Kids These Days

When the 1993 novel “The Giver” was adopted for the screen in 2014, it sparked a flurry of interviews with usually reclusive author Lois Lowry. “Before ‘Divergent,’ before ‘The Hunger Games,’ there was ‘The Giver,’” one piece typologizes breathlessly. “The Giver” re-emerged over 20 years after its original publication as a refreshed entry in a contemporary genre trend. Young adult dystopia itself is not particularly new, but its current manifestation in the box office and the bookstore is at once more sinister and more sensationalized than what has gone before it.

“The Giver” provides a useful case study for the maturation of the genre—maturation not necessarily connoting development in depth or quality. Rather, the 12-year-old Jonas of the 1993 text was lifted and remolded into a 16-year-old protagonist onscreen, (portrayed by a 25-year-old actor), and turned from a quiet, innocent child into a fist-fighting rebel who, trading in the bicycles of the book for sleek motorcycles, makes out behind trees, and is hunted down by futuristic jet fighters. The film is rated PG-13; the Jonas from the text would be barred from watching this decade’s interpretation of his story.

Maybe it’s simply that the relatively quiet, internal, and childlike original narrative wouldn’t have made for a box office hit. It’s easy to think capitalistically about what becomes dominant in pop culture, but something deeper than pure monetary motivation is at play. Teenagers and adults alike have been gobbling up these books, but, in a sense, they’re also being reproduced in real world discourses. Protesters in Hong Kong and Thailand have adopted the three-fingered salute from “The Hunger Games,” sometimes at the risk of arrest, and the release of its first film prompted some to make connections to the recent anti-wealth disparity Occupy movement.

Something about these narratives is resonant today, particularly in mass movements led, powered, and endorsed by youth. And an intriguing version of the young hero is being perpetrated by these recent “young adult” works: how young does 16-year-old Katniss—family provider, trained killer, occasional two-timer—really act? How teenaged does 16-year-old Tris of “Divergent”—lethal sharpshooter, eventual government fugitive—actually seem? Why did Jonas have to be portrayed onscreen by a 25-year-old hunk?

"The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 1" features heroine Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) as a young rebel against an authoritarian government. By COURTESY LIONSGATE

Perhaps one condition of our modern vision of dystopia is forced adulthood. We demand increasingly more of our young, and we champion our current figureheads of young achievement, especially when their success can be measured by some innovative end product. So maybe, in the end, it somehow is about capitalism: the rigors of competitive, quantifiable, and cutthroat economics might not be as bloody as those of the televised arena of “The Hunger Games,” but throw the children into either and receive a commodity of some sort. It might be the next hip, college-dropout startup or the next box-office hit. Neither, even within the context of “young adult” literature, is particularly interested in the immaturity or innocence of traditional definitions of being young.

So trade in that bike for a bow and arrow, kids. And grab a coffee while you’re at it.