Who is Vincent?

My Humanities 1 class dedicates the first day of every week to watching a film for the sake of analyzing it for the rest of the week. Today, we watched the 1997 Science Fiction film Gattaca, a film that wrestles with tensions between combos such as social identity and physical identity, natural conception and genetic enhancement, biological fate and psychological determinism. Ultimately, the film digs deep into the significance of what it means to have an identity by questioning a critical assumption: does one’s biological make-up define one’s identity, or is there something more to what makes the identity of a human meaningful.

The film explores this question with the story of two brothers, one natural born (Vincent), one genetically modified (Anton). A quick summary of their relationship is as follows: Vincent was born with defects in his genome that will shorten his life span to no more than 30 years. This is written into his DNA. It is his fate. Even though it is his dream to become an astronaut, Vincent cannot possibly achieve this dream because his body disqualifies him.  Vincent’s brother, Anton, on the other hand, has high quality genes and incredible talent in many areas. This disparity on the genetic level eventually developed into an ongoing rivalry between the brothers as Vincent refuses to accept inferiority. To establish authority over one another, the two brothers periodically engage in a swimming game called “chicken”, a game in which both boys will swim as far out as they can out into the ocean until one gets scared and decides to swim back. Not to say, Anton was always the faster and stronger swimmer, and Vincent lost each time. One day, however, as both boys challenged each other in the game again, Vincent was actually able to out swim his brother and save Anton from drowning. Since then, the brothers parted and did not meet again, but Vincent never forgot his one moment of  triumph and cultivated a will power for challenging his fate.

Vincent’s first act of defiance was assuming a new identity.  Out of disparity to reach his goals, Vincent abandoned his biological identity and took on the identity of a man named Jerome who had highly sought after genes but was paralyzed in an accident. He did this by modifying himself to look as close to Jerome as he could, and then he extracted daily supplies of Jerome’s hair, urine and blood to satisfy various authentication tests at the Space station. The situation of the story thus far begs a question: is this ethical? Is it ethical for Vincent to assume the identity of Jerome in order to side-step a biological discrimination and pursue his dreams of space? But any such question necessarily raises another question: What about Anton? Is Anton’s genetic modification any more justified or ethical than Vincent’s fraudulent identity?