I have recently read the novel The Giver, by Lois Lowry, and watched the movie Pleasantville. These works focus on making utopian societies. The Giver is about a boy named Jonas who lives in a community with many rules. He is assigned the job of the Receiver of Memory and goes through great amounts of pain and happiness during his training. Pleasantville is about David and his sister Jennifer who goes into their TV to a show called Pleasantville. This town is supposedly peaceful and pleasant. Although The Giver and Pleasantville are both about utopian societies, their characters, setting and the symbolism establish their greater complexity.
The characters in The Giver and Pleasantville are both alike for various reasons. One reason that they are alike is the main focus; they both are about their own version of perfect worlds. In The Giver, the people of the community are brain washed. So too, in Pleasantville the citizens dont realize how different their world is to the real world. Another reason is that the main characters both have other siblings. Jonas has Lilly who helps him a little in the novel. David has Jennifer who goes with him into the TV to Pleasantville.
Alike and different in their own ways, the setting in The Giver and Pleasantville shows an important part in this book. One way they are alike is that they both are utopian societies. Their settings are in one place with many rules. One of them is that you cant be rude or disrespectful to other people. Another is that you cant be violent and you cant have guns. In Pleasantville, David and Jennifer live in the 1990s and are taken back to the 1950s in the show Pleasantville. David becomes Bud and Jennifer becomes Mary Sue. Jonas lives in a modern-type community.
There are many examples of symbolism in The Giver and in Pleasantville, some similar and some diverse. Both societies are in black and white. In The Giver, Jonas starts seeing beyond and seeing color. As the Giver shows him colors, he starts to see them, but only him. In Pleasantville, Jennifer and David cause the whole town to start seeing color. When someone had a passion for someone or something, they would be colorful instead of black, white and grey. One symbol in both the novel and the movie is the color red. Jonas starts to see the red of Fionas hair, the girl who he has feelings for. Also, when Skip Martin, Mary Sues boyfriend, is driving home after hanging out with Jennifer, he sees a rose that is red. This was the first thing to change to color. Another thing is that in Pleasantville, everything is perfect. Nobody on the basketball team ever missed a basket. Once Skip tells his friends about what he and Jennifer did, everything starts to fall apart, and they even missed all their shots.
In conclusion, the movie Pleasantville and the book The Giver have many things in common and at the same time are very different. While the characters play important roles in these societies, the setting and symbolism are also a part to the storylines.
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