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A note on Gattaca: be the best version of yourself
Ecclesiastes 7:13
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This is the opening quote from Gattaca, a 1997 motion picture written and directed by Andrew Niccol and starring Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, and Jude Law. Although the movie (or the bible verse) may not be familiar to everyone, Gattaca conveys a profound and still relevant message, which continues to be openly discussed in bioethics and genetics, and even in our daily affairs.
Imagine a future, not so far from now, in which matters of race, sex, gender, and cultural preferences in general are no longer considered to be important to the development of the individual. Even class has ceased being an issue, while “faith” and “chance” have long disappeared from our vocabularies. In the jargon of the movie, we will be living in a world ruled by genoism.
Vincent, played by Ethan Hawke, is what might kindly be called a “child of God,” or, less kindly, an “in-valid,” a “degenerate.” He is a person conceived naturally, not in vitro or with scientific help of any kind. He and his fellows represent a new underclass, as part of a new division of labor that depends on life expectancy, susceptibility to both physical and mental diseases, and even inherited personality type.
Of course, as in any system that creates its own categories of the privileged and the doomed, there is a certain amount of corruption, which renders possible things we have been told are impossible by birth. In the universe of Gattaca, the black market works to match those who were not conceived with the help of doctors and geneticists with strong, healthy providers of all sorts of biological benefits, so that they can have a clear forecast about their lives. Whether it is about getting a better education, aspiring to advance through demanding professional careers, or simply climbing higher up on the social scale, the right amount of cash can purchase a personal dispenser of urine, blood, hair, and fingerprints: in short, an identity.
These ideas need not be placed in some hypothetical future to see the negative consequences they may produce. Controlled breeding, endogamy, and incest are just a few practices that go far back in human history: attempts to “straighten what [God] hath made crooked.” But now that we are scientifically so close to the possibility of choosing the most fortunate futures for our still unborn children, will we be able to make responsible decisions that won’t slide into subtler forms of discrimination? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to know that our sons and daughters won’t inherit our cancer-prone cells? Or just in terms of personal preferences, wouldn’t it be lovely to see a return of our grandmother’s green eyes, unfortunately caused by a recessive gene? But what if our decisions turn on the problems existing here in the present? Would we prefer to have a son instead of a daughter, in a world where women are victims of violence every day, just for being women, or at the very least unlikely to receive equal pay?
Maybe the movie Gattaca fails to ring a bell with you, but I would wager that we have all heard the story of Vincent more than a few times. The lives of women that dress as men to get into college, of indigenous people abandoning their clothes and their culture in order to earn a place in society, of people with disabilities forced to make daily adjustments simply in order to fit in: all of them ―all of us, maybe― trying to exist in a world that was not made for the unfortunate, the unplanned, the different.
Selene Flores
Selene Flores is a Sociologist with a specialization in Social Communication. She is currently a digital media editor and runs the film critic blog Aire Concreto.
