Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Gattaca
1997 · Andrew Niccol · Gattaca on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the extreme close-ups of hair, skin and eyelashes. (camera)
Idziak keeps magnifying small pieces of the body: a lash lifted from a desk, a fingernail clipping, a flake of skin, a drop of blood. Each one gets read by a machine before any person speaks.
Payoff: In this world the body is text before it is a person. The close-ups teach you how that reading works. In the reading: the readable image. The reading calls these lectosigns: images you decipher rather than simply see, the way this world deciphers a body.
Watch the amber and sepia in every Gattaca interior. (light)
Idziak filters and lights toward the warm brown of an old photograph, and Jan Roelfs built that palette into the sets. The most advanced place in this world looks like a faded picture of the past.
Payoff: The future is shot in the color of nostalgia. This society's dream was built in somebody else's decade.
Look at the cars, the suits and the buildings. (setting)
Automobiles from the 1950s to the 1970s, mid-century tailoring, and Frank Lloyd Wright's Marin County Civic Center standing in for the facility. Niccol and Roelfs used no digital environments at all.
Payoff: Everything you see is a real place or a real object, which is why the film has not dated the way its peers have.
Look at how long the corridors are behind the actors. (staging)
Colonnades, repeated arches, rows of identical desks. The compositions keep putting one small figure inside a geometry that was finished long before he arrived. The building presses on him constantly.
Payoff: The architecture is the opponent. It has already sorted everyone, and the framing keeps showing you that.
Notice how carefully Hawke holds his posture at work. (performance)
Straight spine, measured walk, no spontaneous gesture, a face that gives nothing away inside the building. Off duty the body loosens. He is performing a person every hour he is in there.
Payoff: The straightened spine is the argument. A body shaped by practice becomes something other than what it was born as.
Once you have seen it
Count the steps in Vincent's morning routine. (structure)
Scrubbing, sanding, vacuuming, taping on borrowed samples, planting hair and skin around a workstation. Lisa Zeno Churgin cuts these sequences methodically, as procedure rather than montage. The labor never stops.
Payoff: He is not discovering that he is worthy. He is manufacturing worth, every single morning, by hand. In the reading: le faussaire. The reading calls him a forger: a man who does not find the truth about himself but makes one and keeps it standing.
Watch what Jerome does with a body everyone envies. (performance)
Law plays the genetic aristocrat as paralyzed, drunk and bitter, holding everything the system promised and nothing he wanted. His generosity toward Vincent comes out of that emptiness rather than warmth.
Payoff: The perfect specimen is rotting upstairs. The order this film examines is decaying inside its own showpiece. In the reading: crystal-decomposition. The reading calls this crystal-decomposition: an ordered aristocratic world caught in the act of rotting from the inside.
Listen to the piano figure climbing over and over. (sound)
Michael Nyman writes mostly for solo and small-ensemble piano, with ascending phrases that repeat and repeat. Orchestral swells are saved for release. Around the music the facility hums with climate control and scanners.
Payoff: The score is built from willed repetition, which is how the man is built. Every sound in that building feels monitored.
Track how little the murder investigation actually matters. (structure)
The mystery gives the film its deadline and its danger, then resolves with almost no fanfare. Niccol uses it as scaffolding. The real question was always whether Vincent makes the launch date.
Payoff: The genre armature is doing structural work, not thematic work. Watch where the film actually spends its patience.
Carry this in: Watch the eyelash. In this world a body is read as a sentence before a person gets to speak.