Gattaca is as much about genomics is The Matrix is about informatics —which is to say: nothing and everything.

NOTHING because YOU LEARN NOTHING ABOUT EITHER FROM THE MOVIE. You actually understand less about the subject than you did before the movie because now domain language has been conflated with the cinematic affect of the movie. After 106 minutes of the world’s most sophisticated propaganda, your squishy mammal brain leaves that theatre with strong opinions, high confidence, and a grab bag of superstitions superficially identical to the language of the actual science, but entirely inapplicable to representing physical reality.

Wearing a trenchcoat and calling yourself a hacker does not write software. Supporting awareness and calling yourself an ethicist does not cure diseases.

EVERYTHING because EVERYBODY UNDERSTANDS BOTH FROM THE MOVIE. You left that theatre with all the right passion, confidence, and signals: congratulations, you are now perfectly sociologically equipped to infect the collective domain understanding with noise. Go forth! Even if you yourself don’t watch the movie, other people did, and they now understand you by it.

And, I don’t mean “everybody except you because you know better.” I mean “everybody especially you because you know better.” For example, you will learn more about Gattaca reading this post than you will about genomics. You’ll learn more about The Matrix than genomics from this post. You think that because you “know better” that you’re immune from your own humanity? No! Personally, the best I can cope is by some tortured parody. I know that Pepsi is terrible for me. I know that I’m being manipulated to want it despite my own interests. Yet, somehow, I’ll be wandering around the Stop-n-Shop, and magically a Pepsi product has appeared in my hand. At least a tortured hostility sometimes results in me successfully rejecting the impulse. It works better than arrogant rationalization.

“Hmph, I’m wise to this game, so like a good American, I’ll completely overlook that I’ve completely complied with all the objectives of the propaganda while applying my intelligence to rationalize the propaganda’s success invisible to me because I prefer to understand myself as the sort of person who is too sophisticated to be affected by such crude manipulation. ”

See, let’s watch how well rationalization doesn’t work. I’ll now spend the rest of this post infecting you with all ideas Gattaca because we’re all just too clever to be affected by such things.

For example, after I mocked Steve Dickman at Boston Biotech Watch for presenting the Gattaca movie poster as credible expert commentary about medical testing company Counsyl, commenter John cleverly searched the Think Gene archives. The Gattaca Movie Poster is ubiquitous in hack genomic commentary. Think Gene is hack genomic commentary. Surely, I must have posted the poster myself… Yes!

But ah ha!

“For example, when you are an astronaut assigned to critical mission in space, you had better not have a 90% chance of dying of a heart attack during the mission. Oh… I guess the scene where Vincent dies in space and the mission is aborted at the cost of decades and trillions… was cut.”

John responds:

That’s what I thought when I watched it. It’s a risk. Do we want to take a risk in order to give someone the chance to fulfill a dream or to prove to people that they can meet their dreams? Once something becomes an objective fact, it’s hard to ignore it. The fact that Vincent faked his physical training and checkups, in the movie, demonstrates that the scriptwriters for the movie apparently felt that those processes are unnecessary. Ok, so I guess NASA should no longer do them since Gattaca says so?

Yes! Of all possible occupations, “interplanetary astronaut” is probably the MOST appropriate occupation for exhaustive medical screening. It’s even more appropriate than “olympic athlete.” If you have a heart attack on the 100 meter butterfly —that’s annoying. If you have a heart attack on the the 1,000,000,000 meter  —that’s also annoying, but also, while the world’s most incompetent doctor humors your angina as “indigestion,” you were supposed to be piloting the world’s largest ballistic missile to Saturn. The “triumph of the human spirit” is not going to help you pump your blood at 10Gs, and I generally prefer my world’s largest ballistic missiles to be piloted by people generally healthy enough to prevent them from exploding over… well, so don’t explode at all.

Also, the inspirational quote? “I never saved anything for the swim back.” Translation: “suicidal.” Olympic swimmer: good attitude. Pilot of world’s largest ballistic missile: bad attitude.

Why can’t Vincent be a navigator and not an astronaut? Or get his heart fixed?

Further, I am entirely unable to practically distinguish a common RFID employee identification badge —which every NASA-like facility already uses— and the “DNA test” used in Gattaca. Even a driver’s license works better than those crappy DNA scans —they include a color, high resolution photograph of your face.

And when Vincent is hired by a prestigious firm solely by his “profile” before the hiring manager even meets him… what, that’s never happened to a Stanford graduate? Come on.

We wish the real world was as lenient or dramatic as Gattaca’s. In real life, some prig threatened by Vincent’s ambition would have reported Vincent to Human Resources for something as lame as a resume mis-reference and —strictly per the employee handbook— Vincent would be transferred or fired because he wouldn’t have the political connections with management as the “mysterious, gifted outsider” to make an exception.