a man of secrets
by Douglas Messerli
Graham
Moore (screenplay, based on the biography Alan
Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges),
Moren Tyldum (director) The Imitation Game / 2014
As A. O. Scott in The New York Times review suggests, the life of Turing, along with
its interconnections with World War II deep secret activities along with the
shifting socio-political issues of the period “is a lot for a single movie to
take in,” requiring a script that “prunes and compresses a narrative” by Andrew
Hodges upon which it was based. Despite the often intelligently written Graham
Moore script (which topped the Black List for best unproduced Hollywood scripts
in 2011), the story played out in this rather traditionally told and even more
conservatively filmed bio-pic is, at very best, murky, a work that often does
not bother to explain the images it projects upon the screen. For example, it
would have been nice to know that when we see the central character, Turing
(Benedict Cumberbatch), running as if he had just come from a screen test for Chariots of Fire, that the great mathematician
had been a winning long-run marathoner in his youth. It might have been of
great significance to have known that the cyanide we see him dangerously
scooping up after the robbery and destruction of his bedroom-office, was the
same substance he used, through injection into an apple, for his suicide in
June of 1954. Although the film is framed, in part, around his arrest for and
confession of indecent homosexual behavior, it might have helped us, at least,
to imagine how the individual the film depicts as having little facility in
communicating with his own species, could have lured another man into his bed.
Although
it may have appeared to be irrelevant to the central story the film presents,
it would have been fascinating, surely, to indicate that after Turing had
accomplished the breaking of the German Enigma Machine code at Bletchley Park, he
traveled to the United States where he worked for Bell-Labs to fabricate a
similar computer (“Bombe,” as it was called) and, perhaps even more important,
helped to develop a secure speech device (Delilah) which would become the basis
of electronic enciphering of speech in later telephone systems and radios,
which today as been applied to protect computer systems—and surely in order to
break such codes by hackers and the NSA.
It comes as no surprise, surely, that Turing’s
real relationship with fellow cryptologist and puzzle-solver, Joan Clarke
(Keira Knighhtley)—in truth, argues Turing’s niece, a rather plain woman; but,
then, Turning was no Cumberbatch when it came to looks—was not nearly as
intense and ongoing as it is presented in the movie. Although he did, in fact,
offer to marry her, and, in backing out, admitted his homosexuality, the
relationship between the two, as opposed to the way this film portrays it,
involved little romance. Such a fabrication, we recognize is to be forgiven for
such an old-fashioned film, which requires, obviously, a juicy feminine role.
When a movie posits its entire
psychological evidence for the behavior of its central character upon a
childhood incident, in this case the death of Turing’s beloved friend,
Christopher—after whom he names his equally beloved machine—we know we’re never
going to get to the heart of what makes the hero tick. If Turing was a “man of
secrets,” the movie does very little to help reveal what might lie underneath
the layers of self-, social-, and political-deceit. Instead of shellacking over
these real-life events, a better film might, a bit like an art conservator, have
peeled away some of the varnish already overlaying the “picture,’ exposing the real thing—the actual man and
events behind his life.
There are moments, clearly, when the film
does attempt this. Playing what Turing describes as “a game of judgment” (in
reality what was called “the Turing Test”) to determine whether the being with
which he was communicating was a human or an “intelligent” machine (a
remarkable game of logic that reminds one, a bit, like the test used in Ridley
Scott’s Blade Runner to determine
whether a being was a “real” human being or a manufactured one) the film’s hero
begs his interlocutor to judge him: “Am I a human being or a machine, a war
hero or a war criminal.” The poor detective, who has simply imagined Turning to
be a Soviet spy, admits his incapability.
As the movie would have it, Turing is all of these. If he is a human, he also
a monster (“a living admonishment or warning”) in his inability to fully feel
what humans do; if he has saved the lives of thousands in having been able to
decode through his early computer the German Enigma machine, shortening the
duration of World War II—according to Winston Churchill, by as many as four
years—in his cold-hearted, statistically-based calculations concerning which
war-time encounters with German submarines and bombers, allowing him to ignore
or circumvent them, he had also to be a kind of cold-hearted criminal. Looking
the other way, in numerous instances, from the certain death and destruction of
German attacks in order to keep the secret that they had been able to break the
German codes, Turing and his associates were forced to play the role of gods,
making judgments over the fates of their fellow beings. And the hubris that
came from that play-acting may certainly have led them to imagine they alone
had won the war in their seemingly invisible hut.
With regard to Turing’s sad existence, I
like to think of the metaphor that author David Levitt uses in his biography on
Turing, The Man Who Knew Too Much—even
though I cannot fully accept it as fact. One of Turing’s favorite scenes from
movies, so we are told, was the one in which Disney’s Snow White is given the
poison apple by the witch. Levitt suggests that in his suicide the great mathematician
knowingly used the story as an imaginative image in destroying himself. In the
story, if you recall, Snow White does not die, but falls into a deep sleep, to
be awakened, like Sleeping Beauty, by a Prince, in a future time, through the miracle
of a kiss. It’s nice to think that Turing, exhausted by the burdens of all the
secrets which had already psychologically buried him, imagined that he might
one day be awakened into a world that accepted him for what he was: a brilliant
thinker who helped to save the Allies in World War II and in developing his “Turing
machine” created what we today describe as the computer, a genius who also led
the way for new discoveries in the fields of artificial thinking and morphogenesis,
and, finally, a gay man who “in being what no one thought anything of did
things that no one could imagine.”
Any work of art that helps us to rethink
and reimagine the life of such a remarkable man is worthy of our attention. And
one has to give credit to The Imitation
Game for attempting so valiantly to recognize the achievements of its hero.
But unfortunately this film covers up that same figure in yet more secrets
rather than working to reveal or attempting to solve them.
Los Angeles,
December 9, 2014
Reprinted
from International Cinema Review (December
2014).
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