The Giver Vs Pleasantville

The two parallel worlds between the novel, ‘The Giver,’ written by Lois Lowry, and within the award-winning movie, ‘Pleasantville’ directed by Gary Ross, explore similar attempts, by society to create an idealistic world that contradicts the nature of living a satisfying life. Unlike the life that we are familiar with, the lives of the characters in these universes, live under strict conformity as they strive for perfection. This however, has a deeper meaning than what meets the eye- that denies the key qualities for living a satiating life that includes the presence of: memory, rebellion and freedom. Lowry and Ross further discuss the importance of diversity within these societies that lead characters into discovering a more rewarding life.

Setting her book in a dystopian world, Lowry depicts the dark and dangerous consequence of the limitation of memory to a far more drastic extent in comparison to the world set in Pleasantville, where the potential for individuals to change and gain these vital memories is still possible. Lowry’s main character, Jonas, opens his eyes and realises the ‘flaws’ in a perfect world for the first time, when receiving the forgotten memories of humanity within the Annexe room. Despite feeling the pain ‘of a broken leg,’ to ‘feeling the coldness of snow,’ he also experiences pleasurable feelings such as going down a hill in a sleigh. However, in the end he learns to embrace all these experiences and acknowledge them as ‘being important’. In his final decision, he flees his society in ‘escaping’ and ‘returning’ the ‘memories of the past’ ‘to the people of his community’ so that they can also experience what he has. By showing memory as an essential characteristic of humanity and the changes in Jonas, Lowry highlights the message that memory is very precious and influential for people to live an enriched and nourishing life. In presenting Jonas as the only new person experiencing these memories she further develops a point that memory within this world is very minimal thus, portrays its dark side of being locked away from society for so long. However, memory

In setting the Pleasantville society to be like a fairytale with ‘warms greetings’, ‘proper nutrition,’ and ‘safe sex’, Ross establishes his desire in presenting a ‘perfect’ community severely lacking the human feature of rebellion. In Lowry’s world she presents rebellion as a menacing subject. In presenting ‘the release’, that is the death-punishment for breaking the law three times, she enhances the dangers of revolution within that society, in comparison to the world of Pleasantville, to which mutiny is un-existent in the beginning. The build up of rebellion in the movie Pleasantville, starts at ‘Love lane’ where Jennifer pressures Skip into having sex with her, and through David’s act of exposing his knowledge ‘outside of Pleasantville’ towards some people in the community. His act eventually filled the books with writing, bringing inspiration and life to some citizens. Although these rebellious events seem insignificant on their own; they however, accumulate to trigger the final climax of insurgence within the court. In that scene, David angers Big Bob, leading citizens to know their ‘human qualities’ such as ‘silly, sexiness…’ better, and spark the final colour change of not one entity, but the whole community. By further presenting the ecstatic expression of the people when observing their town in colour, Ross outlines that after strict conformity shatters