Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Vincent contrives a way to fake out the system as he yearns to go on
a one-year mission to some truly far-out planet. Only “Valids”—genet-
ically correct human beings—are eligible for such elite tasks. So Vincent
pays off a Valid for the Valid's urine, blood, saliva, and fingerprints, and
begins his arduous, elaborate ruse. For this is a world in which any bodily
scraping—a single eyelash, a single bit of skin sloughing—might betray
you. Why would a Valid sell his bodily fluids and properties? Because
the Valid is now “useless,” a cripple, having been paralyzed in a car acci-
dent. Indeed, his life is so useless according to society's standards (which
he, in turn, has thoroughly internalized) that, at the film's conclusion and
after having stored sufficient urine and blood that Vincent can fool the
system for years to come, the crippled Valid manages to ease himself into
a blazing furnace to incinerate himself—life not being worth living any
longer, not for one who cannot use his legs.
As for Vincent, and despite some tense moments, life is as good as it is
ever going to get by the film's end: he has made love to Uma Thurman and
he has faked his way (with the connivance of a sympathetic security
officer) onto the mission to the really far-out planet of which he has
dreamed since childhood, despite his genetically flawed condition. This is
a bleak film. The only resistance Vincent can come up with is faking it.
He has no language of protest and ethical distance available to him. This
is just the world as he and others know it, and presumably will always
know it. Thurman's intimacy with an Invalid is as close to resistance as
she can get.
20
There are no alternative points of reference or resistance.
Of course, we are not in the
Gattaca
nightmare yet. But are we
drawing uncomfortably close? There are those who believe so, including
the mother of a Down syndrome child who wrote me after she had read
one of my columns about genetic engineering in the
New Republic
. In
that piece, I reflected on what our quest for bodily perfection might mean
over the long run for the developmentally different. My interlocutor,
whose child died of a critical illness in his third year, wrote me that she
and her husband were enormously grateful to have had “the joyous
privilege of parenting a child with Down syndrome. ...Tommy's [not
his real name] birth truly transformed our lives in ways that we will
cherish forever. But how could we have known in advance that we indeed
possessed the fortitude to parent a child with special needs? And who
would have told us of the rich rewards?” She continued:
