The Burden of Being the Only Person Alive to Have Understood the Film Gattaca

Which is a film about how even very bright people can’t be bothered to understand statistics or do boring data validation

Photo: I know everyone would like a deep soul-searching story from my biography, or a deep-drive on the Trust Assembly. Unfortunately, this image is not only an actual photo taken from my backyard when I helped a guy load up our old children’s play-set but also a metaphor for my current capacity. Please accept his essay on the movie Gattaca, a film released in 1997, that I wrote in about an hour.

There was a time when “you know what that movie/show was really about?!?” takes were extremely fresh and mind-opening. We no longer live in such a time. We get it. You can apply multiple perspectives to a piece of media. Wow. Essays on how the Smurfs is really a show about insect mating patterns, or Breaking Bad is a prequel to Malcom in the Middle, can now only hope to elicit an eye-roll and a groan.

You’re so clever, we think. Is that what you wanted me to say? You’re so clever. Congratulations on making a Disney movie have something to do with incest or bestiality or necrophilia or whatever. Who needs a doctor when we have you ruining common cultural touchstones through the Memetic version of the Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon?

Yet in the name of autism, one must persist.

In the popular mind, Gattaca is a heroic story about the triumph of the human spirit over mere genetics. That’s the level at which it mostly operates when I say it’s one of my favorite movies. Do you see? Do you see how I’m doing it? I’m trying to show how I deviate from regular people! Oh, your science is going to keep me down? Nuh-uh, will power! I feel very strong, visceral emotions when I watch this movie. It makes me feel like I could overcome any obstacle. So, it is with great unhappiness, that I report that Gattaca is actually a tale about how even very bright people can’t be bothered to understand statistics or perform boring data validation. Boom, look at how clever we are being!

Gattaca’s premise is that in the near future genetically engineered humans are taking over everything. Unless you were born in a test tube as an engineered super baby you don’t stand a chance. The genetic super babies are so awesome that all the good jobs go to them as soon as they take a blood test. The world treats this all as a certainty and everyone agrees there’s no escaping your genes. No matter what credentials you have it doesn’t matter because blood will out. Then the main character, Vincent, bursts into the scene and proves that the whole system is a lie.

While this is a very seductive narrative about human will, unfortunately it does not follow the actual facts of the movie. It’s so beautiful, though! The cinematography is top notch! The script is incredible! Everyone in this film acts their heart out and we see perfect performances from Ethan Hawk, Jude Law, and Uma Thurman. Even the supporting cast is flawless.

The way some of these story moments are written is also top-notch. At one point Vincent is swimming in the ocean with his genetically perfect brother. It’s a game of chicken to prove the value of the human spirit, each of them giving their all to prove they possess the strength to defeat the other. Will Vincent win through sheer determination or will his genetically perfect brother take the day through better science? Finally, his brother’s strength begins to fail and he cries out, “How are you doing this Vincent? How have you done any of this?” and Vincent responds, “I never saved anything for the swim back!”

I shout that line at my wife whenever I’m doing dishes late at night. Or whenever I’m doing anything that requires a very small amount of will-power. Mow the front lawn and the back lawn? On the same day? In this heat? “I never saved anything for the swim back!” Carry in all the groceries in one trip? “I never saved anything for the swim back!”

Who could refuse to be swept up in something so dramatic?

Who could be so nit-picky, missing-the-forest-for-the-treesy, and Neil-Degrass-Tysony in order to pull themselves out of this emotional narrative?

Well, me.

And I promise that I think less of myself for this.

At the birth of the main character, Vincent, a blood test is immediately taken. His entire future is mapped out in excruciating detail per the emotional reaction of everyone in the room. Here’s the hitch. The stupid stumbling block. At absolutely no point in the readout of Vincent’s various maladies is anything causal ever actually stated. Nobody ever says, “we found the gene combinations for being dumb and this guy is definitely dumb. See this sequence? This is the dumb gene. If you have it, then you are dumb.” Everything is given as a probability. He has such-and-such a probability for heart failure. Such-and-such a probability for being bad at school. Such-and-such a probability of not being able to understand probability.

Then the movie goes on to show Vincent overcoming all of these constraints. Vincent does amazing in school. He’s an athlete. He gets a job at the in-world equivalent of NASA. And all of these super-geniuses are like: “Wow! That’s magic! I mean, what are the odds that a guy with a 90% chance of being bad at school would be good at school?!?”

And…

It’s ten percent. You stupid son of a bitch! Aren’t you supposed to be genetically superior to everyone else?!?! Isn’t this whole film premised on you being a stunning irrefutable genius?!?! If a guy has a 90% chance of failure he has a 10% chance of success! It’s right there at the start of the goddamn movie!!! AREN’T YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE SMART ENOUGH TO UNDERSTAND THIS!?!?

The same problem exists with Vincent’s supposed heart problems, which again is given as a percentage. There’s apparently some sort of polygenic score going on behind all of these tests. Nobody is stating anything in terms of cause and effect. That means this whole testing regime was set up based on correlations from large data samples. Vincent has lived longer than the median life-expectancy for people with similar scores probably because he’s lived by a very strict diet and exercise regimen his whole life. Or because, again, he might have some other genetic code that overrides the one commonly linked to the negative outcomes that showed up in his test. The testing is not competent at the individual scale! Your genes are more like a very convoluted game of Magic the Gathering than they are a perfect and immediately intuitive assembly of clockwork gears. Oh, you got the card that deals 20 damage to your heart immediately the second you have it in hand? Well, I have the card that negates that card by tapping one blue territory. Luckily, I have nine blue territories. Except with your genetics nobody knows what all the cards are or what they all do, exactly. So we look at outcomes and look at genes and assemble statistical correlations that may or may not point to something causal underneath.

There’s one scene where Vincent’s heart is shown to be beating faster than otherwise expected, but at no point does a doctor ever look at his actual heart and say a valve is broken or anything. One of his best friend is a doctor who inspects him every day! In terms of the tests they need to perform where the result is looking at, “What is actually happening?” or “Can you actually do this?” Vincent can in fact, actually pass the test. Worse, nobody ever records this information about the tests and feeds it back into something called “The Giant Genetic Correlation Database.” Nobody even views this as something that would need to be done!

The people who do the science in the world of Gattaca are lazy! When Vincent is born, his conditions are all listed in terms of probabilities. This is unchanged by the time he’s close to thirty years old when the events of the film play out. That means for three decades that nobody has fine-tuned any of the tests! Nobody has done any work to find outliers, like Vincent, who can pass all the intelligence tests with high marks even when though those outcomes were not predicted genetically. This would be super valuable data to have to actually locate the genes directly at play in intelligence! You could move from correlation to causation! But nobody in Gattaca even attempts to do this. If you want to gain deeper understanding of genetics you should be constantly looping your models against actual empirical, real-world results. Does this person have a score indicating they are going to do badly on a test? Well, when you gave them the test did that happen? Did you loop their data back in to find other interesting genetic constellations?

No? You lazy piece of shit! When did you stop doing science?

The movie still holds up at this deeper level, even when the theme slightly changes. There’s something that never goes away, no matter how high your IQ gets. No matter how “pure” your genetics, you never want to do an experiment. The ancient Greeks didn’t want to do experiments and they were some of the smartest people to ever live. Back in Athens you were supposed to sit down, think about something, and try to prove the theory based on axioms. You didn’t do anything so base as to go try something in real life and see what actually happened! Well, I’ve seen some quite good geometric proofs with clay, but you get the point. If you never have to test your theory you never have to be wrong and you never have to change your mind or think that doing things might be a lot harder than thinking about doing things. In the dick measuring contest of human on human rivalry, you can compare yourself to other people in very tight and controlled ways rather than humble yourself before the deep mystery of the universe.

What is Vincent actually fighting in Gattaca? It’s not the mechanistic universe. It’s not free will versus fate. He’s fighting bureaucracy. He’s fighting careerism. He’s fighting a system that works “well enough” that nobody wants to examine its actual underpinnings. Too much work for too little gain… if you were born with the right gene-markers! He’s fighting the lazy spot in the human mind that would rather accept things as they are than try to discover how they truly are. The world in which “create an indicator for success” trumps “try and see what happens!”

I enjoy the popular viewing of Gattaca, where genetics works like everyone thinks it does and the tests are perfect. It’s a great story. But a dark, adult, and more mature part of me cheers that Vincent is blowing holes wide open in this terrible and incurious bureaucracy. Looking at something odd and shying away from curiosity? That’s where a lot of the real evil in the world is born.