Consider the work of God.

For who can straighten out what he has made crooked.

Are you just watching episode 165?

Gattaca.

Welcome to the podcast that shares critical thinking for the entertained Christian.

I'm E. Franklin.

I'm Tim Martin.

And we're going back in the Way Back machine again.

Way, way back.

Way back.

Yeah, it's interesting because 1997, that was a year that had a lot of change in my life.

So graduated from college, moved to take a new job in a new state, and lots of things going on in my life.

And this movie came out, which I'm not sure I recall seeing in the theater.

I think I saw it a few years later for the first time.

I kept hearing raves about Gattaca and finally got around to watching it.

And it is definite dystopian movie.

This is not a movie that you watch to feel good about yourself.

This is not a feel good movie.

No.

In fact, it actually gives me the creeps and the chills.

So it's not an enjoyable experience to watch this movie.

But the reason why we have gone back in time to talk about it is because it has a message that is very relevant in our world today.

In fact, it's more relevant now than it was when they made the movie in 1997 or released the movie.

This is a case of life imitating art, just 20 years late.

Yeah, well, I'm not sure it's imitating art.

I think, to be honest, this movie was prophetic.

I think whoever put it together, who dreamed up the story, they were envisioning where things that were already going on in the 80s and 90s in the human Genome project, which only recently finished.

I think they finally finished mapping the human genome and not too long ago.

Like in the last 10 years, started in 1990.

Yeah.

And 97 was also Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal.

Yeah.

So there was a lot going on in the 90s that made this a relevant movie even then.

But it's the thing that they were foreseeing could happen.

As a result of all of this, genetic research in the 90s is starting to come to fruition now in our current time.

And so that's why we dug this movie out.

And surprisingly enough, this movie holds up really well.

It's nearly 30 years old, but it doesn't feel that old when you watch it.

I'm pretty impressed with how.

Well, I mean, there's some things that are, you know, plot holes and science holes and all kinds of stuff in it, but I think those Would have been plot holes and science holes even back in the 90s.

Did you know that collection of NASA scientists, I don't know what collection voted this the most scientifically accurate movie ever made?

What?

It's Gattaca.

Yeah.

Really?

Uh huh huh.

Interesting.

Like I said, it might have been a party where everybody was drinking.

I don't know.

Well, the space part of it seems a little flawed in my opinion.

A little?

Yeah.

I mean, to me, I honestly feel like the space part of the movie is really more of the shape of what Vincent's hopes and dreams are.

It's not really meant to be taken literally.

And in a way it is literal, but in a way it's not literal.

I don't know.

But anyway, there are some parts of that make me go, hmm, because you know, the way they constantly sending these missions off, the rocket ships are constantly departing And I think 12 a day, 12 a day or something like that is like, that doesn't make sense from, you know, from an interplanetary standpoint is that we would be launching from space, not from Earth.

So, you know, that to me seems to be the biggest problem.

But then they show them like getting into their ships without even space chutes on and no G force when it takes off and all of these little holes that.

It's kind of like somebody who's heavily involved in watching the space program, because it's always something that has heavily fascinated me.

And I just recently got to meet Barry Wilmore, which is absolutely the most exciting thing ever.

You know who Barry Wilmore is, right?

No, who's Barry Wilmore?

He is one of the astronauts that was stuck on the space station because the.

Oh, that's cool.

Very cool.

Yeah, no, he's a Christian and I got to meet him.

He actually came to my church when he was coming through town back in July.

So I got to get my picture taken with him and everything was really cool.

So, yeah, his testimony is amazing.

I'm just telling everybody now, if you want to go hear an amazing testimony, go check out Barry Wilmore because he's got an absolutely amazing one.

But that's off the topic.

We're actually not going to talk about the space program in space in this movie because it's more about genetics.

And that is going to be, I think, the gist of where we're going with all of our theme discussion.

But before I get into any of that, I do want to talk about the music, because we always do that.

There's always something to talk about regarding the music and the score for Gattaca is by Michael Nyman, and it's a very interesting score.

It's very slow paced and suspenseful, and it's that way through the whole movie.

So there's not a lot of variation.

Yeah.

As a matter of fact, it's funny you should mention that there's not a lot of variation because I was looking at the architecture, you know, the setting and everything.

And I'll talk about this in my opening thoughts.

I was looking at the architecture and one of the elements that they use in the set design for Gattaca is minimalism.

And Michael Nyman used that same minimalism in the composition.

So when I was listening to the score this morning, and I feel like there are only maybe 12 measures in the entire movie, just repeated different ways at different speeds and different volumes.

And it.

But it's amazing what he does with it.

It is a constant repetition of scales and melody.

It's really impressive how well he does it, and it is all so very depressing.

In addition to the normal score music, there's actual piece of piano music that is played in one of the scenes.

And interestingly enough, he composed it.

But it's a piano composure made for a man with 12 fingers.

Oh, yes.

And it's basically when Vincent, as Jerome, goes on a date with a co worker.

Irene.

Irene.

And they are at this, like, theater and this guy's playing the piano and he's obviously been genetically manipulated to be able to play super complex music because he has 12 fingers instead of 10.

But anyway, I thought that was a very interesting.

I was like, who actually played it?

Did somebody with 12 fingers play it?

Exactly.

They went around and they found somebody with 12 fingers.

I have not spoken to a pianist, but I really don't feel like having an additional finger on each hand would help.

Yeah.

Anyway, well, let me play a little bit of this music and then we'll move on to Tim's thoughts.

Where you said the movie is very good.

I say the movie is a masterpiece of filmmaking, or nearly a masterpiece of filmmaking.

But I didn't like.

I loved it from a technical standpoint, but I was very uncomfortable with the dystopia that they presented.

And, you know, the point is that they want you to be uncomfortable.

Right.

The whole intent.

And they were successful.

Yes, they were very successful.

We don't expect to enjoy this movie.

I had a couple problems with it that prevented me from sympathizing with the main character, with the protagonist.

For one thing, I'm not a big fan of Ethan Hawke.

Or Uma Thurman, and they are the two that get the most screen time.

So, you know, it had a mark against it already.

But I found Vincent to be a truly unlikable character for me.

I thought he was a version of.

Not apathy, but he was just one step up from being evil himself.

So I never got to really invest in the story, which, you know, was not all that unusual for me, I guess there are movies that I watch.

I would still recommend watching Gattaca without any hesitation because it is such a poignant movie in the simple message that it has.

But while I didn't get lost in the story, I was able to really focus on the sets and the dressings and the props.

And I.

Because this movie came out almost 20 years ago now, I was able to go back and look at some of the filming locations they used.

One of the houses that they used was actually designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

And the.

The way they mixed art deco and retro, futurism and minimalism all together to create this bleak picture of the perfect future was very well done.

Gattaca definitely won its fair share of awards, including the Academy Award for set decoration, which I feel a little redeemed by noticing.

Yeah.

But Gattaca has some of my favorite actors in it, even though they are not in any of the lead roles.

Alan Arkin.

Love him.

We'll watch him in almost anything.

Tony Shalhoub, you know my man Monk and Ernest Borgnine.

Yes.

Who of course, I remember from Airwolf.

Yes, me too.

I was really dating myself.

Yeah, both of us, really.

But I love all of them.

They're great actors.

And I think the only one who's still alive is Tony Shalhoub.

Oh, that's so sad.

Anyway, there was a funny.

Because I watch movies with closed captioning.

There was a funny closed caption failure with Gattaca.

Tony Shalhoub's character's name is German.

So I guess in whatever script or whatever program they use to generate the closed captions, it has character names in front of the lines.

And every time Tony Shalhoub's character says something on the closed captioning, on.

At least on my copy, it says in German, suggesting that he was saying his lines in German instead of German saying the line.

I just.

I got a kick out of that.

Just shows how technology is working for us.

My final thoughts are really the parts of the dystopia that weighed on me the most was the parts that they left to the imagination.

And the first one is there is no discussion on advancements in contraception.

Yet it is clear that they are presumably living in an amoral society because of this socially accepted caste system that has taken hold.

To be honest, I don't feel that it's abortion.

I feel it's like destroying fetuses.

So, like, when his parents go, it's not that they were having them program the fetus, it was that they were creating fetuses and only implanting the one that met.

Right.

The standards.

So all of.

All of the ones that were not good enough.

I wasn't even going there though.

And then the people, the invalids, were probably not allowed to have children.

They were probably sterilized.

Sterilized.

Yeah.

I was actually thinking of all the recreational sex that happens.

It would have to be, you know, 500 abortions a month in a city that size.

I would assume they were anticipating that you would only have babies through artificial insemination and the rest of the time it would not.

Basically.

Yeah.

It's definitely not a great view of the future.

No, no, it isn't.

The last part that really bugged me was, and I'll put a spoiler alert in here if you don't want a spoiler for this 20 year old movie, jump forward 30 seconds.

The movie ends with one of the main characters committing suicide.

And the way that the movie presented tried to present it as a noble gesture from this guy towards Vincent.

And I just had so much trouble with that.

I couldn't help but to think of euthanasia in Canada in particular the way that they now are allowing people with mental conditions to choose to end their lives.

And this guy was only a cripple, he was a paraplegic.

Right.

So, yeah, I was very put off by those two elements and rightly so.

Yeah.

So before we move into our theme discussion, I do want to remind everybody that we are a listener supported podcast and I'd really want to give thanks to our current patrons, Isaiah Santiano, Craig Hardy, Stephen Brown II and David Lefton, who have been giving to us generously on a monthly basis.

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We'd love to hear from our listeners, especially, you know, when you want to add two things we've said in an episode.

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And we'd love to hear from you especially I know this is an older movie.

A lot of our younger listeners probably.

Haven'T even heard of it or were born after it.

I told several people at work that I was recording when I got home and they were like, what movie are you doing?

And I was like Attica.

And they're like gave me all blank stares.

So this may not be a very popular episode.

Anyway, just so that those of you who haven't seen the movie and perhaps can't find it because it is actually not on any of the streaming services right now, you could probably rent it on prime or someplace like that.

But in case you don't have access to the movie, I'm going to give you just a very brief synopsis, which is something we usually don't do.

And Tim can chime in as he wants.

But basically the premise of Gattaca is that a boy is born to a family without any genetic manipulation.

And they make that decision.

They're actually encouraged by the doctor.

You know, he'll have a better chance at life if you pre select for the things that will keep him healthy and that kind of stuff.

And they're like, oh no, we want to do it naturally.

And so Vincent is born with I can't remember what all of the things were against him, but he was going to be dead by 30 basically because of the potential for heart problems.

And he was going to be a myopic, have vision problems and all these things and so they basically wrap him in Cotton, his childhood, you know, not letting him fall because they're afraid he's going to hurt himself.

And then Cotton, I always think bubble wrap.

They have another boy who is genetically manipulated and he grows faster and he's taller and he's more handsome and he's healthy.

And so there's this understandable sibling rivalry between them, which they constantly show off to each other by swimming out into the ocean to see which one gives up first and swims back.

It's kind of like a game of chicken.

And Vincent, of course, always loses to his brother Anton, who is stronger and just more physically able.

Until Vincent reaches a point in his life where he just doesn't care anymore and he just keeps swimming.

And he ends up having to go back and save Anton because Anton turns back and starts to drown.

And it's a turning point in his life.

And at this point, he has been a janitor at Gattaca.

He wants to go to space, but he obviously can't because he's an invalid.

And so he goes to look in the black market and finds that he can actually be matched up with somebody who's very similar in appearance and borrow their genetics.

And they go through this massive thing where he has to scrub himself skin cells and hair and put it all in an incinerator.

And then he has to carry blood samples and urine and even skin flakes and hair from Jerome around with him so that he can seed his workspace and everything so everybody will think he's Jerome.

And he manages, just based on a urine sample, to get into Gattaca.

But the interesting thing about it is he gets into Gattaca with a urine sample.

But he still has to do all of the physical fitness, do all of the math and everything to prove that he can be a navigator and all that stuff.

He does that on his own.

He's not stealing the know how and the physical abilities.

He's just masking what they're looking for in the genetics with the real Jerome stuff.

So you think everything's going good.

He's a week away from leaving on his mission, he's been selected, and somebody is killed in the office.

And when he goes to the scene of the crime, just as an onlooker, like everybody else, he accidentally drops an eyelash.

And that is found when they are searching for the killer.

And the detective becomes hyper focused on finding this invalid and is looking everywhere.

So a third of the movie is multiple close encounters with this detective.

While Vincent, Jerome, is trying to Elude capture.

And near the end of the movie, they find the correct killer, who happens to be another director in Gattaca, who is the motive for the killing.

Doesn't make sense to me, but something about the mission being shut down or delayed or something, that they were trying to prevent that.

And then you find out that this detective who's been searching so strongly for this invalid, who, it seems like he's trying to find the killer, but it turns out that it's Anton, Vincent's brother.

And he's actually, I guess, kind of, oh, this is where Vincent has let me find him kind of thing.

And so they end up having a bit of a face off.

And then they decide to settle things, as they always have, by going out into the ocean and swimming out as far as they can.

And the first one to turn back is the chicken.

And of course, once again, it's Anton who turns back, which turns into this interesting little dialogue between the two of them where Anton asks Vincent how he has been doing it.

How can you do this?

How are you doing this?

And Vincent says, the secret is, I've never left anything for the return trip.

And then he goes to space and you find out right before when he.

In an Armani suit.

Right, exactly.

Instead of a spacesuit.

But you find out that the doctor who has been taking all of his samples all this time actually knew the whole time that he was not the real Jerome and has been covering for him, which was a really cool gotcha.

And then, as you said, there is a suicide at the end of the movie where Jerome Eugene, the guy who is actually the source of the genetics, leaves a whole freezer full of samples for Vincent when he gets back and then climbs into the incinerator and ends his life.

So that is Gattaca.

It's a very depressing, very dystopian movie.

But I wanted to give that quick synopsis because I think it'll help the rest of our themes if we don't have to stop and explain what was going on.

We can just now talk about the actual themes of the movie without having to explain how everything fits into the story.

Yeah.

Did I do an adequate job of the synopsizing it there?

Yeah, you provided a lot more of the nuance than I think I could have.

Actually, out of curiosity, how many times have you seen Gattaca?

Maybe five or six.

Okay, so my wife has seen it about the same number of times, too, and I had never watched it before this.

Yeah, no, it had been a while since I'd watched It.

But I have seen it maybe five or six times since it came out.

So that's, you know, over 27 years.

So, yeah, it's been a while.

And I actually watched it in two parts because when I got to the part where they were started looking for him, I actually turned the movie off and came back to it later.

It's like, that's the part of the movie I really don't like.

It's just too much.

It's like I've watched it so many times.

I know they don't catch him, but I still get like, totally into it.

So, anyway, our first theme that we want to talk about is the impossible standard of perfection, which I think is one of the main themes of this movie.

In as much as it's something that you see that they're trying to reach, but nobody ever gets to 100%.

I think that, you know, in their strive to produce children that are genetically superior, you noticed it's always like 85 or 90 or 70 something or 60 something.

It's never 100% because perfection is not attainable.

But yet this society has created this standard of perfection that causes people who fall short to feel extremely inadequate.

And always striving for something that is completely out of reach, which because nobody can be 100%, means everybody always feels inadequate.

And I think that that is, you know, possibly the nuance that you're missing in what Jerome Eugene does at the end of the movie.

It wasn't honorable.

It was because without Vincent, he was nothing.

And so he displayed that by destroying himself is like his only worth was in his genetics.

That's why he took his medal, his second place medal that he won in his athletic.

I can't remember what kind of athlete he was.

Jerome's trip, though, wasn't.

It wasn't a permanent relocation.

I mean, he was coming back.

He was coming back.

And that was one of the flaws, I think, in the movie was what was the point of him leaving all those samples?

Because there's absolutely no way Vincent could have hid the fact by the time they got back after a year that he was not Jerome.

Because his own personal genetics would have been filled.

The ship, the people that were on that trip with him, there was no way he would have come back as Jerome.

Everybody would have known he was Vincent by the time they came back.

So maintaining the Jerome myth because he took none of Jerome's genetics with him on the trip, it would have been impossible.

Yeah.

The end of his dream was going to space.

Eugene was like, thank you for sharing your dream with me.

Because he had lost all of his own dreams.

He had nothing left.

And because he was inadequate, he had really good genetics.

But because he was a paraplegic, he was imperfect.

And so he couldn't meet the standard of perfection that the society had set.

And so he was nothing.

And I'm not condoning his suicide.

I'm just saying I think that it wasn't necessarily meant to be honorable.

I think it was an indication of the depression that you see him suffering through the whole movie.

That's why he's constantly getting drunk, why he's sometimes blows up at Vincent for really weird reasons.

And it's because he is nothing.

He exists only to give Vincent his identity.

And without Vincent, he has no purpose left.

So very sad character, all in all.

But he is, I think, emblematic of this impossible standard of perfection because he can't reach that.

He got second as an athlete.

He was supposed to be first.

He was supposed to be the best.

And then he got hurt and.

And I think he's very.

He's like the picture of what that impossible standard does.

And the reason why we did this movie is because when we met to record our episode on Superman, you actually shared an article with me, which we'll put in the show notes and I'll let you explain the article because I'm not able to read it behind a paywall.

For me, it is behind a paywall.

I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal.

I find it to one of the most factually accurate reporting.

You know, major media reporting outlets out there, but they have a.

A great science section.

And this article was in the newsletter that I received.

I want to say it was actually the day we were recording on Superman about how the tech bros or, you know, the movers and shakers of Silicon Valley started going to geneticists to program their children not just for gender or eye color, but for iq.

The article made it a point that the best they could possibly expect to get out of it is 3 to 4 points of IQ.

But even IQ is a complete misnomer.

Yeah.

So it really is just a waste of money in a shell game or snake oil.

But the fact is that they're doing it, which is scary on multiple levels.

Yeah.

And you know, that's the scary part, is that why Gattaca is so unsettling is because it's so possible now.

We've done so much research on the genome, and now with IVF and the way that they're testing embryos before, you know, for diseases and stuff.

It's just tough because we live in a world where it's now possible and it's scary.

But to think that we're trying to create, you know, perfect kids.

I mean, that's what the Nazis were doing in Germany.

I mean, maybe without science, but, you know, they were breeding the perfect man.

And it's just a scary ideal that it only makes men victims and it's controlling and it's.

I'm wondering if the Nazis used eugenic science.

They did.

That's where eugenics started.

It was with the Nazi started in the U.S.

According to the chatgpt, it was actually popularized by a cousin of Charles Darwin.

Yeah, makes utter sense.

Evolution.

Yeah.

And you know, that's the thing that bothers me most about.

I mean, because even eugenics comes out of it, racism comes out of it.

So much of the evils of mankind comes from the theory of evolution.

I mean, that's how we came up with this whole concept of racism, you know, where the color of your skin determines your level of, you know, hierarchy on the scale of human development or whatever it is.

I don't, I'm not an evolutionist, and so I'm affronted by all of that concept.

But we're all one race.

We're all descended from Adam and Eve.

And the amount of pigmentation in your, of mellow, melanin in your skin has nothing to do with anything.

And so that whole concept and the fact that it came from Darwin's.

What was it?

Descent of Man, I think was.

It was the.

It was the second part.

Origin of Species.

Yeah, the second half was the Descent of Man.

All of that, that racism stuff really started with the evolutionary philosophy that we developed from apes.

And so there are people that are in between.

It's like lower, closer to the apes than to the perfect man.

And that's just that if people really realized how evil that doctrine is and how it's grounded so strongly in evolution, we would throw evolution out.

It's just awful.

But anyway, it's just the next step in growth in this.

These evil philosophies.

And it makes me kind of return to scripture because as I say, and I don't know who all agrees with me in our listening audience, but evolution is a direct contradiction with Scripture.

And so we're going to go back to scripture and just quickly go over why man is not perfect.

And in Genesis 1:26:31, which covers the creation of man, in the first chapter of Genesis, we discover that man was created perfect in a perfect world.

So God made the world.

He made it perfect, and he created man, and he put him in the garden, and he was perfect.

And it was good.

And it was good.

It was.

Not only was it good, it was very good.

Because of his creation, God looked at all that he had created it, and behold, it was very good.

So it was perfect.

And then Adam sinned in Genesis 3, and that brought upon the curse.

I'm not going to read all of Genesis 3.

You can go read it for yourself.

And it was rebellion.

That's how the sin happened.

It was a direct rebellion to God's rules.

And then because of that, God cursed creation.

Not just man, he cursed all of creation.

So not only is man no longer perfect, and.

But creation is no longer perfect.

And we see that in Romans 8:22 through 23 and in 2nd Corinthians 5:1 6 and the 22:23 is.

For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together with labor pains until now.

Not only that, but we ourselves, who have the spirit as the first fruits, we also groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.

We see that this result of sin has made it so that we are no longer perfect.

In fact, if you look at the whole history of the first 11 chapters of Genesis, you'll see that the original men were living really long periods of time.

Like Noah at the time of the flood, he was 500 years old, and he lived beyond that.

And so man was so close to perfection that even with this curse of sin, they were living really long lives.

And it's just, you know, the accumulation of the curse that has caused us to not live as well, like we're living shorter lives.

We have a lot of genetic ailments, and as they kind of point out in Gattaca, you know, eye problems and hearing problems and bone problems and muscle problems and all the things that are accumulating through our genetic code.

It's like as we have more children, that curse just gets worse and worse with every generation.

And so then after that, we realized that because we were sin, we could no longer reach perfection.

The sight of eternity, because as redeemed, we are actually promised perfect bodies in eternity.

But not now.

We have to live with the curse of sin until we die.

First Corinthians 15:42, 44 says so it is with the resurrection of the dead.

Sown in corruption, raised in incorruption, sown in dishonor, raised in glory, sown in weakness, raised in power, sown a natural body, raised a spiritual body.

If There is a natural body.

There is also a spiritual body.

So this is the idea that in this life, perfection will never be available, but we can set our eyes on the eternity if we're redeemed.

And so basically, there's no way we can escape the curse, not through science and not through effort.

And so everything that we see in Gattaca, where you see these poor people who have been told by their society that if you just had good enough genes that then you can attain perfection and you can't, you're always going to fall short.

I only had one thing to add, and you actually have already covered it with your discussion of Genesis, but I threw this one in here for you.

Okay.

You see, Ecclesiastes 7:29 says, only see this?

I have discovered that God made people upright, but they pursued many schemes, which is just a reflection of exactly what happened in Genesis.

God made us perfect, and we took that perfection and messed it up.

Yep.

And that's what you see even in Gattaca because they.

They have, you know, this resource where they can, you know, manipulate genes.

I'm not even entirely sure whether they're even manipulating genes.

They're just reading them and discarding the ones they don't want.

And that is even worse because instead of manipulating the genes, they're just going, nope, you're not good enough.

You're not good enough.

You're not good enough.

Well, that's.

That is what IVF is doing now.

It is.

In 1997, IVF was accepted as a.

A valid method to conceive, just as it is today.

Thankfully, there are Christian families out there who are adopting the unimplanted fetuses and going ahead and giving them life.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's wonderful.

Yeah, it is wonderful because there.

I know there are a lot of.

Of embryos out there who have been frozen, and instead of having them destroyed, they can be given to, you know, people who are childless or can't have kids for whatever reason, or can't, you know, and can't conceive.

Looks like you also put in here Galatians 3.

3.

Are you so foolish?

After beginning by the Spirit, are you now finishing by the flesh?

So Paul was writing to the church in Galatia about the Judaizers who have come into the church and started telling everybody that the only way to be a proper Christian is to not only follow all that you have been taught, but to fully embrace the law, the Levitican law.

So get circumcised, eat only certain foods.

You know, the Whole kitten caboodle.

Although I don't think caboodle is kosher.

Kosher, thank you.

That was the word.

There are some Christians today who are still doing that.

Yeah.

I have friends of mine, people who.

Choose to follow the Jewish law.

It seems foolish to me, but hey, teach their own, I guess.

Yeah.

They're not fully relying on the, on the grace of God through the blood of Jesus to, to save them.

They're.

Yeah.

Still trying to keep the law.

But Paul was arguing that the Judaizers were essentially saying that it was grace and.

But it's not grace.

And it is grace, period.

Everything else flows from that.

Right.

And that's what we're seeing in this Gattaca picture of pursuing perfection.

We can't get to perfection, but they believe they can by making each generation a little more perfect.

Yeah.

And always falling a little bit short or sometimes a lot short.

Yeah.

You know, at one point Irene mentions that she has a heart condition to Vincent, who was masquerading as Jerome at that point.

Right.

And I guess I became unclear as to whether or not she was a Valid.

She must have been a Valid to get in there.

She was a Valid, but she wasn't good enough.

So she was never going to get chosen for a mission because her percentage of chances and see these things were always like, percentage.

They have a percent chance of having this and a percent chance of having this and a percent chance of having this.

And like, you know, Vincent actually later told her is like, I have it even worse than you and I've managed to get this far is like, quit using it as an excuse.

But that's basically what it was.

You were told by your genetics this was your limit and people weren't reaching past that.

And so that kind of leads us into our next theme, which is talking about genetic determinism or the prejudice of genetic determinism, which in the setting of this movie it is basically the same as any other form of prejudice that we have today.

I was just speaking a moment ago about racism.

We also have all kinds of isms and schisms that we, you know, we relegate people to and it becomes a form of prejudice, you know, that you can't do this or you can't do that and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

And that's what we see in Gattaca, is that everybody just assumes that their genetics are the law and they can't surpass what their genetics tell them that they can be.

So it sets like these artificial ceilings, these limitations that everybody has to work up to and not get beyond, because society has told them this is all you're capable of.

And they don't try to go past that.

And it's not a utopia, it's a dystopia in the fact that, you know, they're being judged by something that is not ordained.

And Vincent proves that because he reaches levels that he was told he wasn't even incapable of even thinking of, let alone reaching Right.

And so he proves that those artificial barriers that they've placed on everybody based on their genetic code are just that, they're artificial barriers.

Artificial.

They're artificial, yeah.

Yeah.

I think in a way that's why there's no resolution in Irene and Vincent's relationship.

He leaves her behind.

He goes on his mission and he told her that he thought it was very interesting that he had worked this hard to go to space, only to, for the first time, have a reason not to.

But he still does.

And so he leaves her behind.

But I also think it was because it wasn't so much a love relationship between them as it was that he was encouraging her once he was able to reveal himself for who he really was, to push beyond the limitations that society had placed on her.

Yeah, I think it was growth for her because she realized that she didn't have to, you know, stay within that limitation.

She was more perfect than he was.

She could actually get into Gattaca.

She just couldn't attain the level of going on a mission.

And I guess that all those people that were working on navigation problems, they weren't working for navigation problems for their own missions, but for the current concurrent missions that were going on.

So they were actually, you know, doing work towards each mission that was going out, but they were proving themselves to be on missions in the future or something like that.

I do wish they had explained that a little bit.

A little bit more.

Yeah.

Make a lot of sense.

The director.

Not the director.

Not the guy who was killed, but the bigger.

The guy who killed him.

Yeah, the guy who killed him comes up and points to the screen and says, is that the approach we talked about?

And Vincent, slash Jerome says, yes, sir.

And the guy says, good.

And then he walks away.

What was the whole point there?

Yeah, I would have liked to have.

You know, I like the background, I like the big picture and seeing how all the little parts fit together.

Whatever they were doing at Gattaca did not fit together.

It was a 500 piece puzzle and it was missing 450 of them.

Yeah, yeah, I could see that.

And like I said, I think Gattaca was really just the shape of Vincent's dreams.

That was its whole existence in the movie, which is weird because it gave its name to the movie.

Yeah.

And it turns out not to be all that important.

Yeah, it wasn't really all that important.

You had talked about how the Invalids were given menial tasks as a way of being a subclass.

And as I watched that, I was thinking about how it is such an accurate representation of the caste systems that.

That we still see all over the world today.

In India, they still have the Untouchables, even though they were outlawed 70 years ago, almost 80 years ago.

The whole idea of an untouchable caste being outlawed, they're still denied water, access to the temples or schooling.

Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka all have caste systems that are tied to either ethnic groups or religious groups.

And Japan even has the pariah caste.

And we have it in.

In illegal immigration because we bring people in under the table to work and, and not reach the level of citizens because they can be paid less and do the jobs that Americans won't do.

That makes me so mad when I hear that.

It's like, so you're basically saying we're importing a slave class.

Great on you.

Love it.

Thanks.

I'm so proud of us.

Yeah.

And you hear these people defending it by going, well, if you get rid of all the illegal immigrants, who will do the work that Americans won't do?

I'm like, do you understand what you just said?

You want them to be your slaves.

How wonderfully.

Yeah, great you are.

But, you know, they are surviving.

That's not the right word.

They are thriving at that income level because they have such a different culture that they're coming from.

So they are living 12 people in a four bedroom home.

Can you imagine?

Does that make it right, your standard?

No.

No, it doesn't.

Absolutely does not.

Yeah.

We are literally denying the American dream to them.

Yeah.

But our economy can't handle the truth.

It's like, few good men.

You can't handle the truth.

Yeah.

So, you know, what we're seeing here is this kind of, you know, caste system, like you said, it's like the Invalids are not good enough for anything else.

So they take all the jobs that the Valids are too good to do.

And you get a picture of how they live too, like these squalor camps, they only show up briefly where they're going in and testing all of them to see if they can find the missing invalid.

And, you know, they're dressed in dirt and ashes and living in squalor and you know, that's all they're good enough for.

And it's just awful.

And like I said, it's a self fulfilling prophecy.

We see it here in our culture, in our society, which should be more merit based and actually is for the most part more merit based.

But because we've had this long history of people feeling like they have this invisible ceiling above them that they can't reach beyond, they're being taught that they're victims and they don't reach past that, they don't set goals higher than that.

And the ones who do succeed, but the vast majority of them are living under this self fulfilling prophecy of not being good enough.

And it's a sad thing because if we look at it from a biblical sense, we know that there's no one good enough first of all.

So in Mark 10:18, somebody had called Jesus, good teacher, and he says, why do you call me good?

Jesus asked him, no one is good except God alone.

So there's the standard of perfection.

God is the standard of perfection.

And then the next step in that is that not only are we not perfect because God is the standard perfection.

Everyone is sinned, so we are all equally imperfect in the eyes of God.

So there's no levels of imperfection.

It's like we're all imperfect.

And that comes from Romans 3:23,24.

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

They are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

So, so that is the only way that we can even reach towards God in his perfection.

We fall short.

And we are justified by grace through the redemption of Christ Jesus.

It is not anything that we do ourselves.

We can't work our way to that perfection.

And in our redemption we are not allowed to show prejudice.

So it says in James 2, 1, my brothers and sisters do not show favoritism.

You hold on to the faith of our glorious Lord Jesus Christ.

So that is just a reminder that even if there appears to be differences in castes or whatever within the body of believers, we are not supposed to hold somebody who is richer, as you know, with more favor than someone who is poor.

We are all supposed to be equal in Christ.

And then in Galatians 3:28, it reiterates that there is no Jew or Greek slave or free male and female, since you are all one in Christ Jesus.

So as I think we have said multiple times through, I mean, it's basically the gospel.

So we have to reiterate it.

It's not something we're just beating.

Galatians 3:28 has got to be one of our most quoted scriptures.

Yeah, but it's the great equalizer.

It's the thing that shows not only can we not reach perfection on our own, we are all equally imperfect and all equally redeemed in Christ.

And so there's just no way for the caste system to fit into Christianity.

It's the great equalizer.

It's what puts us all on the same level.

And it's so beautiful.

And I just wish more of the world would know about it.

Because when we see the struggle that we have to be better than everybody else, or to struggle with castes and races and all this kind of stuff, it's like, just love the Lord, just seek Christ because He is the great equalizer.

And then you can find new goals and new things to reach towards in Christ.

Because with.

And I'm going to slightly misquote this, because with God, all things are possible.

That doesn't necessarily mean that we're going to become perfect, but when we're following the will of God, he is going to make the things possible that will keep us in his will.

And then there's none of this helpless striving, none of this depression and not reaching the impossible goals set by society.

I rest my argument, and it is a good argument.

I had actually listed out four different themes that I thought we should discuss after watching the movie.

And when I got to the show outline that we used to do our recording, I saw that you had already nailed three of them.

So I had one left.

And it actually ties back to one of the things that I didn't like about the movie.

And that was how I just could not sympathize with the protagonist.

And as I dwelled on that, I realized that that was the issue.

Vincent is a protagonist, but he is not a hero.

And I'm not going to go into the full definitions, but both are from.

We've talked about heroes a lot.

Yep, they're both from Greek.

The protagonist is the first actor.

That's literally what it means.

The first or principal actor in a play.

You know, the person who gets the story going.

But hero is a protector, a defender, somebody who.

Somebody who has taken on an aspect of being admired for courageous deeds or virtuous behavior.

And Vincent is absolutely not a hero.

His entire life is a lie now.

It's a cooperative lie.

He is working with the person whose identity he stole.

So I guess they are accomplices.

In this.

But it is all still just to fulfill a desire to prove society wrong.

And in doing so, he exploits others constantly.

And I felt like Gattaca was trying to get us to root for Vincent and support him in this, you know, fight against the system.

But he, as a character, he is completely unrepentant and has.

He doesn't have a single righteous bone in his body.

There is nothing that he is doing that should garner any praise.

And I feel like that's where Gattaca fails.

It treats this authenticity as proving your worth not being worthy.

The difference is that Gattaca, the setting of Gattaca, the framing of Gattaca, is that being worthy is determined by your genetics.

And he was proving that he was just as worthy, despite his genetics being not quite up to snuff.

Right.

So what he was doing, his goal in that aspect, would have been great if it had been a story written where he didn't lie and cheat the entire time.

If you look at how much money the state spent on tracking him down, there's quite a bit of damage there.

But my whole point is that that's secular humanism in action.

And I know we've talked about secular humanism a number of times, so I'm not going to go into it a great deal, but it's all about Vincent creating his own identity as Jerome and then being his own savior.

And that's not where we should be looking for salvation.

No.

The authenticity of this worthiness requires being based in the truth.

And what we see in Vincent is rebellion and really malicious ambition.

He is determined to go to the stars and in so doing, show everybody that an invalid can be every bit as good as a valid.

It calls me Back to Philippians 2, 3 and 4, which tells us that we should be seeking humility, not ambition.

And definitely not for ourselves.

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility, consider others as more important than yourselves.

Everyone should look not to his own interests, but rather to the interests of others.

And this verse is the opposite of what we saw in Vincent.

And that really got under my skin throughout the entire movie.

Not only is Vincent not a hero, but I am convinced he's the villain who has become the hero of his own movie.

So I somewhat agree with you.

Obviously, this is a secular movie, so they should be not going to portray Christian ideals by any stretch of the imagination.

I think in the context of this dystopia, though, I do root for him because he is proving that the society is wrong about all of them all the invalids.

And so I root for him.

I know he's not a hero, and I know he's selfish and he's ambitious, but I think that that is the only way he can survive in a culture that has basically told him he's worthless, that he literally is worthless.

He has no value into the society at all.

And so his only options, really, are to game the system in order to be somebody.

And that is definitely not a Christian value.

I'm not saying that he is a hero in that.

I'm just saying that that is what makes him, you know, the protagonist of this movie is because he is showing the fault of the society in the way that they are labeling people and devaluing people.

And, you know, we've had people in our culture who have gamed the system in much better ways, who have risen above what everybody thought they were capable of doing.

And I thought it was interesting.

I found it in the IMDb synopsis of the movie and I shared it with you.

There was a coda at the end of the film that was cut before it was released, and it says, I don't know what it was because it was cut from the film.

So it's not part of the film now.

But at the end of the movie, it had originally listed various people who have succeeded despite genetic deficiencies.

And that would have been excluded in the.

In the modern society of Gattaca.

And two of the ones that were on that list was Albert Einstein and Abraham Lincoln.

And you get to thinking about that, it's like there have been people that have overcome societal censure to become somebody that.

I mean, I don't particularly care for Dr. Hawkins, but, I mean, when you realize that he lived most of his life confined to a wheelchair and not even able to speak.

I mean, you know, there are some people who have really gone above and beyond and proven themselves despite, you know, society saying, you just stay in your corner.

You're not worth anything.

And so while I agree with you about why you did not like Vincent, I think that.

And I understand where you're coming from on that, I still think that he made the movie what it was.

Without his character, there would have been no Gattaca.

Because the whole point was that you needed some invalid who literally was supposed to die at 30 to prove that the genetic culture, that standard, was wrong.

And it required ambition and rebellion to do that.

There's no way he could have gotten around the system otherwise.

So, yeah, he is what he is, I guess.

My.

And you don't like the actor who played him.

So that probably.

Oh, yeah, that.

That helps.

I feel like the movie could have been written differently to give him that choice, that chance.

But then it wouldn't have been Gattaca.

Yeah, it wouldn't have been Gattaca.

As you were talking, I was actually thinking of parallels between Gattaca and the movie.

The Leonardo DiCaprio movie, Catch Me if youf Can.

Did you ever see that one?

Oh, yeah.

I actually have the book that it was based on.

Ah, okay.

Yeah, yeah.

They're both super convincing liars and very charismatic.

And it's interesting the way that the two play out.

The parallels are sort of funny.

Yeah.

Frank Abergdale Jr. Who catch me with your can, is a real person.

That's not just a story, it's a biography.

And I really encourage people to go read the.

Don't watch the movie, but read the book because the book is more authentic to his real life and the whole thing.

If you ever hear his testimony, you can look online.

He actually was on Focus on the Family.

That's where I heard of him first, was on a Focus on the Family episode that I listened to with my grandma many, many years ago.

But the interesting thing about his story was that he was actually raised in a divorced home.

And he.

At the age of.

I think he was 18.

No, actually I think it was 16.

He looked a lot older than he actually was.

And he went on this spree of he ran out of money.

And he started.

He had a photographic memory and he just started trying to think of ways to game the system.

And all of his career was from like 16 until he was caught.

I think he may have been like 19 or 20 when they caught him.

So it was very short career, but he did a whole lot of things in that career.

And it's very fascinating if you ever go read the book.

But I could sort of see where you're saying that there's a parallel here, but I don't know that he was necessarily right.

He wasn't fighting against a society that was holding him down.

It was just that he was a bored rich kid who had run out of.

Of money.

He'd been cut off from his funds.

His dad had created a checking account for him and he started writing checks off of it.

And when the checking account no longer had money in it, he kept writing checks.

And then he had bank fraud already.

And so then he had to find new ways to make money.

So, yeah, he was just a bored rich kid who couldn't get a job because he was too young and kind of a runaway.

Yeah.

Interesting story.

I do highly recommend reading the book, by the way.

I will check it out.

Moving into our final and probably our most important theme on this movie is, and we've kind of already touched on this multiple times, but just to kind of pull all of the threads together and tie it into a nice clean knot, we're going to talk about human value and dignity.

And I think that that is one of the saddest things about this movie.

Like, we've already been, you know, stressing over and over again how the invalids were treated.

And we've already mentioned just the thought of them creating all of these embryos and only letting the best ones live.

It's basically a society that is built on death.

As we had already mentioned, I think a couple times, one of the main characters does commit suicide at the end.

And as I've stressed, I really feel it wasn't supposed to be an honorable suicide.

It was because he'd given up.

It was like he was no longer capable of reaching the level of perfection that he had been born to reach.

And so his purpose in life was over and he just ended his life.

And it's so sad to see how it's positioned in this movie.

You know, abortion, sterilization, suicide, all of these things that are caused by living in a society that values what you can give society, what your contribution is to society, rather than what your value is as a human being.

And I think we're really getting close to that now.

It's like we're reaching a point where, if you like, in Canada, they have made it possible for those with mental disabilities and the elderly to be put down when they no longer have a use.

And here in any of the Western countries, they now have genetic testing in utero, which means that as soon as you get pregnant, you can go in and get your baby genetically tested to find out whether it's going to have any thing like down syndrome.

Right.

And sadly, this was a news article that came out last year and we'll put the link in the show.

Notes.

Iceland has now come out saying that they have completely eradicated down syndrome from their country, but they did it by ineurotesting.

If your baby has down syndrome, the babies, they abort the babies, and so they're never born.

That's not eradicating down syndrome.

That's killing people with down syndrome.

And that's a completely different thing.

And then combined with that, we've already discussed it somewhat.

They have IVF for people who can't conceive naturally, they can go in and get their sperm and their eggs combined in the lab, and then they can create all of these embryos, and then they can actually in vitro test the embryos to find out which ones are the correct sex or the, you know, all of the things that they want in a baby.

And then they can implant that child and see if, you know, it comes to term.

And what that leads to is sex selection.

So, you know, people prefer boys instead of girls or girls instead of boys.

And so we start.

What would have happened in China.

Yeah.

100 years ago.

Yeah.

They'd have no women, which they are.

We already have that problem because they've.

Been fighting it now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, that's one thing about the Gattaca situation that I guess doesn't make sense to me is they were working towards their own demise.

Right.

What happens when there are no invalids left?

Who does the work?

Yeah.

Somebody else will.

They'll just have to keep raising the level of perfection.

Yeah.

Oh, well, you, you know, 60% was good enough for a decent job, but now 60%, you got to go do the menial jobs.

Yeah.

So it's a dystopian future that Gattaca presents that we're currently living in.

And that is, I think, the reason why we wanted to discuss this movie was.

And it's kind of fallen in, like you said earlier, it really is a masterpiece in some ways, and that it's been lost to time, that a lot of people possibly have never even heard of it.

Now, if you have not heard of this movie, please go try and find a way to watch it, because it's just a good reminder to what we're living in now, what our society is heading towards.

And it is dystopian and it is scary.

And so we need to remember as Christians what the mandate is of scripture that we live under.

And that is a couple things here.

Jeremiah 1:5, I chose you before I formed you in the womb.

I set you apart before you were born.

I appointed you a prophet to the nations.

God knows us before we're born.

He knows us before we were conceived in the womb.

He sees us as we form in our mothers.

So in Psalms 139, 13, it says, for it was you who created my inward parts.

You knit me together in my mother's womb.

In verse 16, it says, you, eyes saw me when I was formless.

All my days were written in your book and planned before a single one of them began.

And I mean, that should be our attitude towards life.

And I know that there are a lot of Christians who stand against ivf and I understand it.

I'm.

It's an awful thing.

And.

But I also see that it is very helpful for people who can't conceive and who cannot have children naturally.

I can see it as a useful thing.

It's just that we have to have a Christian perspective on every single one of those embryos.

We can't destroy life.

As a man, I feel like I, you know, I don't have the right to be against IVF because I don't have any skin in the game, so to speak.

But I can't imagine, I mean, our very first command from God is be fruitful, be fruitful, multiply.

And to not be able to fulfill that command has got to be so disheartening, so hard, so difficult to live with.

So I can understand both sides and I can look at them from my outside position and yeah, and say, oh yeah, we definitely shouldn't be doing this.

But at the same time, I don't want to be disrespectful of the people who are struggling with this identity issue.

I think it's just one of the problems post fall problems.

You know, we just have to deal with it.

And as a guy, I just can't say, well, you're just going to have to be content with your lot in life.

This isn't like pay where you can improve it.

We've aborted so many children in the last couple generations that I think somebody, I was watching one of my commentaries and they were talking about how much smaller Gen Alpha is than Gen Z and how much smaller Gen Z is than Gen X.

It's like with every generation we have a smaller group and as it gets smaller and smaller, they're having to support the much larger generations as we get older.

And it's because we're aborting them all.

That's what abortion has done, is that it is severely decreasing our population to the point that we may not have enough people to fill all the jobs when we retire because the generations that come behind us, there's so few of them.

And that is what abortion has done.

That is what the sexual revolution has done, that we have taken sex out of the position of creating families and we've made it a recreation.

And because of that, we've removed the responsibility of the family to reproduce and to make the next generation.

And women like me don't want to have children.

I obviously don't Want children because I'm not married and I don't believe in children out of wedlock, but it seems logical.

Yeah.

Well, there are a lot of women like me who have done what I've done with their lives where they've become professional women who spurn the idea of getting married and having children out of selfishness.

And it's the wrong perspective.

It's hard for me to even put myself in that position because.

But I am.

I'm one of those women that didn't get married and have kids.

And I'm part of the problem that there weren't enough Gen Z, because that would have been the generation that I would have brought into the world.

You know, I attended an OPC church in Bangor, Maine, and I had made a comment in some discussion about what about the people who know that they will not make good parents and don't want to have children.

And I got the hardest and most evil side eye in that church.

And I realized that the family sitting in front of me had 11 kids.

And I realized a little too late exactly what I had done.

You already stuck your foot in your mouth so you can't take it back out.

I definitely could taste my soul.

And it's not spelled the right way.

Yeah.

Well, I think that it is something that we do have to be concerned with.

And it's been such a blessing to hear about some of these families who have rescued embryos left over from IVF and, you know, gone ahead and given them life.

And I think that there's adoption centers now where you can contact if you want to adopt one of these frozen embryos.

Because they are human beings, they have every right to be given the opportunity to develop and grow and become who God ordained them to be, whatever that would be.

And so I think that's a wonderful thing.

In fact, we might see if we can look up one of those and pin them in our show notes when we put our show notes together so that if there's anybody who.

This is a completely new concept too, they can look it up and, you know, follow it as necessary.

Because adoption is wonderful.

But unfortunately a lot of babies don't get born.

They get aborted instead of born.

And so there aren't as many babies available for adoption, but there are probably thousands of embryos.

So that might be an option for somebody who would really like to have a baby and can't have it on their own.

The last verse that I put in here, and I think this is probably to me one of the strongest pro life arguments from the New Testament is when Mary, the mother of Jesus, while she was carrying our Lord in her womb, went to visit her cousin Elizabeth.

And while she was afar off, Elizabeth said in Luke 1:44 for you see, when the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby leaped for joy inside me because Elizabeth was burying John the Baptist and he was in the womb.

And when he heard Mary's voice, he leaped inside the womb because Jesus was approaching in the womb of Mary.

So two babies recognizing each other.

That is, I think, one of the strongest things to know that the baby in her womb was already alive, already aware.

And that should be a reminder to all of us that those babies should have every right to.

Yeah.

To live.

And you know, I do want to reach out and say it's very easy to become overwhelmed by the abortion issue, particularly when you are someone who is struggling to get pregnant.

But I would offer the hope that keeps me going and that is God is in control.

Not only is he utterly sovereign, he is utterly knowledgeable.

He knew from conception which children would be born, which children would be born abnormal, and which children would be aborted.

And to say he is a good God is not right.

He is God, the definition of good.

And we can trust that this is all part of his plan somehow.

Yeah.

And I hope, I hope when we get to our final reward that we can understand how it all works.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, that's a good closing argument for this episode.

And thank you so much for listening.

I'm Eve Franklin.

I'm Tim Martin.

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