Gattaca, twenty-nine years later

I first saw Gattaca on a rented tape, probably too young for it, and I have not stopped thinking about it since. The premise is simple. Vincent Freeman is conceived without genetic selection and read at birth as a list of probabilities: a heart condition, a short life expectancy, a low ceiling. He wants to go to space. The film is about the distance between what he was told and what he does.

What moved me as a child, and still does, is that the film never argues with the diagnosis. Vincent’s heart is weak. His eyesight is poor. The numbers are not wrong. He borrows the identity of Jerome Morrow, a man with a perfect profile and a broken back, and spends every morning scrubbing loose skin from his body so that he will not be found out. The effort is enormous and almost entirely invisible, which is how effort usually is.

The swim

Twice in the film Vincent races his brother Anton out to sea. Anton is the engineered one, the one who was supposed to win. The second time, as adults, Vincent beats him and has to tow him back to shore. When Anton asks how he did it, Vincent tells him he never saved anything for the swim back. I have said that line to myself more often than I would admit, usually at a desk, usually when nothing much was at stake.

“I never saved anything for the swim back.”

It is not a line about courage, or not only. It is about refusing to budget for the version of yourself that turns around. Growing up with a head that would not sit still, I recognised the arithmetic immediately.

Play video from YouTube

The look of it

Andrew Niccol and the cinematographer Sławomir Idziak shot the film in a narrow band of amber and green, and the production design is mid-century modern made cold: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Marin County Civic Center stands in for the Gattaca complex, and the staircase in Jerome’s apartment is built as a double helix. It is a future with very few screens in it. People hold paper, drive old cars and wait for the rocket. It looks the way this site is trying to look, which is probably not a coincidence.

Twenty-nine years on, the science has moved closer to the film and the film has not aged. I do not think it is a warning about genetics. I think it is a film about what you do after you have been measured.