The Giver is a tale about a near future society that lives in drug-induced, blissful ignorance. It exists in what seems at first like utopia, but it is later uncovered that the people are content only because the government controls the information accessible to the public and chemically complex emotion. They live a lot like simple animals or robots. The story follows three main characters: the giver, an old hermit living on the fringe of society tasked with remembering the ways of humanity, the history, emotion, and tradition, both the good and the bad. Jonah, a young boy chosen to train under the giver and eventually succeed him. Finally, the story follows the chief elder, a cold woman tasked with keeping the peace by upholding the utopia facade. Every citizen is required to take the drug each morning in order to leave their home. When Jonah doesn’t take the drug as part of his transition into the role of the giver, his emotions become deeper, he sees the world for what it really is, and thus decides to fight the system and break the citizens out of their sensory prisons. After escaping the border of the society and breaking “the boundary” that set their society apart from the world, the citizens began to feel human.

This movie connects closely to the dystopian implications to transhumanism also seen in the Black Mirror Episode “Men Against Fire,” though taken to a new extreme. While the recipients of the sensory reducing technology in “Men Against Fire” were a select portion of society and, at least at first, obligatory, all of the citizens in The Giver had no choice in their sensory enslavement. While technology, or in this case drugs, did maintain the peace of the public as intended, the consequences of losing humanity are dire. As a race, technology is enabling a path toward eschewing certain aspects of our humanity. Currently, these are small features but works like The Giver and “Men Against Fire” show us where this path can lead. The Giver also touches on the balance between politics, economics, and technology in the development of society. It especially touches on how political systems can use technology to control society and, in doing so, diminishes society. The Giver challenges this balance.

The book and movie duo of The Giver is similar to the duo of The Circle that we have read this semester but I believe that The Giver is a more beautiful story that generally gets to the point more directly than The Circle. Additionally, The Circle doesn’t have Jeff Bridges or Taylor Swift so it’s not really a fair comparison. The Giver, either the book or the movie, would fit perfectly into the Black Mirror curriculum, due to its themes of trans-humanism technology in a dystopian society and its connection to other material in the class.