Comment on the movie Gattaca

To start properly this blog, I would like to publish a little text I wrote inspired by the movie Gattaca (Andrew Niccol), which I discussed in class with my students. This text was written in February 21, 2007, and was meant to be an introduction to class discussion on the topic of the politics of bodily control after biotechnologies.

Comment on Gattaca

The movie begins with a quote from the Bible. Creation as a divine prerogative is immediately invoked, as the movie tells a story of genetic engineering or the usurpation of that prerogative by “Man”, and the risks and taboos involved. One theme is present throughout the sequence we saw: self determination vs. genetic determinism. This can also be understood as individual freedom vs. natural “destiny”, or the powers of self-fashioning as a power of the “spirit” and of the “will” vs. the power of scientific self-fashioning as eugenic and hierarchical, totalitarian even as it pretends to be “democratic” or based on the “choice” for health. This theme, or the contrast between those two principles, is related to, but much more than a Nature vs. Culture debate, as it ties in all aspects of the societal management of science and scientific or societal control over the individual’s body. As we see in the movie’s introduction, that particular society has taken the path of unlimited access to the body through genetic engineering and scientific progress in the name of enhancement.
The sequence also tells a story within a story: little by little, the adoption of “backdoor eugenics”, as some authors have called the market regulated adoption of technologies that enhance the body and health through genetic and other technologies, has transformed the face of all society. The assumed unrivaled truth of genetics, or the perceived unlimited power of genes to tell the truth about one’s body and one’s self, leads to its adoption as a sort of universal measure of everything, from simple identifying schemes to the determination of one’s future life and death. Everything from personality traits, diseases, physical appearance and other bodily characteristics come to be derived from genetic make-up. This empirical or mechanistic truth is then adopted as a social golden rule: through genetic technologies society has divided individuals into categories of social prestige: from the best engineered individuals to the genetic unfit, all individuals are given a fixed place in society according to their genetic make-up. It is thought that these “truths”, because they are beyond question, can be a safe basis for regulating all of society. Its truth makes the social divisions fair, even to those that become outcasts.
Yet the story poses a question to this system: through those individuals that refuse their genetic fate, as society regulates it, it makes us think about the possibility that those genetic truths aren’t really final and beyond question. It poses the question: what place does free will, desire and freedom have in a time when all questions about health and the body have been (supposedly) answered?

Anton vs. Vincent
Healthy vs. unhealthy
Genetically engineered vs. child of love

Questions we can pose ourselves, based on the film:
What is the idea of a “person” after genetics? What sense do categories such as race, which attempt to describe and make sense of differences based in the body, have after genetics? What is a person’s will, and how is it different than instinct or biology, if at all? What is the soul?
Since the 19th Century, those individuals most controlled and regulated by the state, such as criminals and other moral “deviants”, become the first to be objects of new technologies as they are adopted as a means of social control and management. Michel Foucault analyzes how the 19th Century saw an important transition in the way the state regulates different categories of individuals. Morally deviant individuals such as prostitutes, pederasts and others gradually are understood as medical categories. The homosexual and the insane are some of the most visible and iconic of those characters. Morality loses explanatory power in the face of the inevitability of biological truths, and medicalization becomes the way to deal with these deviants. Thus the prison, the clinic and other social institutions arise to replace other forms of regulating power in society. This is happening again today: the search for gay genes, or the mandate to collect the DNA of criminals emerges as a sign of the shifting technologies of control in contemporary society. Through control of the genes, society can then regulate its individuals in different ways. Gattaca is a brief exploration of a society where that transition has happened in a particular way.
Last scene: the regulating of society through biological technologies can take several different forms. Genetic totalitarianism is but one option, and it is up to society to construct the ways people and differences will be regulated and represented. Art gives us different views of our differences, suggesting that the possibilities are endless.