GATTACAThis 1997 film takes place in a future where humans who aren't genetically engineered (in-valids) are considered less than those who are (the apparent majority). Parents are able to pick the "best of the best" of their own genes for their unborn children. At birth a simple blood test can determine the exact cause and date of death as well as any disease probability.
Vincent was an unplanned "faith" child whose older brother was engineered. He has a heart condition the doctors said would kill him by age 30. He has terrible eyesight. However, he manages to fake his own death in order to be "reborn" as one Jerome Morrow, a "9.3" product of generic engineering who was crippled in a foreign country in, as he later reveals, a failed suicide attempt. Since the crippling took place elsewhere, he isn't crippled on record, and he basically stays out of the public and hands his identity, skin cells and all, over to Vincent.
Vincent goes to crazy measures to become Jerome so he can work at Gattaca (some sort of hi-tech space company) and eventually become an astronaut. Almost instantly he is accepted and begins training and testing. Then the mission organizer dies and the mission is rescheduled for the following week. Vincent and his lover, Irene, the only one who knows his real identity, narrowly escape the murder detectives (who found a trace of his real DNA and are relentlessly testing everyone's blood, including in random public places) both at a soirée and at Vincent and Jerome's own home. Just before the flight leaves, Vincent reveals himself both to the doctor at work (who has apparently known all along) and to the police detective, who turns out to be his own brother. The two brothers decide to duke it out with another round of the game "chicken," and Vincent proves that it's his own crazy "human spirit" that has enabled him to defeat his brother more than one time. (Theme: mind over matter...?)
In the end, Vincent leaves on the mission and poor alcoholic Jerome burns himself alive in a furnace.
key termsde-gene-erate: someone who was born naturally without engineering
valid: someone born with predetermined genes
borrowed ladder: someone who uses another person's DNA and identity
questions1. Have they really not found a way to fix a broken back yet? What about heart conditions? Eyesight? Pretty impressive (or pathetic) considering the other accomplishments.
2. Did Vincent just disappear to his family, or did he and his brother just lose contact? In the last scenes it seemed like it had been years since they'd last met.
3. How about the scene where his parents decide Anton's gender and looks? Why do they object to choosing the rest of his traits?
4. Does the fact that you know a son is going to be sickly make a parent love him any less? Or is the father just heartless? He refuses to name Vincent after himself after finding out Vincent's problems.
5. So which is better, genetically engineered, or leaving it to fate? Where does one draw the line?
Reproducing the Posthuman Body by Susan M. SquierSquier describes the posthuman reproductive body in conjunction with the postmodern reproductive body. She says that the main characteristic all definitions of postmodernism have in common is the "de-naturing" factor. This factor can be seen in several works of fiction including
Frankenstein and even in a non-fictional government report in Australia. The image of the posthuman reproductive body is best represented by a pregnant man, a surrogate mother, and the ectogenic fetus. She argues that separation of the fetus from the mother-to-be is a main characteristic of the representation of posthuman reproductive bodies. For example, in Romanticism the mother is seen as a machine rather than a main caretaker, nourisher and protector. Postmodernism suggests that the roles are purely social and can be performed by anyone, thereby devaluing the female and taking away her only politically recognized power. Different authors compare the separation of the mother from the fetus in various works of literature as Romantic, Machiavellian, Nietzsche, etc. Squier basically explains the representation of posthuman reproductive bodies in postmodern texts in comparison to other texts.
key termscopula: a word or set of words that acts as a connecting link between the subject and predicate of a proposition; something that links together
Zona drilling: confusing method of in-vitro fertilization (IVF)
AID: artificial insemination with a donor's sperm
iatrogenic: (of a medical disorder) caused by the diagnosis, manner, or treatment of a physician
obstetrical: of or pertaining to the care and treatment of women in childbirth and during the period before and after delivery
epigenesis: the theory that an embryo develops from the successive differentiation of an originally undifferentiated structure
questions1. Who in the world actually reads that much into 19th-century epigenesis? Is this THAT valid? "The fetus as the perfect bourgeois subject-- it makes itself, and so is neither simply the inheritor of paternal power nor the commodity-like product of its mother's labor." Who in the world was thinking that at that time?
2. What are the "representations" in all the different time periods that Squier keeps mentioning? Are we limited to literature here or is there actual discourse on the topic from these eras? Is it all retrospection?
3. In an age where machines were idealized, a woman was looked at as a machine, and this is somehow marginalizing her? I don't get it.
4. The definition of "postmodernism as de-naturing" doesn't ring true to me. Does that imply that postmodern feminists are trying to be something they aren't naturally?
5. "Science is not objective, it is projective." I'm pretty sure science is just a way of organizing reality, not constructing it. This person is going a little overboard, right?
Comments
This article is WAY TOO NITPICKY AND ANALYTICAL for me. Blah. I likened it to Creed's article on the crazy stuff apparently going on in "Alien."
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