Just what I had hoped for. This films sounds better and better the more I read about it. Intriguing indeed. A pleasure to listen to two (film) lovers discuss the creative undercurrents of making a relatively unique contemporary movie about people dealing with REAL ISSUES.

Jeez, James Gray is well spoken. As are you, Mr. O'Hehir. Loved the "surrealist French poet" reference...

I know this wouldn't usually be the place for a discussion of genetics, but in light of what Gray has to say about destiny, a quick word seems appropriate. Here goes...

James Gray said:

"The genetic counselor told me a story about how she would have to talk to these couples who were both Jewish, who had both tested positive for Tay-Sachs disease, for example, which means that any child they had would be dead [invariably] by the age of 4..." (The word in the square brackets represents an elision in Andrew O'Hehir's transcription of the interview, but you can hear it on the tape.)

This is wrong in two ways. First, and less importantly: Since Tay-Sachs is, indeed an invariably fatal childhood disease (late-onset Tay-Sachs isn't, but that's another story), nobody exactly tests "positive" for it. You are either a carrier of a particular mutated gene or you aren't. But more importantly, the fact that both father and mother turn out to be carriers of this mutated gene does not mean that their children will invariably end up with Tay-Sachs disease. Recessive traits don't work this way. In fact (and this info is right in the second paragraph of the page Mr O'Hehir was good enough to link to), such potential parents would have a 25% chance of having a child so afflicted.

But what does that really mean? It certainly doesn't mean that if our hypothetical couple had four children, then inevitably one of them would have Tay-Sachs while three wouldn't. All it means is that, for a given (very, very large) population that consisted of parents who both carried this particular mutated gene, a quarter of their children turned out to have Tay-Sachs disease. But as anyone who's played roulette knows, just because, statistically-speaking, something ought to occur a certain percentage of the time doesn't mean it actually will. Translation: a couple who both were carriers of this recessive trait could very possibly buck the genetic odds and have four or even six perfectly healthy children, while another, less fortunate couple could have three in a row with the disease.

Anyway, I say all this because I find it sad to imagine couples breaking up over something like this, though I'm sure it happens and I'm sure it's shattering. In a way, Gray is right to say that this the "science version" of the Greeks' notion of destiny, and he's more right, the less the actual science is understood. To say that our fate lies in our genes in some inevitable or inescapable way is just as wrong-headed as it is to say that our fate depends entirely upon the whimsy of the gods (which, incidentally, was not exactly how the Greeks felt about things, but this is also another story).

But worse than this high-flung college classroom stuff is what Gray has to say about his non-Jewish wife receiving a clear bill of genetic "health", while he, a Jew, tests positive for practically everything that's undesirable. This may be true of the two of them (though it sounds like an oversimplification or an exaggeration), but it has a really unsavory whiff of eugenics about it. This kind of thinking was supposed to have gone out of fashion with in the forties, wasn't it?