Gattaca, the 1997 dystopian science fiction film by Andrew Niccol, was prescient. It anticipated the inauguration of a newly class-stratified society based on genetics, the manipulation of genes to ‘improve’ humanity – or rather eugenics, to be more precise, where those with supposedly ‘superior’ genes were termed the ‘valids,’ and those with putatively ‘inferior’ genes the ‘in-valids’ (with a rather pointed double entendre, to highlight the implications of such a vicious class system).

If this makes you think of similar genetic practices among the Nazis in the previous century, you would be spot on. If this makes you imagine the dystopian future we face if so-called vaccine passports were to be imposed, (a move, which, at the time, unbelievably, the WHO rejected) you would also be right. It would trigger the construction of the same kind of two-tier society as in Gattaca, with the same, predictable constant surveillance, control, and resentment as concomitant features.

For reasons that have to do with the genetic selection of desirable hereditary traits of children’s parents, the title of the movie is a composite of four of the letters referring to nucleobases of the human genome – guanine, adenine, thymine, and cytosine. Its tagline is also highly significant for its narrative, as well as for our current global situation. It reads: ‘There is no gene for the human spirit.’ In other words, it does not matter whether you are born a genetically frowned-upon ‘in-valid,’ your human spirit enables you to overcome the obstacles you want to defeat. This, I believe, is the case today, too, in the face of all the ostensibly insurmountable obstacles we face.

Gattaca is the story of the tellingly named Vincent Freeman (Ethan Hawke), an in-valid who was conceived the normal way, and hence faces the prospect of various ailments in his future. After his birth, his parents decide to go the eugenics route of gene selection, and hence Vincent’s younger brother, Anton (Loren Dean) turns out to be a ‘valid.’ Vincent and Anton play ‘chicken’ by swimming as far out to sea as they can, and the one who turns back to shore first loses. Although Vincent usually loses, it happens that he challenges Anton one day and actually wins – the first indication that your genetic profile........

© Eurasia Review