites a conversation with Lowry about the state of YA on screen: “Lowry pointed out, that every young-adult book published is a dystopian thriller packed with action sequences. ‘And that’s why they’re getting made into movies and mine has been out in Hollywood for 16 years — they can’t figure out where the action is.’” Noyce’s film does not lack for action, but its emphasis on high speed chases and sinister elders loses much of the subtlety that makes the book so compelling.

Take, for instance, Fiona (played by the stunning Odeya Rush). The film characters are older than the book characters, easing the way forward for sexual tension and awkward love triangles that most audiences would find disconcerting if represented by 12-year-olds. Fiona becomes an accomplice to Jonas’ escape, serving as a decoy while he rescues the doomed baby Gabriel; yet that intense chase scene epitomizes Rush’s role throughout the story—as a distraction. Her place in the story and her relationship with Jonas highlight the central problem of Noyce’s tale, where feelings and emotions are regarded as synonymous with memory. Both The Dude (wait, I mean The Giver) and The Receiver succumb to the pointless pattern of trying to make other members of the community feel things outside of their memories, and the message seems to be that the only way to act responsibly is to feel.

Call me coldhearted, but I’ve experienced too often in my life what I think of as the tyranny of feelings. Feeling something does not make it real or true. Feelings can lie. And the love that really propels Jonas to change is not the eros he feels for Fiona but the agape he chooses for Gabriel. No matter how long Jeff Bridges waxes didactic about love and feelings (to a group of elders who, according to the logic of the story, can’t understand anything he’s saying), there are only two direct expressions of love in the film—both of them representative of agape. The Giver declares his love for Jonas upon agreeing to stay behind and deal with the torrent of memory into the community; and Jonas expresses his love for Gabriel in a heartwarming scene of peek-a-boo. Both The Giver and The Receiver willingly lay down their lives for those they love, and the movie’s attempt to insert Fiona into that sacrificial lamb category as well seems internally illogical.

Indeed it is only those who embody the memory who bear the wisdom and strength to practice agape love. That’s what memory is for—memory that testifies, love that pushes us to sacrifice ourselves. Without memory, Meryl Streep’s creepy hologram character is right that humans are cruel and selfish and prone to passions that deteriorate into contempt. Collective memory acts as antidote to feeling, which often gives rise to the very violence that The Giver depicts as part and parcel of the human condition. Noyce’s decision to literally insert Jonas into the memories (where he becomes the solider or the poacher or the groom) illustrates just how often feelings get in the way of working toward the good of humanity. We are feeling animals, all complicit in the violence that seems to be our ontology. Yet the film also seems strangely at odds with laying that burden squarely on the shoulders of the viewers as well as The Community (which, really, is meant to stand in for all our communities, back and back and back). By vilifying the elders generally and Meryl Streep and Katie Holmes particularly, the film conveys what Fiona spits at one point: “There’s something missing from our lives, something stolen.”

She knows that because she felt, for her day without medication, “the stirrings.” But where the film falls into the YA trope of adults versus children here, there’s potential for a lot more nuance, without the comfortable lessons learned that comprise Noyce’s conclusion. While Noyce’s film instantly identifies itself as dystopian (and read Mallory Ortberg’s YA parody here for the movie’s clichéd structure), the beauty of the book is that we, like the characters, grapple with the hazy divide between utopia and dystopia. That too is the human condition, where feelings exist on a spectrum that lead us from love to war, often one in the name of the other. And while scenes of battle and weddings make good montages for Noyce’s film, it’s the everyday acts of courage and cowardice that define our communities. It’s the ways that we care—or fail too—when we don’t feel like it. It’s the road to Jerusalem, from celebration to crucifixion, where human feelings inevitably fall short, but agape triumphs over all.

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