“Remembering the future”: shaping a collective future in Lois Lowry’s The Giver (1993) and its film adaptation by Phillip Noyce (2014)

Abstract

Futures Studies is a multidisciplinary academic field that has developed in the last decades. Pioneering studies on the subject, such as those Wendell Bell (1997) or David Wilson (2000), have emphasized the meaningful and revealing nature of the images of the future originating in every society, images which embody the projections of the fears, hopes and anxieties of the community which produces them. It seems necessary to examine the “construction” of the collective future which also contributes to shape and reinforce the collective identity. The purpose of this paper is to apply this notion of “collective future thought” by Szpunar and Szpunar to the dystopian novel The Giver (1994) by Lois Lowry and its film adaptation by Philip Noyce (2014). Both the novel and the film (although with significant differences) represent a future dystopian society where citizens live happily through the strict control of their emotions, knowledge, perception and language. Memories of the past, as a powerful and threatening artefact, are preserved but kept away from the members of the community, who live their lives placidly unaware of the collective past they have been deprived of. This paper seeks to discuss the deep connections between past and future in this dystopian community. These connections are embodied in the character of the Receiver of Memory, the only individual who holds all the collective memories of the past in order to unburden the rest of the members of the society from the painful suffering of knowledge. Ultimately, he represents the link where past and future are going to co-exist in a bond of reciprocal interaction by being, using the critical notion by Sara Ahmed (2006), mutually “oriented” to each other.