three films for turing
After reading
the Turing biography by Andrew Hodges, I determined to revisit three films
which I had seen previously, the first, one I saw as a child, Disney’s animated
1937 work, Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs. Turing
commented to friends about that film, and was particular fascinated by the
poison apple which resulted in Snow White’s suspension into sleep, which, given
Turing’s own choice of death, as I mention above, imbues his reactions with far
greater meaning.
The second film, Desk Set, which I’ve watched dozens of time (it’s
one of Howard and my favorite Christmas movies), was made just three years
after Turing’s death in 1954, and makes references to a figure vaguely similar
to Turing in the central character is a computer inventor, who has previously
been involved with top-secret governmental activities that not even the crack
researcher-librarian who falls in love with him could uncover. That film itself
was a head-on cultural confrontation with some of Turing’s predictions,
querying and exploring just how much a human being the computer, named EMARAC (Electromagnetic
Memory and Research Arithmetical Calculator, named after the American-made
ENIAC machine.), a film which also momentarily injects some of the names of the
seven dwarfs as Santa’s reindeer.
The third film, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space
Odyssey of 1968, was, according to author
Arthur C. Clarke and director Stanley Kubrick, dated in response to Turing’s
paper in the journal Mind, wherein,
in 1950, he had predicted the existence in 2000 of computers with enough
storage power to allow to “play the imitation game so well that an average
interrogator will not have more than a 70 percent chance of making the right identification
after five minutes of questioning; such a computer, of course, came alive in
Kubrick’s film as HAL 9000, who (or which, depending upon whether one’s been able to properly identify the mechanized
imitator), upon discovering that his human controllers are about to disconnect
him, disconnects one of the spaceman’s air hoses and locks him out of the space
POD.
Although I kept Turing very much in mind,
accordingly, while viewing these works, I also attempted to relive my own
youthful relationships to the films in order to explore how I had personally
felt about some of the consequences of Turing’s world and creations.
big eyes
Ted
Sears, Richard Creedon, Otto Englander, Dick Rickard, Earl Hurd, Merrill De
Maris, Dorthy Ann Blank and Webb Smith (writers, based on the story by the
Grimm Brothers), David Hand (supervisor), Eilliam Cottrell, Wilfred Jackson,
Larry Morey, Perce Pearce, and Ben Sharpsteen (directors) Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs / 1937
In
trying to determine when I first saw the great animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, I
supposed it might have been in 1958, at the age of 11. Although the film also
was re-released in 1952, when I was five, I wondered whether it would be
possible that at such an early age the film had made such a lasting impression
upon me. But then, it dawned on me that, at 11, a year in which I was
intellectually ingesting Hitchcock’s Vertigo,
it seemed highly unlikely that I had suddenly become so enthused with what was obviously
a children’s picture, so it must have been in 1952 when I first saw the work,
just two years before Turing, himself, ate of the poisoned apple.
What
also also struck me, this time around, is that although I have always declared
that my only early musical experiences had been Oklahoma! of 1955 and Carousel
of one-year later, it is apparent that Snow
White, which was something near
to an old-fashioned operetta (there are fewer spoken lines in this picture than
musical ones), had also contributed to my love of the American musical comedy
genre.
Like Alan Turing I too was fascinated how
much work had gone into the making of that little red apple soured with death.
And the fact that, despite all of her wizardry—her poetic incantations and
charm spells, in which nature itself, lightning and thunder, collaborated—there
was still such a simple way of breaking the magic spell: a kiss. To a
five-year-old, what was a kiss? Snow White, herself, doles them out to those
little men as they head off to work, with a peck upon their heads. But Dopey,
lips puckered up into some almost obscene gesture, seemed to be expecting
something else—another kind of kiss which I certainly had never truly
experienced at age 5 except upon the movie screens. And when that kiss in consecrated
late in the movie, it is, if one actually thinks too carefully about it, quite
shocking, given the fact that the woman to whom the Prince bends down to kiss
upon her lips is dead.
Underneath the seeming innocence of this
film, accordingly, lies not only issues of neurotic vanity, false imprisonment
and torture (in an earlier version of the Disney film, the evil Queen imprisons
the Prince and entertains him with visions of dancing skeletons) and hints of
pederasty (after all, the young girl actually slept in the beds of seven men),
but gives evidence of attempted child-murder and necrophilia—so say nothing of
the misogynistic remarks of Grumpy and the complete idiocy of Dopey.
Finally, what to make of the relationship
that this young girl has to deer, chipmunks, turtles and robins? If it’s
further evidence of Snow White’s purity and innocence, it also smacks of a kind
of human enslavement of beasts: the animals certainly seem willing to do most
of her work without even a peck upon their heads.
In the end one even wonders a bit the
vitality and health about Snow White. Throughout most of this splendid operetta
she dreams and sleeps her life away. Even while scrubbing the stairs outside
the castle, she spends her time dreaming of her Prince (“Some Day My Prince
Will Come”) and her very scary night in the forest—where she encounters a
memorable surrealist-like landscape of open eyes—ends with in her again in the
prone position, her own eyes drenched in tears. The minute she gets the dwarfs
house all spiffed up, she’s tired again and lays down for a nap. After dinner
and just a little partying, she’s ready once more to rush off to bed. One gets
the feeling, just perhaps, that Snow White suffers (just like Sleepy) a bit
from narcolepsy.
Had Turing, like Snow White, simply worn
himself out with all of his mental efforts to save and protect the evil Queen
who, equally jealous of his intellectual prowess, had been willing to
symbolically lock him up? In some
respects, unlike the fate of the lovely Snow White, the dwarfs of post-war
world had already attempted to bury him even while he was living. Certainly, it
must have seemed to him, in many instances, that he was living in a never-ending
night resembling Snow White’s frightful flight, with all eyes upon him. It
might have seemed wonderful to have a long night’s sleep at last.
Los Angeles,
February 8, 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment