I understand this article appeared in Nature Genetics and so explores the genetics aspect of the movie (which is admittedly heavily emphasized, starting with the G-A-T-C letters highlighted in the title and opening credits), but I always thought it is about the practice of discrimination in general, regardless of what "quality" is chosen to put people in sets of "A" and "B".
How literally should the audience take this cautionary tale?
It is up to you. Like any good piece of art (literature, painting, sculpture, documentaries, movies, fiction etc), saying something specific to the audience is just the first order effect and sometimes not even the most important one. Inspiring you to get on a process of discovery, interpretation, asking more questions, is what any great art aspires to do.
The thing I liked most in some ways about the film is that society is in some ways correct: going to space with a heart defect is a real issue and we already exclude people based on such issues for very real and valid reasons. Yet, we can't help but root for the protagonist who has their dream denied through no fault of their own but instead the choices of their society and parents. Compelling. If taken in a less extreme sense I think it's a good film for reflecting how much much genetics does determine what we can do, even today, and the reality that many of these limits do ipso facto exclude us from our dreams. As much of life is learning to live with this reality as it is striving to achieve our dreams. The film, of course, presents us with a character who cannot live with it (although with limitations not from genetics) and ultimately commits suicide, and another character who achieves their dream but for whom we do not see the possibly morbid consequences as it is the end of the film.
The part that I could never get over is that the discrimination against the main character actually made sense. He's trying to hide his heart condition to go in an important space mission.
edit: HN is rate limiting me so I can't reply, but to
davesque's comment below:
> no one wants to live in a world where their life and capabilities are pre-determined
But we do live in that world. It was determined that I would never play in the NFL the day sperm met egg. (Probably earlier than that, actually, as I doubt there is a single genetic combination of my parents that makes an NFL player). On that same day it was determined that I would never have to study in school.
I guess I'm just more comfortable with the fact that genetics plays such a decisive role in our lives than most people, and that's probably why I didn't see the movie as particularly interesting.
I think you're missing part of the movie's message. And that was that no one wants to live in a world where their life and capabilities are pre-determined. The audience is supposed to feel that viscerally as we see Vincent's striving and frustration. The story is told from an individual perspective because we are, after all, individuals. In that sense, our emotional reaction to our lives matters and society should care about that.
Put another way, there's a tail in every distribution. From the point of view of an individual that ends up in the tail, being passed over for the good things in life feels like a great injustice. And the fact is that we may not be aware of all the characteristics that could make someone successful. Maybe that's what makes evolution as a process so effective.
In Vincent's case, he was able to beat his brother swimming out to sea because he was at peace with the uncertainty that his life had forced on him. Anton didn't have that strength because he'd been told his whole life that he was destined for success. Even though Anton should have won, it turned out that Vincent's attitude made him more fit to survive which was something that the massive statistical apparatus of his society couldn't have predicted.
I see that fallingknife wasn't able to respond directly so I'll give a quote and response to something they said here:
>> no one wants to live in a world where their life and capabilities are pre-determined
> But we do live in that world. It was determined that I would never play in the NFL the day sperm met egg.
If you're arguing that the plot of the movie is implausible, yes I agree. It's using an extreme example to drive a point home as stories often do. But, for the sake of argument, there are a couple things I would say.
For one, I think the example of the NFL isn't great. American football is a fairly simple game that clearly favors a narrow set of characteristics. In that sense, I don't think there's any great societal harm that comes from excluding people that aren't as physically strong. The dynamics of the game aren't that complicated. People who are stronger will generally perform better. That's why the game exists: to see people push the limits of a narrow set of abilities.
I think Gattaca really has more to say about restricting people's access to a more general set of opportunities; ones for which we can define some standardized measures of success but whose dynamics are much more complicated. I think education and everything that comes from it fits into that category. In that area, there's a very real sense in which people who don't look the part are the target of prejudices that lessen their likelihood of success, regardless of ability.
That's what I meant when I said there's a long tail to every distribution. If you happen to fall in the long tail, you wouldn't want to be passed over just for having a certain characteristic. Ideally, we would be able to measure the characteristic we care about directly instead of depending on statistical likelihoods, as standardized tests like the SAT aim to do. But in practice this seems really hard to do reliably. There are still many reasons a person might get a bad score on the SAT and yet still possess some great qualities that the world could benefit from. That's why schools consider more than just test scores in applications. If the criteria by which we judge things are too simplistic, the results are worse. That's true for email spam filters and it's true for college admissions. Although maybe it's less true for the NFL.
> The part that I could never get over is that the discrimination against the main character actually made sense. He's trying to hide his heart condition to go in an important space mission.
That's the part I also couldn't ever get over. He's shown to have a serious heart condition, and then cheats his way onto a space mission?
Yes sure, discrimination bad and all that but— that's a human judgement. In actual fact, he's dramatically increasing the risk of failure of said mission, along with the risks to everyone else involved with it.
My own take-away was that, grit or not, he's incredibly selfish.
Those are great points. To follow the argument: is a lion selfish when she kills a gazelle?
To me, the story is about individual struggle. Even if his behaviour is selfish, his life is richer than if he accepted the imposed limitations by others (imagine how boring that story would be, why is that).
In a way, he is following nature‘s rules (survival of the fittest), instead of the arbitrary deterministic society rules he lives in.
Ultimately, if we only cared about the good of the planet, we would probably choose to cease to exist. Up to a point, everyone alive is a bit selfish.
no he isn't, he is merely exploiting the compassion of the society of the fittest that temporary allowed the less fit/ gifted /engineered to still live / work near them and infiltrate at the right time
-- it's got a bit of that a heist/noir of criminal cat and mouse
Vincent uses criminal connections to pull the entire scheme off (the german), just like a bank heist in a film it feels fun for reasons that don't work without a movie's magic 'genre' control of tone/sympathy/agency etc.
similar to other problems we have today where 'compassion' politics actually harms the fittest members most
An old homeless loony stabbing a brilliant healthy young person today isn't a show of the former's fitness, it's because (there are other incentives for the) the fittest of society (elites) choose to not wipe out/exile/enslave the unfit for various reasons (inextricable from the society itself--labor dynamics, crime and fear being useful, christian virtue, etc)
Gattaca in the opening even says it's only because he was born in the 'early stages' of the transition
Actual 'meritocracy' safety and other values require ruthlessness and violence, which we already have as all states do, just distrubuted in one configuration (gattaca) versus another configuration (chaotic US today, versus say the safety of singapore, or dictatorship of north korea, or some other gattaca 2.0 where the Vincents aren't born at all because fertility is managed)
A society can distribute its coercion/violence/reward structure in different ways, vincent is just a defector in a trust game
Always reminds me of that lame smug 'Feynman negging woman at a bar' anecdote, how is defecting on social norms clever? that's literally the point of lying/cheating/stealing/littering etc, one individual wins a temp game at the harm of the environment / culture long term. Once a few men are rude / cads, reputation of the place declines and fewer girls show up, or only certain types and not others, etc. A higher status guy like F can avoid/internalize the social ding of resentment from others who lose out of the good vibe/meeting someone cool while he's there, but can't tell him off.
Managing mini social games everywhere is 'culture' and essentially the reason infinite invisible class norms are so 'stifling' and invisible at once, it excludes the riff-raff and keeps those included people on their toes, behaving in a way that makes the place/group/experience "rich" rather than the vincent-like 'richness' of just maxing his own experience at cost of group.
(essentially why costume dramas are so fun to watch for girls (me included, I just don't lie to myself lol) as a guilty pleasure that doesn't feel like a guilty pleasure (you claim it's high status reasons -- the set design, jane austen, the history, so well written!!! etc) -- But the ideology of the genre of the movie itself does all the heavy lifting on cost of the 'nice things' you're not allowed to advocate for or admit to yourself you want as an elite experience missing from our lives today (the fantasy of *extreme social exclusion* so only the very pretty, very rich, and very witty girls can join the tea party-- as well as enjoy the courtship dance pre-filtered by only worthy rich/pretty/witty men :) Genre expectations let you relax, they 'hold the space' ideologically. Real life is social chaos of competing norms and suspicion and low trust, that's the price... But I digress
Once they find out Vincent's fraud, next years space program is gonna have to be even more draconian, annoying rules for all coworkers because of him... Maybe all the fellow blue-collars will get fired too.
> he is merely exploiting the compassion of the society of the fittest
If they are the fittest, how come he can actually do it? If he can "win", that is fit enough for nature, moral questions aside.
If we had a whole system saying that people with 11 toes always run faster, and a person with 10 toes wins once, that system was based on false premises, taken as objective truth without proof.
Now, if we have a system that claims people with 11 toes usually/on average run faster, why not allow the diversity of runners with 10 toes?
'the fittest' could destroy him but choose not to -- since fitness in a social species is, reductively, how groups of elites structure their power games over others.
elites 'let you win' some games for all sorts of ulterior motives, implicit or unconscious even.
Vincent barely wins for a small time, he almost collapses on the treadmill lmao
My point is they left the exclusion / ruthlessness dial at level 7 when they could choose to crank it to 9
Vincent takes advantage of that temporarily, next guy and group will be punished for it.
> That's the part I also couldn't ever get over. He's shown to have a serious heart condition, and then cheats his way onto a space mission?
But he survived. He survived far longer than calculated. Isn't this direct evidence that his genetically determined heart condition was successfully counteracted by a non-genetically identified trait?
And his perfection and determination when designing the mission plan was flawless. Presumably far more flawless than the "valids" he was working with, despite having an inferior genome, or the director would never have commented on it. His attitude dramatically improved the odds of mission success.
You seem to be arguing that if a metric says "don't do it", that this metric should be obeyed, even in light of evidence that it is wrong. Had the metric about his heart condition been correct, he never would have made it onto the flight.
I think this is just the plot device to explore the broader questions around scienetific progress, the hubris of a society that increases their knowledge and the general idea of fate. It's kind of "cool/scary" IMO that we can start with a pretty universally agreed-upon statement like "People going into space should be screened for health issues" and end up with the dystopian world explored in GATTACA.
The movie is suggesting that the criteria for the mission and the fatalistic attitudes of society are somewhat incomplete by showing that Vincent's 99th percentile "grit" has been completely overlooked because of the genetic stuff which is more readily measured.
Perhaps it's true that his genetic predisposition, as measured, is 70th percentile, but there are other relevant factors towards being a good astronaut that aren't so easily measured, to say nothing of environmental factors affecting cardiac health as well as the reliability of the gene-based measurement itself.
There is a certain probability he will have the heart condition. That actually happened. There is a separate, dependent probability that given he has the heart condition he will die very young. That, at the point of the movie, hasn't yet come to pass. I don't see the problem.
How literally should the audience take this cautionary tale?