The Giver: Teen Dystopian Filth
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- čas přidán 27. 02. 2022
- Let's talk about the absolute nightmare that is The Giver 2014! Visit curiositystream.com/bigjoel and get thousands of exciting documentaries and access to my streaming service Nebula, where I have all my beautiful Nebula Plus videos.
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why did you delete than reupload?
there was a weird little glitch that I needed to fix, tragically
Hello.
@@BigJoel curse you, I had a comment that had a lot of likes and I forgot what I said. You have personally robbed me of those likes, and all the potential likes that comment would have gotten as the video got more attention. I can never forgive you for this
Hey its that guy who thinks you should let people steal from you infinitely because you shouldn't be allowed to protect your property. Because your precious labor time is meaningless since he is so privileged, money is no object for him.
One of the things I find most memorable and unique about this book is that the dystopia isn't evil. It's cold, invasive, and even cruel at times, and the way it creates community feels artificial to the reader, but it isn't evil. There is one explicitly horrific act, but it's unclear whether the perpetrators are even aware of what they're doing. Panem, Oceania, whatever the city in Divergent was called, etc. all get a mustache twirling dictator and protagonists who suffer, which works well in more political stories, but in The Giver there's just... nothing. Just a society of mild-mannered, nice people who have forgotten what it means to be human. It's this poignant, emotional parable about alienation and why it's important to feel.
Anyway, the movie added a mustache twirling dictator.
I agree, and I found the world more compelling because it wasn't a person or government trying to take advantage of other people for selfish reasons, you could see this society was likely built by people who wanted to do right by everyone and try to make a perfect world with no pain, inadvertently making the dystopia of the story.
The city in divergent had some weird name like "Chicago"
Right? I feel like that's something even a lot of adult dystopias don't get right. Although I'm not sure it's really "right" more than any other interpretation... But it was a perspective I STILL haven't really seen again, and one that does have SOME correspondence to reality.
@@maplepainttube8158 exactly, in trying to make a utopia, they made a dystopia, and that's just so much more interesting than a phoned in rehash of, "mwahahaha, I'm evil government person"
It's very Brave New World-ish; there may have been some ill-intentioned people controlling it at the start, but now it's just been running for so long that it's turned into nothing more than tradition and ritual that people no longer know how to question.
I sent a message to Lois Lowry through her website like 10 years ago to tell her how much I loved The Giver as a middle schooler. I figured it was a contact box that would go to an assistant or her agent but the next day she emailed me back directly to tell me thank you. 😭 She seems like a nice lady
Same!!
How do you know it didnt go to an assistant or her agent?
@@williammiller3277not sure but this what she wrote in response in 2013 "Thanks so much, Joy! I appreciated your email and am so glad you like Son so much!
Lois Lowry"
i did the same thing lol, she was my favourite author
@@baconblubber She may have. Not saying she didn't as I have no way of knowing. But exactly what assistants have done since the days of the autopen.
The Giver movie actually reminds me a lot of the Lorax movie. Both are based off short, abstract books that serve to tell kids very general messages about society, but both added on so much extra plot and character development in the movies that it took away from these messages. Also Taylor Swift is in both
That is exactly what I’ve been thinking too!
@@cherie..cherrydid they? did they make the onceler hot?
@@adamsmith9080 Ah, clearly you were not on Tumblr during that era.
@@theab3957 Speaking from experience, that's for the best, really.
@@CluelessAnon indeed
A romantic subplot could have actually been an interesting addition to the book’s plot if done correctly. Jonas could have realized what love is and began to have feelings for one of his peers, feelings that his peer cannot reciprocate because they have no concept of what love is and lack the ability to feel strong emotions.
didn't that sort of happen in the book with fiona
+R R I don’t remember. It’s been over a decade since I read the book.
Yeah if I recall correcently, Jonas developed a crush on Fiona in the book. But she never showed any signs of being aware of his crush (she wasn't even aware of the concept of romantic love) and naturally she never reciprocated his feelings.
@@samiamrg7 from what I remember he has a dream where they’re helping people in the bathhouse, but then he wants to help Fiona bathe too. There’s even some sort of medication he takes after the first dream since this is considered a bad thing, but eventually he doesn’t take that either.
But like ellie said it’s entirely from Jonas, with no reciprocation from Fiona
@@alexsiemers7898yes, you’re correct. Jonas tells his parents about his dream and then he has to start taking pills to stop his “stirrings”.
Am I the only one who remembers the second sled memory where Jonas breaks a bone and vomits into the snow. Pain is why there is no sledding. It was disturbing and represented the tonal shift for the book where it got darker.
I haven’t read that book in like 7 years but I still think about that scene from time to time. Super good storytelling
I didn’t remember this but did instantly think about sledding causing broken bones
I too was expecting to see that one, as well as the Sunburn one, in the movie. Not just some dialogue about "Snow Bad for Crops".
Something about returning to the hill and the snow.
@@TechySeven funny enough, snow bad for crops came up in my in class discussions about the book when I read it for 7th grade. I forgot that that explanation was actually never in the book when I first watched the movie
“We cannot remember sledding, as sledding requires snow and snow is bad for crops.”
*Jonas goes and sleds without snow, because of course you don’t need snow to sled, literally anyone can immediately work this out.*
Also, couldn't you just allow snow in some out of the way spot where you aren't growing crops?
Yeah lmao. The book’s reasoning for banning sledding is the risk of injury. It’s followed with a memory of someone crashing, so I dunno why they went with this crop explanation
That's why the book does the story more justice by just being more of a loose metaphor. The movie's effort to ground the story in some form of sci-fi realism just raises questions like 'has literally *no one* even accidentally reinvented the concept of going downhill on a flat surface until now?'
Figuratively…?
@@TheMusicalFruit that was kind of the point i think: the world, in order to retain eternal peace and goodness and no harm for anyone, removed anything even potentially dangerous or mildly troublesome, along with the memories of those things. they COULD allow snow in places it wouldn’t harm crops so farmers could still farm, but then people may wanna go see it and play in it, and snow itself can cause people to grow sick from cold or even die because of it….
I feel like the point the movie was trying to make was that in trying to rid their society of every potential harm (or at least greatly minimize those harms), they went too far and also robbed people of some of their greatest joys, and ultimately robbed society of the human experience as a whole. It does this poorly bc instead of saying “people could have gotten hurt”, it throws out a bullshit excuse of “oh, well… the crops”.
This movie feels like a satire you would see on The Simpsons, or something. I've never seen a more blatant example of a movie studio forcing a story to fit the standard Hollywood formula. It really has everything:
1. Forced love interest
2. Pointless action
3. The age of the protagonist is increased to his mid-teens so the character can be played by a conventionally-attractive actor in his twenties
4. Simplified "good vs. evil" morality
5. An overexplanation of everything because studio executives assume everyone in the audience is dumb
The Giver movie has become the lifeless humanless forumlaic nonsense that The Giver book warned about
Was there not a love interest in the book?
@@v0id_d3m0n Nah, Jonas had a small crush on Fiona, but the two of them never actually pursued a relationship.
@arachno communist Jonas actually marries another woman years after his escape in the following books, but it's not Fiona
And the crush is just implied, never stated. And pretty quickly Jonas grows distant from her, along with all his friends, as he realizes, because of what he’s learned from the memories, he can’t really connect with them like he used to. They don’t understand him anymore.
One massive problem with The Giver is that in the book, the fact that no-one could see colour was a masive plot twist, which of course is impossible in a film
I think they could have definitely produced the movie in black and white/sepia and add the flashes of Jonas seeing colors until he starts seeing everything in color. Special effects exist and did at the time, I think they just didn’t want to stay true to the book
@@etherealsoliloquy Well, the movie did do that. It just makes it so that it isn't a twist anymore, since the movie is initially black and white, and black and white movies are very uncommon now (and only done as an artistic choice), so that immediately makes you go "what's up with that? why's there no color?", while in the book you have no reason to question this until it's brought up.
It is one of the challenges of adapting a book like The Giver since the book doesn't describe much visually. Most things are left extremely vague. Part of the idea here is that we are meant to initially imagine Jonas' community as being similar to the society that the reader is familiar with. The small differences here and there initially seem pretty harmless or even positive. It's initially framed as utopian, after all. Then, bit by bit, the rug is pulled from under that initial impression.
I think most of that could be pulled off in a good film adaptation. But some of the things that are revealed have important visual consequences that would make the impression unsettling from the start, and there's one that the movie actually ignored. It's never explained exactly how, but in the book, people in the community aren't aware of the sun. Direct sunlight was eliminated because of the risk of sunburn. My guess is that weather control is used to make it constantly overcast, so that daytime is still bright but the light is diffused and the sky is just a featureless pale gray with or without color. I assume the movie didn't represent this because it would have some complicated implications for production (either filming could only happen on overcast days, or exterior scenes would need to be done on sets where the lighting could be completely controlled). Also, even from a thematic standpoint, the contrast between the pure colorless beginning and the colors that show through over time would be a lot less dramatic when the colors are kind of muted just by the lighting in general. I can understand why it's simpler to just kind of ignore this specific detail in the book. But this is kind of a digression from my main point, lol.
I think a film adaptation could still work with that particular reveal not being, well, a reveal. The audience will be tipped off that something is weird by having it start in black and white, but the explanation, and the moment we first see color, can still be a very surprising moment. The other elements need to be working properly, though.
I didn’t read it as they couldn’t see color, I read it as they see severely dulled/ washed out color, since color is one of the things people use to tell things apart.
@@hayleighhartenstein8526 , since art is subjective you and I will call two entirely different viewpoints on how the black and white nature is depicted in the book, but I always viewed the black and white segments of the book to being very boring, bland, and depressing hence why the original Giver and Jonas are special outcasts of society.
They could’ve made it so that while the audience sees color, the characters don’t. So the twist can be revealed by the camera switching to a first person POV and us seeing out of the character’s eyes.
The comic book- another visual adaptation of the book actually keeps the twist and does it really damn well. I say this as someone who read the comic before the actual book. The book is drawn in a muted, black and white style, and you think that it’s just a stylistic choice. Not all comics are in color and the color palette of the comic doesn’t quite look like it’s “missing” color like a black and white movie does. And so when the comic being black and white suddenly becomes relevant to the plot feels far more meta- as the artistic choice suddenly is recontextualized into a narrative component. I highly recommend the graphic novel version of the book it’s very well done
this movie gave me a reverse existential crisis. it was such a shallow interpretation that it made me stop thinking about my place in the universe so I could focus all my energy into being disappointed.
So technically a feel good?
@@scratch2086 The feel-good movie of the year: The Fucking Giver lmao
@@scratch2086 more of a net neutral because I still had to watch the movie the giver
@@greyno7030 I've never felt a comment as strongly as I do this one. A pretty damn accurate recreation of me leaving the theater that night.
The thing that pissed me off the most about this movie for the longest time is Jonas’ change in eye color. His eyes- being light blue in the book- were actually the reveal to us that their world was greyscale. They were described as “light” instead of “blue”, and everyone else’s eyes are described as “dark”. This was the repeated detail that seemed small at first, but as it became more frequent, the reader comes to realize its meaning. His eyes set him apart from the rest, and they were the first way he connected to Gabriel, and this interest led to the connection he formed with him.
He became The Giver because his eyes were light, like the Giver before him. This use of a superficial feature as a deciding factor in one’s entire life further serves to demonstrate the shallowness of this society.
Usually I’d agree that complaining about eye color is a nitpick, but in this case, it’s actually important to the entire premise of the fucking film. Did they even read the book????
I interpreted that as meaning they were somehow related, even distantly. Sme with the baby. It also has light eyes and Jonas puts a memory in the baby
Reading the book first ruins the film for anybody.
@@politereminder6284 maybe. But you'd expect the *writers and producers of the movie* to have read the books
@@amber2616 I'm pretty sure they did. Film is just a different medium, with different conventions. They read the book, and adapted it to the medium of film. You may not have liked their adaptation, but don't go extreme and accuse them of not having read the book.
yes i think they should have done it, just cast dark eyed people or make actors put on contact lenses
It was SO stupid to age him up. The whole point is that they wanted to stop *puberty* because it is a time of exploration.
It is similar to the role of Lyra in His Dark Materials trilogy. Puberty and possiblity is dangerous in that series as well
Actually, in the book, the reason for all of the memories being removed is the same: risk. There are actually two memories about sledding in the book. The first memory of sledding is a beautiful time, and exudes joy. It is given as a warm up of sorts. Later on in the story, another memory of sledding is given. In this one, the sled runs over a patch of ice, and the sledder looses control, and crashes. While the precise injuries aren’t stated, they are implied to be grievous. And that would run directly against the community’s goal: elimination of risk. The sameness isn’t created because everybody being the same is the point - it was created as a means of eliminating social risks. Climate control was created as a means of risk elimination as well. It has nothing to do with crops - it is because people can die from the cold if they are not prepared, which makes cold an unnecessary risk. The fact that the screenwriters for the movie didn’t understand this is kinda pathetic.
Edit: the film making light of the, “you can lie” line in Jonas’ pamphlet is horrifying. It is, imo, one of the most important concepts in the book. It almost instantly isolated Jonas from the community because trust, or rather, the need to have faith in people, was one of those unnecessary risks that the community removed. And, as a result, Jonas isn’t able to really interact with the rest of the community again.
I haven't read the giver in a while, but most of the things I remember seem to be parts the movie removed, the sledding crash being two of them lying, and it's a damn shame
I haven’t read this book in years and yet I understood and agree with all of this. It’s profound how screenwriters and Hollywood producers are incapable of basic media literacy.
with risk comes decision making, which they forbid as well. they had all their choices made for them, to the point where they dont even have last names and their jobs are picked for them. they feared that if a bad decision was made, there would be a risk
i feel both are important and relate to each other in the same way
I like that
I stopped watching the video because he clearly didnt pay much attention while reading. Even after 15 years I remember that the sledding memory had two parts.
the book of "the giver" was like so amazing but it traumatized me because my teacher made up an assignment about "if you had to kill a baby because they were defective what would you kill it for :)" and she KNEW i was born premature with brain damage, like gabriel was implied to be born with (or at least low birth weight). it was....traumatizing lmao i did not like that class
That's so fucked up, damn
I'm a retired teacher--gotta say, that is one fucked up teacher/assignment. Also fucked up whether she knew any of that.
I remember being a student in Middle School and we had an assigment where we had to discuss if we thought the society was a utopia or dystopia...
@@madmoblin That's an appropriate assignment. I can't recall what the kids did. Was probably mostly visual because the kids were learning disabled.
God I hate it when Teachers make kids debate fucked up stuff like it's just a fun hypothetical and not something that can directly affect their students.
I knew the movie was going to be worse just because the giver can only really be done in a book format. When reading it you don’t realize that the world is gray. You use the assumption that everything is in color until the Jonas starts to see the red in Fiona’s hair. That’s when you need to recontextualize the entirety of what you read. That’s something you just can’t do in a visual media like a movie.
Yep finally a comment that gets to the point of The Giver. It must be read in book form so that the message can even get thru as the world slowly comes into focus
Its a shame cuz americans just dont read books theyre basically illiterate so complex themes like in books will never enter society in a meaningful way.
@@stephaniewilliams6756 you're right, not a single American can read or write, it's been like that ever since we declared independence from Britain. Well, more specifically England, the land of corruption and witches. There are still studies being conducted on whether the same fall in literacy happened to the Australians and Irish, but we all know how those will turn out if England is able to rig them again. I fear for Scotland's future if they manage independence. Damn English and their black magic. Their machinations have laid undetected for generations...
@@duetopersonalreasonsaaaaaa me and your mom are in a passionate love affair she says get a life and stop being a loser
idk about filmography, but if you started it in dull colour, still visible, and it slowly fades to grey scale, until that moment, when suddenly everything is in banging colour
When you say the Giver is a very cinematic book, I completely agree. It's a book that when I read it, I can see every scene clearly in my head. I can't believe how badly they screwed up this book
They even screwed up very important details just to the world building of the story I hate this movie with a burning passion
@@caitlyncarvalho7637 they never mentioned that do I don't know
I am like half aphantastic but even I can vividly remember the imagery the book evoked
In the book the moment when you find out that Fiona is already killing kids is supposed to be kind of soul crushing in a way. The realization that the one person he thought might even slightly be able to understand was already happily doing what he hoped she would be angry about. He is completely alone, the Giver likes the way things are and the other citizens, even the ones he considered friends, think everything is exactly how it's always been and always should be. The book is meant to be somewhat devastating at times. The main character, and by extension the reader, is supposed to feel more and more betrayed by everyone around him the more memories he gets. The fact that they took that out of the movie so they could add romance absolutely destroys the entire plot.
THE GIVER LITERALLY HELPS JONAS GIVE THE MEMORIES BACK AND SAYS THAT HE NEVER FIGURED OUT A WAY TO DO THAT BEFORE!!!!
NOT EVERYONE IS BAD TO JONAS IN THE BOOK!!!
@@notthatLeia I never said anyone was bad to Jonas. That isn't even slightly the problem Jonas faces with the rest of his society. He finds out about a system of mass murder, and he is horrified. People around him know about this system and see nothing wrong with it. However, Jonas believes he can tell Fiona about it, and she'll also be horrified. Then the Giver shows Jonas that not only does Fiona know about the mass murder, but she has personally taken part in it already. That is the point where we realize that it doesn't matter whether people are friendly to Jonas or bad to Jonas; he will always be utterly alone because only he can see how sick their society is.
@@skyekeating349 Hi, sorry, that was my 12yo son replying to you. ~sigh~ I agree with your point. I think he was responding to your mentioning that the Giver was fine with society the way it was and that everyone in the community that Jonas thought might help him, betrayed him to some degree. (I can't scroll back to quote your comment accurately bc the CZcams app on my phone won't let me do that without discarding my comment.) Anyway, I'm sorry my kid capslock!yelled at you. Next lesson is going to be proper netiquette, I guess...
@@notthatLeia I wasn’t aware people said lies this obvious in comments anymore lmao
The irony of shoehorning a romance into a story that didn't need one is it kind of points out the similarity between the society in the book, and the society in which the book was written: The society cannot abide media that does not fit the formula, because the society tries to use media to keep itself fitting a formula.
underrated comment
das deep
that's deep
exactly! I didn't even think about it until you brought it up, but it really is interesting to think about how this movie frames women versus the book.
Like, in the book, women are just kinda regular people like anyone else, while in the movie, they're either nagging mothers, romantic interests, or dead and played by Taylor swift. And while I think the fact that the book was written by a woman, while the movie was written by two dudes, is important, I think there's another, broader explanation for that dissonance.
Essentially, when Lois Lowry wrote The Giver, I think she was trying to counter a narrative. A narrative that asserts that emotions, particularly negative emotions, are annoying nuisances that do nothing but get in the way of normal life, that they're to be stifled and avoided and fought. And because she had those oppositional aspirations, the book was less likely to fall into other common storytelling tropes and stereotypes.
Meanwhile, when Mitnick and Weide were writing the movie, they just wanted to adapt the book she wrote, and alter it to fit the formula of trashy teen dystopia. They were trying to tame it, rein it in, make it fit the established narrative. And that goal will inevitably cause narrative tension in the finished product, which manifests in these weird, annoying, awful little moments and details that we can then point out.
bro i left my phone on WTF is this reply
The thing I found interesting about the book was how dumb the leadership of its dystopian society was. Like Jonas just kind of grabbed a baby and left, and no one was smart or aware enough to stop him. That's kind of the point, right?
My own idea is that their brains have rotted from existing within this state of the world that the idea of “fleeing” literally doesn’t compute, which is why Jonas just fucks off so easily, because no one knows how to actually stop him.
Yeah. Because they’re kind of empty? Without those sort of memories.
yeah the leaders are pretty dumb and helpless thats why they need the giver to make a lot of their decisions
Especially since like...surely receivers pull shit constently?
If I remember right there was one bit where he had to hide from a jet plane looking for him, wasnt there?
I hate that they gave every character agency because the whole point of the story is that Jonas is the only o e with agency so letting everyone make choices and feel things deletes the purpose of everything Jonas is trying to do.
The ambiguous ending of The Giver novel was the one of the reasons I liked it so much. The idea of the protagonist riding his bike along an indistinct road that was clearly unmaintained, with no idea of where he'd going or what happened to society, raised a lot of questions. Not to mention his toboggan slide and the question of whether he had actually found other people, or if he was dying and only imagined the cabin.
The sled at the end might not even be real was the impression I got.
@@caitlyncarvalho7637 Abortion doesn't really seem like a theme that can really be discussed in the context of the society Jonas grew up in because of fundamental aspects of the society's treatment of birth and life. First, to give birth to children is explicitly made a job in the society - a necessity for the good of the whole society, but birth mothers also are not supposed to have any attachment to the child (further explored in Son, the fourth book in this series). We also know that smaller twins and babies that cannot meet specified criteria even after birth are "sent to other communities" (ie. euthanised). What these may also indicate is that women who do the job of birthing, who we know have access to a lot more amenities and facilities to maximise safety and comfort of both mother and child, likely also go through many checkups to ensure both parties are healthy enough. Any and all abortions in this kind of society would most likely be the explicit result of significant medical health concerns for either the mother or the child that gives them reason to believe it would not be beneficial to keep the baby; birth mothers don't seem to have the right to just say "actually I don't want to do my job" since no one in the whole society has that right. In that light, the book can't really give any concrete statement towards the position of abortion in our real-world society. Life as a whole in their society isn't really held as "sacred" or anything like that, but freedom of choice is also not really a concept understood by the bulk of their society.
@@caitlyncarvalho7637 It's never explained explicitly. Based on the nature of their society, however, it might be possible to conclude that some sort of artificial insemination system is employed - a fittingly "clinical" approach to life, permitting selection for desired features and devoid of the emotional elements associated with more "traditional" methods of procreation.
@@caitlyncarvalho7637 I was refering more to the act of intercourse, I suppose. Hormones are controlled in-universe by various medications, if my memory serves (shown briefly during Jonas' story, and explicitly stated to be how it works for birth mothers in Son).
@caitlyncarvalho7637 maybe I'm applying my headcanon to a book that wasn't written with today's understanding of Social Justice, but I have a more charitable interpretation. As a person on the spectrum, I do often get the idea that if people were gonna be aware of my behavioral issues from birth, they wouldn't have let me be. I don't interpret this as anti-abortion, I see it as an understanding of my personal struggle.
Anyone who’s ever went sledding and gotten snow down the back of their shirt, or their socks wet can attest to why a society should forget about sledding.
its really comforting to know that there are others out there who think sledding is overrated asf
Due to climate change, our country barely sees snow any more, my child had no chance of experiencing sledding in a decade. Careful what you wish for.
Also, proper winter attire is a thing. I have no memory of wet socks because my mother never let me outside in the winter without winter boots.
@@JadeReloaded
Then move to Saudi Arabia; they’re experiencing inordinate amounts of rain, hail, and snow.
My SUV isn’t killing polar bears 🤗
a world without sleding really sound like an utopia. thank god we are working to world without snow IRL
counter point, that i get to aim at my family members and barrel into them at mach 10 is why sledding should always be remembered
I loved the book as a kid and refused to see the movie simply because of the other movies that were out around then (Maze Runner, Hunger Games) I just knew exactly what I was going to get...
Literally the exact same POV on this movie when it came out
But the giver was a good book and those other books/series you mentioned were very much not that... Still, you did the right thing.
@@pstrap1311 Fair enough. And I'm not normally one to judge a movie against the book because they're simply too different a format, but this one, I just couldn't find a good reason to see 🙈
@@pstrap1311 the first hunger games and maze runner are passable. (Movies) but you are correct
@@pstrap1311 the hunger games was an amazing series with GREAT metaphores and concepts.
After reading the book for school, I decided to watch the movie. Throughout the entire thing I was just bothered by how the characters were aged up. Like it completely breaks the buildup the pills (changed to an injection in the movie) that blocked emotional hormones out had. Jonas is beginning puberty, that’s how we’re naturally introduced to the pills, and by getting off of them so quickly, we get to see him as a kid. By seeing him as a child, we can inherently relate to him more and see his struggle as more tragic. He’s a child, a child going through a tough change in emotions and hormones, and he’s having to endure wars and death and destruction.
It's not like emotions only start after puberty though
@@alexwang982 Yes, but puberty is a much more intense period for people when it comes to emotions. In the book they start taking the pills at that time for that exact reason.
@@allergyjelly Wasn’t he 12?
@@alexwang982 Puberty happens then
Haven't read The Giver since I was a kid, but I strongly remember there being this overwhelming sense of isolation. Only The Giver could understand what Jonas was going through, everyone else were effectively robots. The book perfectly balanced melancholy and hope for the future through that isolated perspective. Seems like this film is the cinematic equivalent of adding lyrics to an instrumental track
@@caitlyncarvalho7637 Personally that doesn’t make sense to me. If anything it would be anti-adoption since a reader could interpret that this society determined that biological parent-child relationships are more intense (and real) than their adopted counterparts and therefor had to be controlled. And I think that’s an issue with the book.
@@caitlyncarvalho7637 I feel like Vessels could end up being confusing if an adopted child was reading The Giver. I worry a child could take away that adopting children is part of the system’s strategy to remove emotion from relationships, and that biological relationships were harder to control. When really I think the reason this society created Vessels is because they already didn’t have strong relationships with their child, they would rather have someone with lower social standing carry that burden.
@@caitlyncarvalho7637 the birthmothers
@@caitlyncarvalho7637 Unfortunately, I’m unable to say. And after thinking about it more, I feel like I need to reread the book to have a better perspective on this topic. So please take my comments with a huge grain of salt.
I’d definitely feel more comfortable standing behind these statements if I had read it more recently. Since really as a child my only take away was that curiosity is what makes us human and we need to seek out others who have that passion. Not much more than that.
@@caitlyncarvalho7637 what
I haven’t read the book or watched the movie in nearly a decade but the thing that resonates with me most is how the book’s devastating reveal about the babies being killed shook elementary school me to my core and the film’s execution of it felt nowhere near as impactful, like you have to actively try to take such an inherently horrifying concept and make it underwhelming
ikr.
From what I remember, in the book they literally like medicate the kid to kill them, drop it in a shoebox, and put them in the shute. In the movie I don’t think it ever shows anything?? I also haven’t seen or read the giver in like also almost a decade
I dunno because to me it’s like…only horrifying because we know babies are meant to be precious and the main character basically becomes like us by being the giver and forming bonds but like…with my adult brain I’m like a post scarcity society isn’t necessarily gonna be a bloodless one either we’re always sacrificing some section of humanity to maintain a status quo so I kinda like how in the movie it’s just business as usual at the baby killing booth.
@@myclutteredmess2271
Yeah, they use the word "carton" to describe the boxes they're put in, so as a kid I imagined a literal white milk carton they cut a slit in and dropped the corpse into. The sound of the plastic/cardboard flap flapping always haunted me
This book was so moving to me as an elementary school, it went back and forth between beautiful imagery and devastating events
A thing I also found important in the book is that at the end of (one of) the sledding memory(s), the person whose memory it is crashes and breaks their leg, the bone breaking through the skin, and Jonas has to both see and feel the pain. They didn't address it directly, but I assumed that's why sledding was banned. It's dangerous, and you can get hurt. (Though my adrenaline junky self immediately thought "It's worth it tho")
that sledding is a potentially dangerous activity is a way better and more obvious explanation that fits the premise of the entire concept than “SeAsOns r BaD fOr FaRmErS” which is. just totally asinine
i read the giver when i was 8 or so and that description scared me so much i didnt sled that whole winter, idk how the writers missed the point so hard
Sledding being banned because it’s dangerous makes it more applicable to all forms of sledding rather than just snow based sledding because like they showed in the movie you could technically sled down any smooth surface.
Yeah, I think Joel is wrong in his assertion that the book never explains why sledding memories were banned. It doesn't go out of its way to explain every ban, sure, but the idea is that it was all related to some kind of suffering, even super mild suffering. The book's about shutting yourself off from all suffering, and how that leads to being shut off from most joys too.
But, of course, the movie had to make it more about an evil government trying to hide snow from people for bad reasons because that's what Hunger Games was about and this one's also a dystopia so that means it's like Hunger Games, right?
That was my understanding as well. I will admit, I haven't read The Giver in a long time. But when Joel was talking about this part, I could have sworn I remembered the implication being that sledding was something that could get you hurt. And that the dystopia of this world was in how it sacrificed so much for the sake of safety. That someone, at some point, had decided it was worthwhile that no one ever experience the joy of sledding if it meant no one would ever suffer the pain of a broken bone.
And that's why we were meant to see the world of the giver as scary and bad. Because despite being a world without famine, disease, or war, it was also a world without passion, excitement, or joy.
In the book, Fiona is shown as a crush, but that is put down with pills. Choosing not to take the pills is a big thing, yes, but it is not just due to romance. I feel as if Fiona was always meant to be a representation of the things like love jonas could not have in this community.
My favorite scene of the book was where he learned about war. And then later has a panic attack when the kids are playing war as a game. He knows the true horrors of war and they see it as nothing but a fantasy they don’t even know what war is as a concept yet he does. It marks the massive shift in Jonas with the othering he experiences
I feel this is an issue with many thoughtful dystopian stories when adapted for the big screen. The essence of what makes the dystopia is lost and it's just a jailbreak from Scaryland.
Well, most dystopias involve an element of psychological horror. In order to get a TV14 or PG-13 rating, you have to tone that horror down which defangs the movie.
@@TheMusicalFruit I mean, Ghost in the Shell had a similar problem. The director was literally quoted as saying the source material was too philosophical. It wasn't about a rating, it was just an antagonism towards understanding the point of the material at all.
@@zotaninoron3548 Too philosophical? Too philosophical?! Could any objection be more absurd?
@@TheMusicalFruit it’s honestly ridiculous though of course. Most psychological horror, when done correctly, can still be immensely impactful and thought provoking, whilst retaining a PG-13 rating (The Martyrs notwithstanding)
@@jemolk8945 hey, this is hollywood we are talking about here. I robot and chappie/real steel is the most you can expect of it while kids movies go miles deeper with Wall-E and the Iron Gigant
I kinda like the idea that the main change in the narrative is that Jonas, now knowing about how culturally impactful Shrek was post the falling of the Berlin wall, is projecting the arc of the titular character onto his own. Hence why its only fate that he should fall in love with Fiona of all people.
a red-headed Fiona no less 😳 (it doesn’t look like she is in the movie but pfft Ill chock it up to the fact that they can’t see colors)
Well, you win this comment section!
@@Hakajin thanks dad just say you are proud of me next time it will mean more.
LMFAOOOOOOO
We rarely see movies where there is no concrete antagonist. So it's especially frustrating when they take that away from the Giver
I think the antagonist in the book is the society itself, and the antagonist in the movie is either the chief elder or asher
I would like to correct you that the original novel did have themes of sex and sexuality in it. There was a scene in the book where he described a dream where he wanted to see Fiona undress. The book does make a point to show that people do have to repress sexual desires but it's just not focused on and it doesn't have to because all the audience needs to know is that the "Community" represses the human sex drive because it's a threat to the Community's utopia.
I like to imagine that the relationship between the giver and high elder wasn't in the script, but on set the sexual tension between Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep was smoldering and the film makers could not get them to turn it off while the cameras were rolling and were forced to write it into the film
This is the best interpretation
Tbf that does happen a lot
If anyone wants a "faithful" visual adaptation, P. Craig Russell's graphic novel is really good at the little boring visceral stuff, like Jonas and Gabe being uncomfortable during the escape for the first time. Instead of just black and white, the book starts with blue and gray pencil, like a comic deliberately left unfinished, and instead of just color, it grows into ink as Jonas gets stronger in himself. Lowry herself says it's her favorite adaptation, play or otherwise, not just because it's faithful, but because it understood how to be a tragedy of the mundane.
Yes! I love comic book adaptations of books; I generally find that they can be way more faithful to the books because they’re not constrained by budget in the same way movies are.
I was introduced to this book by my 14yr old granddaughter at 62. Such a rich story, and it stuck with me since my first read.
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Imo
@@caitlyncarvalho7637abortion doesn't happen after the baby is already born. It might be closer to anti-eugenics, as babies are killed because they're "defective" or aren't meeting their standards.
Just my opinion though lol
When reading The Giver, I always imagined it as taking place in a world not much different than our own. I imagined that Jonas lived in a small little city in a small suburban home. I imagined that these people's ideas of "utopia" was simply just a "perfected" version of the home they already knew.
The high-tech aesthetic that every early 2010s dystopian film was striving for doesn't sit well with me in this film. It makes the film feel so emotionally foreign to me. Don't get me wrong, emotional stories can definitely take place in such a setting, but this isn't one of them. If the writing was actually good and took advantage of the setting, this movie could have been excellent. Oh well, perhaps in another life.
teen dystopias have this thing where the main characters are different, they notice the flaws in society and they can change it for some unknown reason. the giver is different because there is a clear reason why jonas is different but it is explicit and implicit that everyone else is in this state of sameness. theyre not different, they dont speak out of turn. the movie messes this up and im mainly saying this about the scene where the family speaks to each other during a ceremony. plus of course fiona. the whole thing in the book is that they are not different. anyways rant i love this book so much the movie sucks
big joel says this in the video nevermind 👍
another good teen dystopia that subverts the trope of the mc being 'different' is the hunger games. katniss is shown repeatedly to have no control over anything that's happening. She's only in the position she's in by sheer chance -- the districts were basically just waiting to rebel. she was the spark, and she wasn't even trying to do that, it just happened because she was trying to stay alive without killing someone she cared about. then once she becomes the symbol of the rebellion, she has no input on how she gets used as a symbol. she's also not particularly good at it, a lot of her power came from Cinna's dresses, haymitch's words, and later on a ton of editing in her broadcasts. the last book is particularly bleak for this reason, katniss has almost no agency and can't even help the people she loves stay alive despite theoretically having all this power
@@tedros6917 That’s the thing I always liked about The Mockingjay is that, sure, Katniss is a skilled archer and combatant, but the reason she is so important is due to what she symbolizes for the revolution. The stress and pressure that role comes with is also expanded upon pretty well if I’m remembering correctly.
Jonas isn't actually different either (other than his eye colour), he is fully immersed in the society until he experiences something outside of it.
I was a teenager during the early 2010's, at the height of teen dystopias, and the dystopias that really resonated with me at that point were the formative works like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 because there was no happy ending. Instead of providing a quick catharsis of teens saving the world, the protagonist was beaten down by the world around him. It was a bleak ending that would sit with me far longer than a saving the world story ever would.
I still remembered being nauseated by the "birthers" or whatever they were called in the book. Especially because it felt the general populous looked down upon them in a society that was supposedly void of most emotion.
Same! It’s one of the things that stuck with me forever, how chilling it was that pregnancy and giving birth was just seen as some menial task. And the complete separation of children from their mothers. And the fact that the ‘birthers’ job after they weren’t fertile anymore was menial labor, too- obviously, like everything else, it was presented as totally banal and benign, but there was this class of women used as the society’s incubators. Then they were the ones who did menial labor, too- because that’s all they could be used for at that point.
The killing of the babies freaked me out, but the way motherhood and the connection between a mother and child were discarded to the point of not being considered at all is what’s creeped me out for years. Every now and again I still think about it
The Giver series does have more books, and the fourth one, Son, follows the perspective of one of the birthers. Specifically, the one who gave birth to the child Jonas takes with him. It's pretty dark, but a very good read, as are all the other books in the series
It doesn't seem strange to me at least, like the red hair, they couldn't eliminate all human traits, and people were given roles with different value, low IQ men were assigned as labors, low IQ women were treated well as birthers* and then assigned as laborers. They were given the tasks of animals, ironically something that was almost completely eliminated from their society.
As I remember it was noted that the birthers were fed/given good accommodation, which seems to underpin a classist structure along with work roles, where valuable people would be given a "freer" life than the low-class labors.
@@IrvineTheHunter the really disturbing part IS the fact it’s just considered a job. It’s a horrifying life to be forced to be a human incubator , no matter what accommodations you get
@@thekalenichannel1812 Why though? All jobs involve sacrificing your body/time to contribute to society, dangerous jobs aside, paid baby sitting, clinical trials, and most importantly surrogacy is already a thing, so it's not like people don't condone IRL.
in any case population growth is a real problem that faces all societies across history, Europe, the US, and especially Japan are all staring at the very real problem of apathetic population decline.
So, there'll probably continue to be more tax benefits and programs that "pay" people for the work of "giving birth".
PS. That's also maternity leave, it's literally your job paying to have kids because having kids is important.
The Giver is definitely in the genre of ‘books/stories that you have to read in school as a child and stick with you forever bc what the fuck was that’
I’d forgotten about the Giver. I absolutely devoured the book as a child. We were supposed to read it in school but since I went to a private Christian school it only took a couple parents complaining about the content for it to be banned at our school. Reading it was oddly eye opening for me as a child because at first I couldn’t understand why all those sheltering parents didn’t want their kids reading a book about questioning your reality.
Seeing images of the movie just reminds me how much the color thing blew me away, reading The Giver as a kid.
I know it's like the most obvious thing, but the fact that none of the characters can see color and you as the reader aren't aware of that until Jonas has to learn what color is was really cool. One of those reveals that the movie never could've pulled off just because it took perfect advantage of the medium of literature.
Exactly! The movie instantly spoils a major emotional plot point. In the book there's this build up and tension to it. You're trying to piece together what the main character is seeing. In the movie you just wait for the dumb black and white to go away. The book makes it a revelation you worked for. The movie makes it a task to get through
I haven't watched the movie and I'm not planning to, but the color could have made some cool visuals and helped Jonas feel alienated from his society but it seems they just kinda went black and white -> some red -> full color which is boring
Thank you!
Then rereading it you notice how nothing is described with color. They are light or dark but not a color. And first reading it you look it over. The details were amazing
idea: they could've maybe given the film some Generic Desaturated Hollywood Grading™ in the first bit. but once jonas learns about color it becomes bright and vibrant. the idea would be to make it look like that's just the style of the movie, though, so the audience gets used to it.
The book says that the sledding memory was wonderful until the memory was combined with a horrible aftermath. The person sledding snaps their leg and then vomits from shock, the main character screams "NO" and awakens from the memory.
The one thing that I really dislike about the shallow teen dystopia is that it reinforces that our society is good. The characters feel like they are trying to get back to the way things are for the viewer.
This is the complete opposite of what makes a dystopia so compelling.
The idea that The Giver potentially showed Jonas the entire Shrek Tetralogy is very profound to me.
Oh just wanted to clarify something that I got one comment about. There is an interaction similar to the sledding one between Jonas and the Giver. But in the book, that interaction is prompted by Jonas asking why sledding isn't around anymore, not the far stupider question for that context, "why don't we have the memory of sledding, even if we don't have sledding."
you ignited my long lost memory of this film... and Tiananmen Square. how DARE YOU!
Precision of language!
because if people remembered it as a good thing, they might want to recreate it? as in, bring back snow, something they have a reason to not want (even if its a bad one)
like old cars. I'm sure a lot of old car guys would love to drive cars that would require emission laws to be repealed.
a good thing/memory that necessitates a negative state of things to occur
Do you mean this passage?
At the end of Chapter 12:
Jonas wasn't interested, just then, in wisdom. It was the colors that fascinated him. "Why can't everyone see them? Why did colors disappear?"
The Giver shrugged. "Our people made that choice, the choice to go to Sameness. Before my time, before the previous time, back and back and back. We relinquished color when we relinquished sunshine and did away with differences." He thought for a moment. "We gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others."
Unless there is another passage, you are correct. This one is definetely more abstract than the movie's answer. Also more interesting and thought sitimulating than the "matter of fact" attempt of the movie answer.
also, there’s a Chief Elder in the book too but she is never shown doing anything besides call everyone up for their Assignments because it’s all from Jonas’ perspective and he never saw her do anything else
I feel like the fundamental problem with this adaptation is that The Giver was published in 1993, and it doesn't fit the mold of 2000s YA dystopias like The Hunger Games. Which is a GOOD thing, because it's unique and has its own very particular tone and story. But then this movie came along after the 2000s YA boom, right on the heels of The Hunger Games when everything was trying to rip off that series, and it tried to shove The Giver into that mold when it fundamentally was never meant to be that kind of story. In fact, while they're both dystopias, I'd argue The Giver isn't even exactly the same genre.
Almost every major change they made, I think, can be chalked up to this. The Giver has no teen love story. The Giver has no President Snow-esque main antagonist. The Giver has no extended action scenes. The Giver mostly has no futuristic tech (in fact, it seems to take place in a pretty low-tech world), other than some subtle offscreen stuff like whatever they're using to control the weather. But the movie adaptation added all of those things, because the YA teen dystopia mold says they "should" be there. And the tragic irony is that the result makes it seem like a pale ripoff of every YA dystopia of that era, even though the book PREDATES all of those and was telling a much more unique story.
Imagine what they’d do to 1984 and Brave New World…
they all try and copy hunger games even though hunger games is a rip off of battle royale lol
This movie is why I’m SO HAPPY that the graphic novel of The Lottery was done by Shirley Jackson’s grandson who was decidedly committed to protecting her original meaning and legacy.
One of the worst things I think to come from The Giver was how it’s taught in American schools. We were literally told it was a warning of “the dangers of communism” lmao
Bro. In what state/time period was your school
@@Ailacatailu like 10 years ago or so
@@zhan768 my schooling was in a liberal bubble of California, like there were no white people allowed on the classroom walls lmao.
But then I also had a year of schooling in Utah, where the science teacher told his class of all-girls that women pregnant from rape had “made an adult choice”. So I guess the schooling system in the U.S. is all over the place.
Some guy on Goodreads wrote a scathing essay review about it calling it nationalist propaganda
I do believe that the book implied sledding was too dangerous as the first painful memory is being injured while doing so. But I still agree overall with the sentiment that The Giver was nebulous on purpose with its reasoning.
This is what I was thinking! If I remember right, he breaks his arm while sledding in one of the memories
"What if she hologrammed into rooms like a fucking idiot?" Something about that line just... killed me. Like, I can just picture a hologram appearing in a room somewhere, and someone in the room turns to them and just says, "You dumbass." Nothing but contempt in their voice, like it's so clearly obvious that that's the only correct response to a hologram appearing.
I can't tell you how upset I am that I don't write sci-fi dramas having just read this. You've inflicted psychic damage on me.
I remember seeing a scene like this in the Donkey Kong Country cartoon (Diddy Kong appears as a hologram, however his arrival immediately implies to Cranky Kong that he used the crystal coconut's power without proper training, so cranky starts going off on him)
Best comment I have read in ages. Indeed, the only correct response.
you should always show disdain for excessive displays of technology
Keep speaking, Jewish man!
thank you, i came here just to see a reference of that lol
lol
Not only does the “do you love me” scene in the movie totally undermine the thesis of the story, but it also loses ALL the terrible emotional weight it has in the book. I can’t explain it, but the idea of your parents not being able to CONCEPTUALIZE loving you is so much more isolating and existentially terrifying than the idea that they’re just repressed or whatever. Jonas’s father not even being able to understand the question, brushing it off when it was everything to Jonas, was what made the scene devastating. Even children who read the book understand that on a basic emotional level. How do you mess up this bad?
"Can't have snow because cold is bad for farmers" is also just... factually untrue. Plenty of plants' seeds need to be "cold stratified", i.e. be cold for a while, in order to germinate. Granted, most of the examples I was able to quickly search for were for wildflowers and grasses, but garlic is one I know off the top of my head that needs to be cold stratified.
Cold is also super important for pest control. Without cold snaps, the most notable issue is locusts more often. But pretty much every place on earth with snow will have at least one pest who lays _a bunch_ of eggs in the soil so a few will make it to spring. No snow? _All_ those bugs survive to munch on your crops.
(Say nothing of how important the seasons are to higher species. Without winter and wolves, deer are going to explode in population and eat your crops/grazing lands to famine too)
on the flip side, isn't it also bad for farmers to continually farm on their soil? Like you need a break or it will run out of nutrients right?
The layers of bullshit on that one line are just off the charts, is amazing.
It ends feeling like it was written by some incurious hack who doesn't even know what soil is much less how to Google stuff.
This is why the book had a simpler explanation: you can crash a sled, which can cause serious injury
Bok choy
I’ve always interpreted from the book that sledding is a forgotten memory to protect people from getting hurt, since the giver gives Jonas a memory of tumbling and breaking his bones
I loved that the ending of the book was unknown, and we don't know if Jonas and Gabriel live or die. He's freezing and they're starving and these things are making it hard for him to concentrate on memories of warmth to raise his spirits and keep them alive. But if he's narrating the film...that means we know he lived. And I don't want that spoonfed to me.
i mean there are like 3 sequels so he did live, but yea ambiguity was kinda the point
@@etherealsoliloquy I'll be damned, I never knew there were sequels! Never checked, lol. Granted, a publisher would be crazy to not push the author to write more after the success of the first book.
The series written around The Giver is so damn good, and it finishes off beautifully with Son (although it can be difficult to follow at some points). By far, Gathering Blue still stands up as one of the best books I've ever read.
For some reason in elementary school I was assigned to read Gathering Blue with no knowledge of The Giver and I remember it being really fucking cool
i loved gathering blue growing up so much. i genuinely barely remember much of what it's about now, but i do remember the mystical and otherworldly feeling of it, similar to the giver
@@yveltalsea I highly recommend going back to it and reading the series in order. Son is a little dense, but the whole series still stands up.
I love Gathering Blue and am obsessed with natural dyes to this day because of it
I remember in middle school, when we were covering The Giver, the teacher told us that there was no movie adaptation, but that one *had* been in the works pre-dystopian YA boom, all the way back in the 90's, as a passion project for the Bridges-- Jordan Bridges as Jonas, Jeff Bridges as his father, and Lloyd Bridges as the Giver. Of course, Lloyd's death put the brakes on this ever becoming a reality. I was able to corroborate some of this with some articles I found. It's really sad that the end result of this passion project that had been in limbo for 20 years is such a cheap, bald-faced cash grab at Hunger Games money. Thanks for the insightful takedown!
:(
In regards to your point about how the parents were way too hard on the "no love" thing I think this just really reflects how so much teen dystopia (as was the rage in 2014) centered around teenagers rebelling against the adults in society when this novel just isn't about that all of the people in this society are just as trapped and clueless as he was and they wouldn't be hard on Jonah for that they wouldn't even understand what love is in the first place
the whole emphasis on rules too
A somewhat minor thing that stuck out about this movie to me was how they changed the delivery method for the "anti-horniness meds" from pills to injections
I felt that it gave off a subtle yet very distinct Antivax message that I am not comfortable with at all
I think you are wrong here
I think this change is less directly antivax more of your typical Hollywood lack-of-subtlety
The act of injecting is more invasive & aggressive than simply taking a pill, it is another detail added to ensure we absolutely, positively, realise this is a dystopia and is bad
I always figured it was just that injections look more futuristic, so it was to fit with the futuristic environment
IM SORRY BUT WHAT DID YOU CALL THEM-
@@wxzzandploosh3648 that's what they are
@@JesusChrist-sm4bm true
A parent telling a kid not to do something she is currently doing feels completely realistic as opposed to being a plot hole.
We went over this book in middle school. We ended with a discussion on whether Jonas escaped with the baby and his leaving released the memories or if he and baby froze to death and his passing is what released the memories. We decided the latter was more thematically poignant, even if that read may not have been the author's intention.
Sadly, they survived in the later books for whatever reason.
@@zephaniahofgod1673 you are sad that a child and baby didn't die.
@@helloill672 it’s fiction?? a more interesting conclusion > the death of fictional children
@@zephaniahofgod1673 I heard that. This class discussion was years before the second book was written.
@@helloill672The two of them dying makes a lot of sense. Then Jonas' escape is also a sacrifice that returns the world to reality with all the positives and negatives that entails. The book ends with him hearing the cries of his town as the memories return to all of the residents. The whole point of the story is how "protecting" everyone from the truth was dehumanizing and harmful and that painful memories are just as needed as positive ones for a society to progress. If he dies to return humanity to the world, it's a worthwhile sacrifce.
The MOST bizarre thing about that "You Must Not Say His Name" scene is directly afterwards, where they show a close up of the young girl, and she says "I will." It's such so clearly an ADR, while the tone of her voice, and the context of the scene all make it seem like she should be saying "I WON'T." If you watch her lip movements, it looks like that WAS what she said, originally. So, why this weird mistake? Like, did they accidentally have the girl say the opposite of what was scripted? Was this a last minute change, despite her saying "I will" in that situation making next-to-no sense?? Truly baffling
Joel,
As someone with ASD, your videos have a lot of value to me. It’s hard for me to examine media critically (in an lit class way) so your videos help me to learn about all these subtleties and how they affect the story as a whole. This video in particular also provides some insight on interactions between people, like the lying scene you discuss, which I appreciate, as I also struggle to interact with and read other people. ❤
I didn’t know that was Taylor Seift playing the other Giver student in flashbacks and I literally thought to myself “Who is this God awful actress?” She was flaying her arms around so much that even as a middle school child I thought it was bad. I realized it a few years ago when Cats came out and someone has to stop her lol
I remember when our tiny Joel would make such straightforward videos, with a buttoned up shirt like it was school picture day, with so much enthusiasm but little time for silliness. But now, upon entering the Hog Zone, and becoming a larger Joel, he’s gone from the occasional tongue-in-cheek aside to nothing but oinking and cheekiness. Nothing but cheek. Butt Cheek. Deez Nuts gottem.
You sound like a person who hasn't fully enjoyed his time within the Hog Zone.
@@TheMusicalFruit no, I enjoyed it, I’m just sitting back in my reading chair, touching the bristles of my dad mustache, fondly reminiscing my little Joelly boy and at the same time quietly being proud of him as I watch him grow into a fine young hog man.
I have this thought at the beginning of what feels like every Big Joel and We're In Hell video, of "I'm not sure I want to listen to this guy just talk into the camera for this long on a topic that only vaguely interests me" and I'm wrong EVERY time. I'm here for the Hog Zone now.
I assume he will one day cross the threshold of the Hog Zone, become the largest Joel, wear sunglasses and a gold chain and his style will be the song of the hog lord which is 45 minutes of Joel saying Imma a big piggy oink oink oink over and over
When it got to "Shhhh. It's Helicopter Time" and he kept the whole thing in I absolutely lost it.
I never knew the plot of The Giver until now, but it's extremely similar to a short story I read in a college class called "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," about a utopian city that lives in perfect happiness but at the cost of torturing a child in a cell underground, forever.
Ursula k. Leguin?
I remember that one. It made me so sad hearing about that poor child....
But in Omelas the suffering child isn’t preserving the memory of pain for some necessary purpose; it’s more about exploitation and our indifference to the way that our standard of living requires people in the developing world to suffer.
Those were both stories that affected me strongly as a child. Omelas taught me about exploitation, the Giver about the way people can be manipulated to not care about it. And both in ways a little kid can understand
yes, in the old days, there was something called "science fiction"
This book was the first book to make me cry, the scene of the infant being killed was really well-written and it made a point of how horrific the reality of this system was, how comforting and necessary the lies were in order for the system to work. I read this book for school, and I'm glad that I did, it's a story worth reading and teaching about. It's a shame it wasn't adapted well.
24:05 I get such immense Moral Orel vibes from this entire comparison and I love it. This is a dystopia with procreation as a survival requirement, Moralton is a town of sin masquerading as righteousness with procreation as a societal requirement.
Crazy thing is, is that Jeff Bridges _WANTED_ to make this movie for decades, even made a home movie doing scenes from it. You'd think someone who loved the source material so much would have seen the problems in the script.
Acting and screenwriting are separate skills, though.
If it took years to make then this was most likely the product of a million compromises. I don’t imagine that Jeff Bridges was happy with what the studio did with the movie.
A lot of the changes just reek of studio interference.
If I remember right, as Felipe W and ThePinkMan surmised, there was a *lot* of studio interference in finally having it get made, and he basically lost creative control over it. I remember, during marketing before it came out, a lot of people talking about and pointing out just how silent Bridges was being in regards to the movie, and how he was making very little comment about the quality and stuff. It struck me that he was pretty unhappy with the end result. :c
Something sad that couldn't be avoided in a movie adaptation is that we never get that moment in the book where we suddenly realized that the whole book was in black and white when the giver Tell Jonas what "Red" is
Keep spitting facts my Jewish friend!
I looked up this video to watch for the first time after Little Joel showcased that one comment lol
If you haven’t read Gathering Blue, I HIGHLY recommend it! It was my favorite as a kid, and read it again recently, and I still loved it!! It’s by the same author, and just as beautifully written!
Not to mention the other two books that tie gathering blue into the giver’s world, they’re called messenger and son. Both lovely books
@@apolloismanly THANK YOU FOR LETTING ME KNOW THAT AS A KID I READ THE GIVER, IMMEDIATELY WENT TO READ GATHERING BLUE AND HAVE BEEN CONFUSED FOR YEARS AS TO WHY THEY DON'T FIT. YOU HAVE SAVED ME MORE YEARS OF LOOKING BACK IN CONFUSION
This! I’ve read the whole series multiple times and all thread together so nicely while still having each a unique message!
@@w_7337 after the third book you see where and how they thread together trust me I was so confused until I read them
One of the most annoying things about this movie when I watched it was it’s ending is less ambiguous than the book. I remember reading it in my fourth grade class, and the way the last scene was written made my teacher ask around and different kids had different ideas. I was pretty confident in my read that Jonas died of hypothermia, but this movie just goes: “idk happily ever after log cabin I guess”
There is 3 more books in the series! Jonas most definitely doesn’t die but he isn’t the main character anymore.
@MT yes I understand what you guys are saying and I did like the ambiguous ending myself originally. However, there are still more books in the series where he is very much alive...so it's not actually up to reader interpretation.
It's been a while but I remember thinking he had found Christmas town for some reason.
@MT I've never watched so no. It's just in the book I remember there being red and green lights at the end. All the sled talk didn't help either. I was like, 13 at the time so I doubt I'm right. 😅
If I had a nickel for every time a dystopian movie based on literature regarding the nature of what it means to be human was ruined by needless narration, I’d have two nickels.
Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.
I think I've heard this joke before.
If Joel gets to reupload his videos I get to re-comment my jokes.
@@rruhland fair
What is the second one? Promised Neverland?
@@airplanes_aren.t_real I was thinking Blade Runner
i always felt that the original novel would be very difficult to adapt accurately into a film. for me personally, the realization that jonas’ society is repressed to the degree that it doesn’t even have color was extremely shocking in the book because color is of course something we take for granted and the idea that the characters navigate their world without even knowing the colors of each others’ hair or eyes isnt something i’d necessarily consider right away. in the movie, the fact that the world is in black and white was obvious from the get go.
Dystopia was one of the themes in my English class last year, and my teacher decided this was one of the films we had to analyse, because we didn’t have time to read the book, I guess. I hated it so much. Worse was, some of the questions we got assigned was clearly based on the book rather than the movie. We just had nothing to work with.
What a shame, especially since the book's short and simple enough to read in one or two sittings.
The book can be read in like a few hours of classtime though its very short and has like a 4 hour audio book
Probably was just less work for them to pop a movie on
"The whole town, who you should disagree with, is chanting Jonas' name ritualistically"
"Jonas' parents, who are part of this evil system, refuse to chant his name"
"Jonas' sister, who is good, says she will not stop saying his name"
There's a potential for a point to be made about the ritual chanting for the sake of wearing it out vs the true grief of holding onto his memory... but that's not what's shown. It's almost like his sister is right for joining the town
Not sure if you knew, but The Giver is the first in a series of four books, each with their own beautiful stories that do eventually connect. I 100% recommend reading all of them
Y'know I think the romance concept wasn't the worst on paper, but the path they should've gone down was make it a misdirect, where Fiona gives more ambiguous responses to everything that Jonas reads as positive and the framing reinforces as romantic, up until the end where the rug is pulled out with the reveal that not only does she kill people, but she's become the best of the whole lot at it, doing it efficiently and with no reservations or second thoughts at all. That'd make the realization hit all the harder as Jonas and the audience realize she had actually felt nothing the whole time, had never understood what he was trying to show her but had just gone along with it politely, and he'd just built things up in his head the whole time. Really show why trying to just show people experiences like that in a society that controls to prevent them is futile, and that this simpler romanticized vision of things is doomed to fail. That'd actually make the reveal from the novel hit harder than it already did, using the expectations of the audience about this kinda movie against them to make the rug pull that much more shocking
this isn't /exactly/ in line with the movie discussion but am i the only one that hates the idea in a lot of dystopia that if things were equal and there was enough for everyone we would never again feel any negativity or joy and immediately cease being human at our cores? and that we would have to kill people to achieve this? There's always a reason in these movies that humans can't have a tinge of equality or support without a complete dictatorship. We can have food security and healthcare without joining a cult where we all think and act the same and never feel anything.
in my total utopia you will still feel pain, and grief, and misery. the weather will ruin your plans, you will have physical and mental illnesses and pains, your loved ones will die eventually, you will embarrass yourself in public, you will be passed up on that promotion, you will be made fun of, you will have addictions, you will die. but this would never ever impact your ability to house and clothe and medicate and love others and feed yourself and the people you care about. it's so black and white to think that whatever perfection we could reach would be more bland and meaningless than the forever agony and war and suffering we have now. devastation and labouring till we give out is not colourful character development it will not get us into heaven.
@@googleoogle
I agree 100%. I've seen a related trope "These people are happy, therefore they are too complacent and never accomplish anything. We clearly need strife and suffering or else we become lazy and blissful." and that bugs the hell out of me. Like NO!! As someone who has struggled with depression, I can definitely say that I can imagine more, invent more, create more, do more amazing things when I love myself and all my needs are met than when I am beaten down with anxiety, stress, and suffering.
I humbly disagree with you, and let me explain.
I think that is dystopia everybody clearly isn't equal. There's usually a very unsubtle class system that the characters don't notice because, well, they've never thought about it.
Dystopia's are more so cautionary tales about what happens when we stop asking questions and start letting something else control us too much. It's about losing free thought. Dystopia's are essentially about what happens when people are able to get away with genocide but mask it as equality.
You say in your Utopia everyone would be equal but still be able to feel, and it would basically be current society but people wouldn't struggle for their basic needs. And that's how it would be for me too. But in dystopias that never actually happens, they just say it does and people go along with it.
The thing with The Giver is that it really isn't trying to make the same kind of argument that something like 1984 or Brave New World is; it's not a statement on how society should be run so much as it is a straightforward allegory for the dangers of pathologically avoiding and sheltering others from conflict, pain, and strife. The cult dystopia enforcing all this and the existence of the one person allowed to hold the memory of the full human experience are just means to that end, and ultimately not what the novel was trying to comment on.
i mean it's a dystopia. there IS a hierarchy people aren't actually equal. and the fact that people don't feel joy or anger also makes it dystopian. imo a real "utopia" would not actually stop you from feeling anything negative. it would just be a place where everyone's human rights are met and people have equality in the eyes of the law as well as equality of opportunity like you would be able to access education regardless of what your background is and you would never be in danger of being unhoused or not being able to receive healthcare
"How do they know Jonas is gone?"
"We must not say his name anymore."
*"JONAS. JONAS. JONAS. JONAS."*
I think this is one of those books that just... *Doesn't work* as an adaptation. Because part of what makes the book so amazing is how visceral the descriptions of emotions and feelings and the world are. You can't capture that in a movie, at least not in the same way, because you can't just read out several page's worth of descriptions of what joy feels like. Or what sadness or loss feel like. The entire point of those bits in the book are about describing this feeling like you're having it for the first time, but it doesn't translate at all to the visual medium because you're watching someone else feel it rather than feeling it yourself.
I LOVE JEW
The giver was the first book I got into an interpretation argument about. I heard there was a sequel and was like "how, dude died at the end hallucinating about the old world". And the argument I had in 4th grade actually was key to my growth as a reader, and therefore person. Thanks giver. "thanks" Giver movie for taking a dump on it
Fiona seems to me to be a way to shovel the whole quartet into the first book without even bothering to talk about the other books. In the fourth book, Gabriel's biological mother, Claire, stops taking her medication for medical reasons when she's pregnant and becomes invested in the baby. Jonas runs off with Gabriel, and Claire runs away to follow.
THERE ARE OTHER BOOKS?
@@turner15 yeah I think one of them is called gathering blue
@@turner15 Four of em! Gathering Blue, The Messenger, and Son.
never knew about the other books. my middle school after finishing the unit on The Giver started a unit on Elsewhere. which at first I thought was related as elsewhere is brought up in the giver. but its an irrelevant book by Gabrielle Zevin of a concept of an afterlife where you age backwards in an afterlife world until you're a baby and are sent back to earth. it was a good book too. but idve liked to continue the story of the giver.
@@gemstonegynoid7475 oooh, I loved Elsewhere when I was younger -- I still have a copy somewhere, though I haven't read it in a while.
I think when Jonas’ mother said “you must not say that name anymore” while the whole room was chanting his name, it was supposed to symbolize that she’s already kind of separated the name Jonas from her estranged son. I don’t know if that makes sense. And then again, that’s giving the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt
if I had a nickel for every time a beloved children's book from my youth was made into an awful movie where they aged the male protagonist up from 12 to 16 and was played by an adult for no good reason, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice
Percy Jackson?
@derpfluidvariant0916 Sounds about right, yeah.
PLEASE let the series not suck
See, I was thinking City of Ember. Though I don’t think that movie is awful.
This movie, despite all its additions, never made me feel emotionally invested. To be fair, i barely remember the book because its been so long but the desperation he has at the end where hes transferring memories of campfires and stuff to keep the baby feeling warm and the hope and uncertainty as it ends with him seeing the lights of the town (but maybe being too weak to get there) have always stuck with me. I think even if the film makers had done a faithful job (and not just tried to make it popular) it wouldnt have been very successful because the book itself is just more suited to writing. But who knows
I don't think it would have translated. There was no romance. No overt violence (release isn't exactly violence). They added all that to the detriment. But very few people would want to finance a movie faithfully adapted from that book. It was boring but I feel like the translation would have lost its spark.
I was very young at the time, but watching Disney's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea affected me much the same way. If Disney hated the Jules Verne novel so intensely, why did he bother? And what gave him the chutzpah to impose his political viewpoint on the film to contradict Verne's studied and nuanced moral dilemma?
Because Disney had the money and the resources to impose his political views and pragmatic views of the world on an audience that, by that point, would just walk into a theater and buy just about anything his studio would produce.
And Captain Nemo was not white in the book
because he's disney.
When dus very young children start reading Jules Verne? It's not such an easy read
@@Youcanpokemyballs I was 15, which is very young when you are 70.
These latest comments are amazing
Thank you so much for the CinemaSins bit. I know exactly who I'd call out for misinforming people that pointing out a logical inconsistency is somehow inherently invalid, bad faith criticism when that is obviously not how that works and there shouldn't even be an argument necessary to show how it isn't.
Is it Shaun?
For the most part I agree with your criticisms, but I take issue with your point at 4:37.
The whole point of the Giver's role is to withhold the memory of anything remotely connected to adversity. If the memory of sledding were made public, then people would take notice of the snow and the cold, entirely unfamiliar concepts. And what do humans do when exposed to the unfamiliar? At best, they feel a sense of discomfort and no longer have the optimum level of emotional stability, which would make them less efficient, or possibly even a disruptive influence on others (keep in mind, the community's tolerance for disruption is nearly non-existent). At worst, the memory would make people curious, and start asking questions. They'll start looking into what causes snow, which will lead them to look into the community's climate control, and discover the reason for its existence, to prevent adverse weather conditions. Adverse to what? Well, a little more digging, and they'll discover the existence of famine, and from there learn about the concept of food shortage and starvation. This one snowy memory has the potential to snowball into a chain of events and discoveries that would destabilize the entire community, which so precariously hinges on the total censorship of all adversity.
It's a perfectly cromulent explanation.
My thoughts exactly, i don't understand why Joel thought that giving reasonable explanation to this society would somehow make make a disservice to the source material. For antagonistic society to have meaning it has to make sense, it has to have it's motives, no dystopia is complete without it. And his argument about him remembering dynosaurs and not having problems with it is silly, since he just explained the fault in this society's logic, not movie's . I mean offcourse it's faulty, that's the point of the book/movie, it has to have flaws otherwise it would be an utopia and not a dystopia.
the issue isn’t that they aren’t giving the memory back now, that’s the obvious reason why, the issue is why were they even made to forget in the first place
Sledding doesn’t have to involve snow though. Joe includes a clip of the movie where Jonas shows Fiona how to sled with no snow involved at all.
Also, Joel is wrong that the book doesn't give an explanation for sledding being taken away. In the book, the memory of having fun sledding is immediately followed by one of someone crashing their sled and bleeding onto the snow. There's also a memory of warm sun on your skin followed by a memory of sunburn. The purpose of these things being taken away was to save people from suffering, and in doing so they removed almost every source of joy
I think it's a leap to conclude that the existence of snow would lead people to discover that the community had the ability to control weather. Wouldn't they just play in it for a little while, get cold, and then leave?
It’s confusing to me that snow is thought to be bad for crops. Where I am the snow is an essential source of soil moisture without which most of what we grow wouldn’t be able to. Idk, it’s just silly, out of season snow and hail and the like are hugely destructive to crops but without it in winter we wouldn’t get the water needed for food.
I don't understand, in the book they do have the conversation about snow:
““But what happened to those things? Snow, and the rest of it?”
“Climate Control. Snow made growing food difficult, limited the agricultural periods. And unpredictable weather made transportation almost impossible at times. It wasn’t a practical thing, so it became obsolete when we went to Sameness.
“and hills to” he added. “they made conveyance of goods unwieldy. Trucks, buses. Slowed them down. So - “”
(page 83 -84)
its a weird thing to miss, and i think it's important to the understanding of what is the difference between the book and film.
Yeah, I'm surprised that not alot of people are mentioning this
Yeah, that's what I came here to say. It's not a bad line in and of itself
Ok good, someone else pointed out that the line about climate control was in the book. I think that's the only memory that was explained in that way too. Agree with the rest of the video though.
Thank you, I thought I was losing my mind. When I read that scene I got the distinct sense the Giver didn't believe what he was saying, and was trying to lead Jonas to question everything he was being told. The whole time I didn't think the reasons given for forgetting things were reasonable at all, but I could see how a committee could come to that conclusion
Right. But in the book, he’s explaining it to Jonas who is a kid who doesn’t know about it. In the context of the film they are spoon feeding viewers in a way that is unnecessary in that sort of medium. The book is told in the third person where the narrator knows Jonas’s thoughts, but not other character’s. The movie is not told from that same narrative perspective. This also makes it feel again more stilted to the audience than part of the fabric of the film
in 6th grade we read the book and i loved it, after we read the book my teacher decided to have us watch the movie. i had to go home before i could finish the movie because i fell down a flight of stairs. i don't really have a conclusion for this thought just felt like sharing.
Really super liked the editing style in this one. The little text pop ups and graphics were really amusing. And also the slow fade from black and white to color was a very nice touch
I just got a new phone and this was one of the first videos I watched. I was so scared that it was some weird thing my phone was doing, I'm relieved to see someone else point it out 😂
We read the book in middle school, and then watched the movie afterwards. I don't think a single person liked the movie or even was just neutral, the class united against the film which is rare
same thing happened with my middle school class. The movie seemed so shallow
I remember reading _The Giver_ in middle school, and enjoying it, even if the themes were lost on me during my youth. Yet, I recall that, even when the film adaptation was first announced, I was skeptical that it could ever live up to the source material, knowing about what changes affected _Diary of a Wimpy Kid_ when it was made into a film (because of course). Chief among my misgivings was that the trailers were in color. One of the big things about the novel is that everything is in black and white, and as Jonas receives memories, they are in color, and he can begin to see color. Nonetheless, I did wish to watch it, but never did, and after seeing this, I suppose I’m glad I hadn’t.
I mean the thing with the black and white stuff is that it is a twist that does not work at all in a visual medium. It hinges entirely on the reader envisioning all that happens in color, only to have the rug pulled under their feet halfway through.
Do you know what the word pedantic means?
The worst part is that the Giver was one of my favorite books as a kid. I read the sequels too.
Edit: 4:16 technically the Giver answered by showing the receiver a painful memory of sledding but not really explaining past that point. The Giver seemed to want Jonas to get information but not be told what conclusions to arrive at based on that information.