Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

A Non-review by Professor Popinjay

(1997)

WARNING! THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS AND THE WORD “EYELASHES” ABOUT 20 TIMES PER PARAGRAPH! IF YOU HAVE ANY AVERSION TO SPOILERS OR EYELASH COMMENTARY OR EYELASH RELATED HUMOR AVERT YOUR EYESLASHES NOW! YOU WERE WARNED!

Hey! Do you love eyelashes! I know! Who doesn’t, right!?! Well just when you had given up all hopes of someone coming along and making a movie about eyelashes, Andrew Niccol has made Gattaca; and let me tell you, there are SO MANY eyelashes in this film! You’re just gonna flip at the amount of eyelashes in Gattaca! It’s a regular eyelash-palooza! A country eyelash jamboroo! There’s more eyelashes in this film than you can shake a stick at! I don’t exactly know what that means but if the amount of eyelashes is so abundant that you can’t move well enough to shake sticks, that’s gotta be a lot of eyelashes!

This film has more eyelashes than Phoebe from Friends pulled out at once! Remember that!?!

This all starts when our hero, Vincent, gets born. Unfortunately in this not too distant future, Vincent is determined to be genetically imperfect, probably born with too few eyelashes or something. I don’t remember.

The doctors want to immediately kill this eyelash deficient abomination with fire. Vincent’s parents however decide they want to keep the little weirdo despite his lack of eyelashes even though it’s likely he’ll have a hard life of menial non-eyelash related jobs.

Vincent has other plans though. He’s not content with menial non-eyelash related jobs. He wants to fly to one of the moons of Saturn. But you need eyelashes for that kind of job, A LOT of eyelashes!

Well it just so happens he knows a guy who is genetically perfect and he has the perfect amount of eyelashes. Neither too few nor too many. This guy was an athlete but he got in a bad wreck. I guess eyelashes aren’t everything. Since this guy is confined to his luxurious villa in shame and embarrassment because he can no longer be an athlete with his perfect eyelashes, he agrees to be Vincent’s eyelash supplier. Vincent couldn’t be happier at this arrangement.

Vincent takes his new eyelashes to his new job and is soon on the fast track to Saturn! But lo! Tragedy strikes! Vincent’s boss is found dead! An investigator comes in to interrogate the employees. Everyone and everything seems on the up and up until the investigator should happen upon an unaccounted eyelash!

Despite Vincent’s thoroughness in dispersing his recently-acquired eyelashes about the office, he inadvertently lost track of one of his own naturally grown imperfect squirrelly little weirdo eyelashes that everyone universally hates and the investigator wants to know what is up with that, yo!?!

The investigator is like “HeEeEeEyYyY!!! This is the eyelash of a guy named Vincent who was supposed to be killed with fire at birth! What’s it doing here!?! Me suspects foul play, me does!”

Now finding himself suspected of murder for losing an eyelash, Vincent escapes and goes for a swim… or has a dream about swimming. Or I was having a dream about swimming. I gotta be honest, I kind of checked out mentally at this point. I think I recall something about Vincent’s eyelash supplier getting killed too so where are his eyelash shipments going to come from? I don’t know and I don’t care.

I think all this was supposed to scare us with what the world could turn into if we start screening our baby’s genetics and making rash decisions based on that information. Vincent could have lived a perfectly normal life were it not for the ridiculous standards of the society depicted in this film. It’s probably a valid concern.

I know they (doctors) wanted to do some genetic screening with my first daughter. We refused obviously. For one thing, we’d heard stories of people who got screened, were deemed faulty in some way, and then came out just fine. Secondly, we didn’t want to even think of what the alternative was. This was our child! We were ready to love her however many eyelashes she had. And you know what? She came out a little weird. And I love every ounce of that weirdness. I wouldn’t have her any other way.

Maybe someday she’ll fly to Saturn.

On the flip-side however, I’ve heard of some folks who got the genetic screening done, learned the kiddo could be deaf, and were able to get a head-start educating themselves in sign language. Obviously the practice has its arguable benefits too and I certainly don’t want to paint genetic screening with indelibly dark colors if it truly does benefit someone.