The Problem with Thinking Too Much
If I had a nickel for every essay about Gattaca, I'd have two nickels--which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.
This week was my daughter’s final week for the school year, and it turned out to be busier than I’d expected, so I didn’t complete an original essay once again. Instead, I have an eclectic collection of essays and videos that crossed my feed recently, plus an old short film of mine that you’ll enjoy.
The first part is about music without lyrics, but hearing words anyway. The second batch of articles address problems in our knowledge-creation systems. Lastly, we’ve got some overthinking about Gattaca.
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Words & Pictures
Have you ever wondered why it’s so easy for comedy songwriters to insert movie titles into the lyrics of theme song parodies?
Turns out, there’s a very good reason for this. Word stresses function similarly to musical beats, and composers sometimes use the very title of the film as inspiration. Here’s a fascinating video that goes into great detail on the topic—
As I was watching that video, my short film EXT. LOS ANGELES - DAY came to mind. Dan Clingman, the composer, matched the rhythm of the opening notes to the title of the film.
Then I realized, No, dummy. The title is nine syllables long,1 It doesn’t match at all.
But Dan did match the music to the unspoken lines appearing on screen, which is arguably trickier, since there’s so much dialogue. In fact, he assigned different instruments to each of the characters, giving each their own voice (kinda like Peter and the Wolf). Specifically, the lead character is “voiced” by a clarinet, and her father by a bass clarinet. In other words, they’re in the same… family of instruments.
What is Happening in Colleges?
I call this site “Too Much Film School” as a tongue-in-cheek way of reminding myself that credentialism applied to filmmaking is kind of absurd. But while a film degree is kind of meaningless, other degrees shouldn’t be, which is quickly becoming a problem.
Generative AI ruins everything it touches, and makes bad problems worse, including and especially universities. Per
:When teachers rage against AI-enabled cheating, they're identifying a symptom while missing the disease. The fundamental problem isn't that students can now use artificial intelligence to generate essays or solve equations; it's that our educational system has been redesigned to prioritize sorting and ranking over authentic learning, making cheating more alluring even without AI. Students aren't cheating because AI made it easier—they're cheating because, for generations, we've taught them that the grade matters more than the knowledge.
Read The Hidden Curriculum Exposed at
.In a bit of an older, but related piece,
asks, Why Did English Departments Abandon Ideas for Ideology? She draws a line from Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author” (which I consider to be one of the worst literary theories imaginable) to Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault.The literary academy has now an intellectual playground for identity-based literary criticism — feminist, post-colonial, and queer theory — and seeks to challenge traditional, “mainstream” narratives through literary theory. This approach is not merely a matter of prioritizing an overly politicized interpretation over all possible interpretations through which scholars might understand, appreciate and evaluate literature. Rather, it has become the only acceptable way to study literature, with all dissenting viewpoints, like my own on Sylvia Plath, very much sidelined.
The problem is that any narrow-minded focus in literature — on identity, or any other similarly reductionist category — risks obscuring the broader, more universal themes that literature can and should address, resulting in an environment where literature is less about exploring the complexities of the human experience, touching on universals such as ambition, love, and death, to name a few, and more about advancing a particular socio-political agenda.
I’ve had a very similar experience in film school.
says much the same thing, while specifically analyzing The Lord of the Rings in his recent article, The Ring Is Not What You Think—
Are you an academic enamored of Foucault? The Ring is hegemonic power. Are you a 1960s hippie posturing against the Cold War? The Ring is nuclear deterrence. Are you a Libertarian? The Ring is the state. That’s not literary interpretation; it’s projection.
The article does start off complaining about “cultural illiteracy,” which, I’m sure you know, I find triggering.
Gabbing About Gattaca
For a nearly three-decade-old film, Gattaca has stuck in the craws of a surprising number of people. I say “surprising,” because I always thought of it as an early sign of the dumbing down of sci-fi just as visuals effects were improving at an astonishing rate. Visually arresting movies that were built on extremely dumb or ill-informed ideas, like In Time, The Creator, and Elysium.
Those have been largely forgotten, but Gattaca continues to pop up in the cultural conversation. First, there is
’s latest video essay—I find his analysis more interesting and insightful than the film itself, although I think he’s giving the filmmakers too much credit when he dismisses the “class struggle” metaphor. I think that’s exactly what they were going for, and they just do a bad job of it, as often happens—
In The Burden of Being the Only Person Alive to Have Understood the Film Gattaca,
offers a novel interpretation of the movie.What is Vincent actually fighting in Gattaca? It’s not the mechanistic universe. It’s not free will versus fate. He’s fighting bureaucracy. He’s fighting careerism. He’s fighting a system that works “well enough” that nobody wants to examine its actual underpinnings. Too much work for too little gain… if you were born with the right gene-markers! He’s fighting the lazy spot in the human mind that would rather accept things as they are than try to discover how they truly are. The world in which “create an indicator for success” trumps “try and see what happens!”
I enjoy the popular viewing of Gattaca, where genetics works like everyone thinks it does and the tests are perfect. It’s a great story. But a dark, adult, and more mature part of me cheers that Vincent is blowing holes wide open in this terrible and incurious bureaucracy. Looking at something odd and shying away from curiosity? That’s where a lot of the real evil in the world is born.
I think he’s onto something, but as is often the case, the viewer is simply smarter than the movie. What do you think about Gattaca?
EXT. is short for “exterior.”
Oh man, as someone who has heavily contributed cult of Gattaca, I am OFFENDED. heh. But truly, few movies are as well visually and thematically integrated as Gattaca. Every name is significant, it is theologically layered, and if you don't think its message against fear and statistics is evergreen, then I don't know what to tell you. I'd say similar things about Niccol's The Truman Show, but after that his work goes the way of M. Night, imo.