Death by thesaurus: switching “relevant” to “pertinent” is incoherent in this context. If you are going to use a cliche or idiom, then use it without modification.
Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later
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Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later
#92The great thing about Gattaca is that the cinematography ages incredibly well on top of the amazing plot. A lot of great sci-fi is marred by cheap effects that look incredibly dated only a decade later. Gattaca chose to focus on the story and create a minimalist future environment that still looks beautiful 25 years later.
Generally, movies that focus on set design age much better than movies that focus on effects. If you make a good set, it will look good no matter how technically advanced your setup is. It may look better when filmed using the latest cameras, but it will never look wrong when it isn't, because it is the real thing. Effects are not the real thing, and as technology improved people have gotten better at noticing and are less tolerant of the details that make it look fake, that's what makes them look dated.
Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later
#93I 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 thi…
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 nev…
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.
Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We explicitly discriminate by intelligence, which is mostly genetic. How is that different than Gattaca? We discriminate on intelligence when it's important for the job at hand . The bad kind of discrimination is the kind that considers irrelevant factors. I agree implicit discrimination based on height and attractiveness exists in our culture. This movie is a searing criticism of exactly that kind of discriminatio…
We do our college admissions by SAT score. If we did them by genetic test for intelligence (Gattaca style), the classes would be mostly the same minus some dumb rich kids. And since social class and income is heavily determined by where you go to school, it's a similar situation to Gattaca. In the movie, if the genetic enhancements work, then it's basically meritocracy, and not that different than what we have today.…
I feel like you're actually getting to the deep, important questions explored in the movie, as you try to explain why it's just a good movie :)
I think the big take-away is that it's not a foregone conclussion that they "always work, always better". The question is should we remove the possibility from those without perfect genetic markers because the odds say so, or give them a chance and evaluate in some other way? Or are the markers both less conclusive than believed and/or less causal? We could find lots of trivial markers that have nothing to do with meaningful outcomes; does the world explored in Gattaca take this to the extreme?
Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
IQ was mentioned a couple times in the film, and the main character was shown studying very hard to keep up with his job. The fact that it wasn't the sole focus of the selection program was a consequence of the whole society wanting to do it. It wasn't a bunch of super-nerds doing something weird, the idea was that every part of our society's conception of achievement and "human quality" had been folded in to the nig…
Fair enough, but health and fitness are not just for sport and culture. It's practical; you don't want your astronauts to have medical emergencies in space. Similarly, if you put resources into training them you'd rather they didn't die at 30 due to poor genetics. If any new tech threatens to render the premise obsolete, it's robotics. Not sending humans to space in the first place avoids the issue of selecting astro…
Well, you have to be open to a little symbolism in films. "Astronaut" is a universally recognized symbol of someone who is fit and highly educated, and who had passed a lot of tests to gain access to an esteemed position.
Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later
#96I guess I never thought it was much more than a good movie. I mean what is the message supposed to be? For one thing the main character has a heart condition and absolutely should be weeded out of the space mission he is trying to get on. As a larger point about a dystopian future with discrimination based on genetic characteristics I don't think it works either. We discriminate like that based on genetics now. It's…
Exactly! We are all already the beneficiaries and casualties of the unearned rewards and punishments due to the randomized genetic combination we received at conception. Kathryn Paige Harden brilliantly explains this ethical challenge in her book, “The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality”, https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190808/th...
> In recent years, scientists like Kathryn Paige Harden have shown that DNA makes us different, in our personalities and in our health—and in ways that matter for educational and economic success in our current society.
> In The Genetic Lottery, Harden introduces readers to the latest genetic science, dismantling dangerous ideas about racial superiority and challenging us to grapple with what equality really means in a world where people are born different. Weaving together personal stories with scientific evidence, Harden shows why our refusal to recognize the power of DNA perpetuates the myth of meritocracy, and argues that we must acknowledge the role of genetic luck if we are ever to create a fair society.
As a professor of clinical psychology, Harden is well situated to introduce us laypersons to the overwhelming strong evidence that genes matter. Notably, even biological siblings only share 50% of their genes with each other. Therefore the randomization in genetic combination alone can create differences in innate strengths and weaknesses among children with the same parents. A lottery is the appropriate metaphor for the lack of control any of us have in the genes we’re bestowed at conception.
Genetic engineering may offer an equalizer, but that presents its own ethical challenges. Harden instead argues that we should design a sufficiently robust welfare state to counteract these natural inequities. She presents a Rawlian framework (ie, veil of ignorance) to argue for why we should not accept genetic privileges and disadvantages anymore than we’d accept other injustices.
Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
The works that touch on these core issues are not often as well executed as Gattica - sometimes you wind up with Mean Girls ... ok that is a bad example as that is a timeless classic as well.
That's the first time I've seen someone compare Mean Girls with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Sistine Chapel's ceiling, and The Federalist Papers.
Being able to bring important academic thought to the masses in an entertaining way is important, hard and potentially lucrative though, and Mean Girls delivers!
Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later
#98One thing I don't understand about the movie, even after reading the screenplay etc. is why does Vincent claim the doctors knew the exact time of his death just seconds after he was born? They clearly don't and can't, given the entire rest of the movie. Are the doctors just reading out the exact middle of the probability distribution (or the time with the absolute highest probability), to way more precision than actu…
"They clearly don't and can't, given the entire rest of the movie."
Even today some doctors dumb-down and overvalued their own opinion. I assume someone who thinks they're basically playing god would think similarly.
Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah let's hope parents don't get to choose a better life for their kids, watch out?
Well, the problem we deal with today is that parents--actually medical professionals--choose death for children rather than allow them to live out their lives. Zero children with Down Syndrome are born in Iceland. Why? Because physicians would rather end their lives as soon as they find out that they "suffer" from the condition. I placed "suffer" in quotes, because many of us are quite aware that people with Down Syn…
I don't particularly agree with your comment but it does point out another aspect of the movie's genius: it presents the scenario, makes us think and suggests some conclusions but doesn't beat us over the head with moral lessons. In other words, it treats the viewer like an adult.
Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later
#100There is a bit of survivorship bias. Sci-fi has imagined every possible universe, some of the predictions feel very close to what is transpiring. And if we focus entirely on the human stories behind technological facades or other cultural variability, some people claim that all possible stories have been written already.
I doubt that very much. People can always be wilder than fiction. I'm not aware of any sci-fi that predated gender fluidity, for instance.