The Imitation Game: Thoughts on Its Oscar Win

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Alan Turing, Benedict Cumberbatch, Graham Moore, Homosexuality, Morton Tyldum, Oscars, The Imitation Game

The Imitation Game received a number of Oscar nominations this year, most notably Best Picture, Best Director (Morton Tyldum), Best Actor (Benedict Cumberbatch), Best Supporting Actress (Keira Knightley), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Graham Moore). The only one it won was Best Adapted Screenplay, being based on Alan Turing: The Enigma (Burnett, 1983) by British mathematician Andrew Hodges. As my friend Abe commented, it “won the Oscar that it was important that ‘The Imitation Game’ not win.” I agree whole-heartedly. I would have been quite happy to see either Cumberbatch or Knightley win for their performances, and I could certainly have been ok with it winning Best Picture or Best Director, although I’m not sure it really deserved either of those honors. But it certainly was not the Best Adapted Screenplay, unless the Academy really thinks of that honor as ‘Best Screenplay that happens to have been loosely Adapted from a Book”.

Graham Moore accepting his Oscar for The Imitation Game

I’ve already commented on the film’s numerous factual errors, so I won’t rehash them here. Instead, I’ll focus on other issues. It’s hard to think that the people who voted on this Oscar had actually read the book, because if they had, they would have realized that Moore has mis-used Hodges’ metaphor of the Imitation Game. The Imitation Game, which is more commonly called the Turing Test, was a test Turing proposed in which an observer would be given responses to his questions from a human being and a computer without knowing which response came from the human. The computer would be deemed to pass the test if the human was unable to distinguish the computer’s answers from the humans; the computer would win by sufficiently imitating a human.

In Hodges’ book, the Imitation Game serves as a metaphor for Turing’s attempt to present himself as a heterosexual. For example, his engagement to Joan Clarke was an effort to look heterosexual rather than being driven by genuine heterosexual attractions. But in Moore’s screenplay, the Imitation Game is Turing’s attempt to present himself as a normal human being instead of the weird, semi-autistic figure Moore paints him as. So in the process of adapting Hodges’ book, Moore has purposefully recycled one of Hodges’ observations and made it a central conceit for something entirely different. The very title of the film is a sign that Moore was mis-adapting the book.

The Film’s Sexual Politics

The movie has presented itself as a call for justice for gay men who, like Turing, were convicted under British sodomy laws. It ends with an epilogue text that tells us that 49,000 men were convicted under the same law that ruined Turing’s life. Cumberbatch has spoken, quite genuinely I think, about the importance of pardoning those men, and the film has helped revive a debate about these convictions.

It’s definitely important that the film has helped boost this conversation, and I’m glad that Cumberbatch has used this moment to champion the issue. But the film itself is being rather disingenuous about gay rights. While it is presenting itself as a pro-gay film, it goes out of its way to minimize Turing’s homosexuality and to recast him in a more heterosexual light. It dramatically emphasizes Turing’s brief engagement to Joan Clarke and sharply minimizes Turing’s actual homosexual relationships. The adult Turing admits to being homosexual but is never actually shown being sexual with another man, or indeed even being in the same room as another homosexual; the only homosexual gesture we see Turing make as a teen is to pen a brief love-note to another boy at school. The film claims that Turing’s homosexuality was only discovered when he began being investigated for espionage when in fact Turing flat-out admitted his homosexuality to the police. So what the film has done is admit that Turing was homosexual and then systematically shy away from virtually everything about his homosexuality while playing up a very brief heterosexual relationship.

Both Cumberbatch and Tyldum have responded to complaints about this by saying that the film didn’t needs any gay sex scenes. That’s entirely true but also entirely irrelevant; it’s like saying a movie about the Holocaust doesn’t need any Jewish sex scenes. (In fairness, Cumberbatch’s statement was a response to a question about gay sex scenes posed by a reporter.) A film about a gay man does not have to show him having sex with a man in order to show him being gay. But it does, I think, have to show him being gay in some fashion; simply having the main character say “I’m a homosexual” once or twice is dodging the issue. And I suspect that the movie doesn’t think its audience is entirely comfortable with seeing homosexuality on the screen so it has adopted a genteel Victorian work-around; it admits Turing is homosexual without ever having to show it. In doing so, Moore violates one of the most important rules of script-writing; show, don’t tell.

Morton Tyldum accepting a Hollywood Film Awards award

Given that the last third of the film centers around Turing’s homosexuality, refusing to actually show it seems to me a massive omission and in some ways a re-enacting of the closet that Turing lived his life in. To then turn around and include a post-script decrying the persecution of closeted men is a serious problem.

Had Moore wanted to, he could easily have explored the way Turing lived in the closet. He could have addressed why Turing proposed to Clarke and whether Turing was attempting to use her as a ‘beard’. He could have shown Turing’s surprise when he encountered less-closeted gay men at American universities. He could have considered the way that the closet pushed Turing to begin a relationship with a 19-year-old unemployed man that he must have had little in common with apart from their illicit sexual desires. The film could have demonstrated Turing’s courage in refusing to let his lover victimize and blackmail him. It could have examined the way his brother John reviled him for being “disgusting and disreputable” or his mother Ethel’s choice to stand by him. Moore could have shown the fact that some of Turing’s colleagues at Bletchley Park risked their own reputations by testifying on his behalf at the trial. In other words, if the film had actually wanted to make a stand for gay rights, there were a lot of ways it could have done so. None of this would have required a gay sex scene. But instead, Moore invents a crisis in which Turing is blackmailed by a fellow Bletchley Park staffer for being gay and shows him lacking the courage to admit his homosexuality; this is both false (he wasn’t blackmailed at Bletchley Park) and the opposite of what happened later (he refused to allow his lover to blackmail him).

I think the real problem here is that presumably neither Moore nor Tyldum is gay (Moore has publicly said he’s not gay, and Tyldum is married to a woman). So we have two apparently straight men trying to tell a story about a gay man, and they unsurprisingly fail to appreciate the complexities of being a closeted gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal. I’m not saying that only gay men can write about gay men, but these two straight men seem to have failed to appreciate what the closet is like. Rather than recognizing Turing’s proposal to Clarke as being about his status as a closeted gay man, they’ve re-interpreted it as an attempt to keep Clarke at Bletchley Park. They’ve actively directed the audience’s attention away from the issue of the closet and toward a narrative straight viewers will be more familiar and comfortable with.

For all these reasons, I think that Moore’s script is a poor adaptation of Hodges’ book, not to mention Turing’s life. The performances are solid and the film has other qualities to recommend it, but the Oscar it won was probably the one it is least deserving of.

Postscript: If you want to read a little more about my thoughts on this movie, you can see my post on a different blog about the Best Movies of 2014. A number of other bloggers contributed to the same post, so you’ll have to scroll down for mine.

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The Imitation Game: Does It Pinkwash Alan Turing?

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Alan Turing, Allen Leech, Benedict Cumberbatch, Homosexuality, John Cairncross, Keira Knightley, The Imitation Game, World War II

When word about The Imitation Game’s (2014; dir. Morton Tyldum) plot came out, there was some concern among gay activists that the decision to focus the film on Alan Turing’s (Benedict Cumberbatch) relationship with a female co-worker was an exercise in ‘pinkwashing’, rewriting a gay man as a straight man by giving him a conventional heterosexual romance. (As an example of pinkwashing, see the way Dallas Buyer’s Club rewrote its bisexual, gay-friendly protagonist as a heterosexual homophobe.) So I want to explore whether the film gives Turing’s homosexuality appropriate treatment.

Spoiler Alert: I discuss a couple of major plot points in the film, so if you plan on seeing the film in the theater, you may want to put off reading this until after you’ve seen it.

In 1941, Turing proposed to co-worker Joan Clarke (Keira Knightly), who accepted his proposal. But a few months later, Turing had second thoughts, apparently because he felt it was unfair for him to marry her when he was a homosexual. He came out to her, which did not faze her, but the engagement came to an end. The incident appears to have been a fairly minor event in Turing’s life, and in fact his relationship with Joan Clarke does not seem to have been one of his more important ones.

In the film, Turing proposes to Clarke mostly because her parents are trying to force her to leave Bletchley to find a husband. Desperate to keep whom he regards as the most important co-worker on the Enigma project, he fumbles his way into a proposal. He eventually breaks it off with her because he knows that his homosexuality may be revealed and he doesn’t want her ruined; when she says that she doesn’t care about his homosexuality, he does that clichéd film trick where he says mean things to her to convince her to go away for her own good. But their engagement is a central point in the film, and early critics feared that the film would use the engagement to gloss over Turing’s homosexuality entirely, implying that his relationship with Clarke was a traditional one.

Fortunately, the film does a reasonable job of acknowledging Turing’s sexuality. A school friendship at Sherborne School is explicitly shown to be a first crush. He describes himself as homosexual several times in the film. The frame tale with the police officer deals directly with the legal side of the issue, and at the end of the film he is receiving chemical castration. So the film doesn’t shy away from what ultimately happened to Turing, and an epilogue text tells us that nearly 49,000 men were prosecuted in Britain under anti-homosexuality laws. For addressing the role of homosexuality in Turing’s life, the film is certainly to be commended, even if it doesn’t, in my opinion, truly deal with the way homosexuality influenced Turing.

However, there is a significant problem with one part of the film. Early in the film it is revealed that there is a Soviet spy at Bletchley Park. Turing eventually figures out that it is John Cairncross (Allen Leech), one of his fellow cryptanalysts, who threatens to out Turing as a homosexual if Turing reveals Cairncross’ crimes. Turing initially accedes to Cairncross’ demands stays silent. But he gradually decides that he needs to do something. He breaks off his engagement to Clarke to protect her, and at one point attempts to report Cairncross but backs out. Eventually Cairncross is revealed without Turing having to out himself.

Leech as Cairncross

Unfortunately, none of this is true. Cairncross did work at Bletchley Park, not in Turing’s Hut 8, but in Hut 3, where he smuggled decrypted messages out for the Soviets. There is no reason to think the two men ever met; security at Bletchley kept the various working groups separate, and Cairncross only started at Bletchley in 1942, the year that Turing left Bletchley. So the last act of the film is entirely invented.

On the surface, this seems like a minor invention for dramatic purposes. But as a couple of reviewers have pointed out, this means that the film makes Turing a traitor for failing to reveal Cairncross’ espionage activities. More seriously, it also unintentionally validates the 1950s gay scare, which was predicated on the notion that homosexuals were an inherent security risk and therefore had to be driven out of government and military service. This element of the film is underscored by the frame tale of the police detective working to uncover Turing’s secret. The detective is convinced that Turing is a Soviet spy until evidence turns up that he is a homosexual.

Given that the film’s screenwriter and director have both claimed that historical accuracy was a major consideration for the film, this has the effect to falsely teaching viewers, who probably don’t know much about Turing coming into the film, that that Turing was investigated for spying and that he was in fact a security risk and complicit in treason. This is not explicitly homophobic, but it does reinforce the canard that gays are security risks, an issue in American government down into the early 21^st century.

So while the film deserves some praise for looking honestly at the role anti-gay prejudice played in Turing’s life, it deserves some criticism for employing careless fabrication in a way that partly undermines the film’s message of toleration for gays and lesbians. As I’ve said before, historical accuracy matters, because movies are a major source of historical knowledge for the general public, and this is a good example of how historical fabrications can be serious problems.        

Want to Know More?

The Imitation Gameis available on Amazon in a couple different formats.

Turing has been the subject of a number of works. The film is based on Andrew Hodges’ Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film “The Imitation Game”, which is probably the most highly-praised on them. Also worth a look is a biography written by his mother, Sara. Alan M. Turing: Centenary Edition was, as the title suggests, reissued for the centenary of his birth, and includes new material by his brother that in some ways contradicts his mother’s version of Turing’s life.

       

The Imitation Game: An Imitation of the Life of Alan Turing

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Alan Turing, Benedict Cumberbatch, Bletchley Park, Enigma Machine, Graham Moore, Homosexuality, Joan Clarke, Keira Knightley, Morton Tyldum, The Imitation Game, World War II

When The Imitation Game (2014, dir. Morten Tyldum, based on Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges) came out, it got some early Oscar buzz and in fact earned nominations for best picture, best director, best actor (Benedict Cumberbatch), best supporting actress (Keira Knightly), and four others. The film seeks to help the general public gain a better understanding of Alan Turing’s contributions to modern society. It is also arousing complaints about its historical accuracy. So let’s take a look at it.

Spoiler Alert: If you are planning to see this film in the theater, you may want to put off reading this post, although if you know much about Turing’s life, there aren’t really many surprises in the film.

Alan Turing was a ground-breaking British mathematician and cryptanalyst who laid the foundations for much of modern computer science. Of particular importance was his work at Bletchley Park in England during World War II. He and a small staff of other cryptanalysts worked in Hut 8, which was dedicated to finding ways to break German naval ciphers, most importantly the famous Enigma machine. To accomplish this, they built a proto-computer that could process cipher combinations far faster than humans possibly could. Their success was a major strategic breakthrough for the British and is widely credited with hastening Germany’s defeat and, as the film claims, saving the lives of perhaps 14 million British (although how that number was calculated I have no idea).

Alan Turing

Turing’s contributions to computer science were not limited to cracking Enigma. He helped develop the earliest stored-program computers and began to explore the question of whether machines might someday be able to think. He posed the famous Turing Test (also sometimes called the Imitation Game, hence the title of the film, but yes, I know that the Standard Turing test is not quite the same thing as the Imitation Game), which is a test to see whether a computer can exhibit behavior indistinguishable from a human being. Turing is sometimes called the father of modern computing. Given that you’re reading this blog on a computer, you’re benefitting from Turing’s major contributions to modern life.

Turing was a rather eccentric figure; he was messy and shy, and by modern standards something of a geek. At Hut 8, he tied his mug to a radiator so that his co-workers couldn’t use it, and he sometimes wore a gas mask to help him deal with his hay fever. He was also extremely athletic. At age 10, he bicycled 60 miles to get to his new boarding school during a rail strike. He was an ultra-distance runner of near Olympic quality; he occasionally ran the 40 miles from Cambridge to London for important meetings.

Bletchley Park

Unfortunately for Turing, he was also a homosexual at a time when homosexuality was a criminal offense in Britain. In 1952, a 19-year-old lover of his helped a friend burgle Turing’s home. Turing reported the burglary and as the facts came out, ultimately confessed his homosexuality to the police. To avoid a prison sentence, he agreed to undergo chemical castration, done with estrogen injections that caused him to develop gynaecomasty and impotence. In 1954, after a year of injections, his housekeeper found him dead. An autopsy concluded that the cause of death was cyanide poisoning. A half-eaten apple was found near the body, and an inquest determined that he had committed suicide, possibly by injecting the apple with cyanide and eating it. (That half-eaten apple, incidentally, has been cited as the inspiration for Apple Computer’s famous logo, although Steve Jobs denied it.) Questions remain about whether Turing might have accidentally been poisoned by cyanide fumes from a gold electroplating system he had set up in his bedroom, but his biographer Andrew Hodges has suggested that Turing chose a deliberately ambiguous death to spare his mother’s feelings.

Turing’s persecution as a homosexual has often been seen in recent years as a notorious miscarriage of justice. Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a public apology for the government’s action, but a petition to have Turing posthumously pardoned was rejected on the grounds that by the standards of the time, Turing was undeniably guilty of the crime he was charged with. Despite that, in 2013, Queen Elizabeth formally issued Turing a pardon even though he technically didn’t fit the criteria for one. (See below for some additional comment.)

The Imitation Game

The film opens in 1951, with the police showing up to investigate the burglary at Turing’s home. He gets brought in for questioning and Turing’s explanation of his work triggers a flashback that forms most of the film. Interspersed with his time in Hut 8 we get scenes of a police detective trying to figure out what secret Turing is hiding. The film also periodically jumps back to Turing’s years at the Sherborne School growing up.

Cumberbatch and Knightly as Turing and Joan Clarke

The film does a good job dramatizing the work done in Hut 8 to crack the Enigma machine’s system and explaining the nature of the problem that the cryptanalysists were dealing with. The performances are solid, and Cumberbatch does a good job with the material he’s given.

Unfortunately, as biopics so frequently do, The Imitation Game takes significant liberties with the details of Turing’s time at Hut 8. The film essentially claims that Turing was the driving force behind the breakthrough that cracked Enigma, with everyone else resisting his ideas, except for Joan Clarke (Knightly). The viewer would be forgiven for assuming that Turing essentially cracked the Enigma system himself, with a little help from Clarke and another co-worker, Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode). In reality, while Turing was undeniably a central figure at Hut 8, it was definitely a collaborative process, involving more than a dozen men and women. Turing would not have cracked Enigma on his own.

In the film, Turing is initially thwarted by his co-workers, who are led by Alexander, and his uncomprehending commanding officer, Commander Denniston (Charles Dance); in desperation, he writes to Winston Churchill and gets Churchill to give him control of the whole project, demoting Alexander to a secondary position and frustrating Denniston, who spends the rest of the film seeking ways to shut down Turing’s project. The film seems to suggest that this all happened in 1941. Turing’s action alienates the rest of the staff, who must then be gradually won over again. We’ve all seen this narrative many times before; it’s the Christopher Columbus scenario, with Turing as the only man who understands the problem, Clarke as the faithful supporter who helps him along the way, and everyone else as blocking characters who must either be overcome or won over.

Charles Dance as Cdr. Denniston.

In reality, Turing was one of the senior figures in charge of Hut 8 from the start. The obstacle he faced was not opposition from his colleagues and Denniston but rather a lack of resources. Turing, Alexander, and two other members of the project wrote to Churchill and got Churchill to allocate more resources to them. Turing left Hut 8 in 1942, at which point Alexander then took over leadership of the project.

Another major problem is simply the film’s depiction of Alan Turing as a human being. Cumberbatch’s Turing is a man with high-functioning Asperger’s Syndrome, a man who is fascinated by numbers but has no idea how to relate to human beings and consequently alienates those around him. He doesn’t understand jokes, can’t dance, and is maddeningly literal. At one point, Clarke tells him that he needs to win their co-workers over, so Turing walks into Hut 8, hands everyone an apple, and proceeds to awkwardly tell a joke. He names the code-breaking machine ‘Christopher’, after a friend from the Sherborne School.

The real Turing was shy and geeky, but he could also be warm and charming. He was noted for his sense of humor and his popularity with children. The code-breaking machine was called the ‘bombe’, not ‘Christopher’ and there’s no evidence that Turing personified it. Denniston, far from being an uncomprehending military officer, was in fact an experienced cryptanalyist in his own right. So the film gets most of the personalities involved wrong in key ways.

Similarly, Joan Clarke’s history is misrepresented. In the film, she is recruited because she solves a crossword puzzle in a newspaper; the puzzle was a tool to find people with unidentified cryptanalysis skills. Although Turing did recruit some people that way, Clarke was not one of them. In reality, she had known Turing at Cambridge, and after she was hired at Bletchley as part of the stenographic pool, she was promoted on the basis of her mathematical skills, which were considerable. Her film parents want her to get married and try to force her to leave Bletchley to find a husband; this prompts Turing to propose to her as a way to keep her on the project.

The real Joan Clarke

That engagement becomes a central plot development of the film. Turing eventually realizes that if he is outed as a homosexual, it will ruin Joan as well, so he tries to break off the engagement by telling her he’s homosexual. She is unfazed and says she accepts that. Desperate to protect her, he resorts to the cinematic cliché of saying cruel things to her so that she will leave him. In reality, Turing simply proposed to her because he found her a pleasant companion; a few months later he decided that it was unfair to marry her because he was homosexual, so he broke it off, even though she was not upset about his sexuality. (The idea that marriage requires sexual compatibility is a more recent development.) He actually broke things off using a poem by Oscar Wilde. (Incidentally, after the war, Clarke went on to become a respected numismatist, particularly noted for her work on Scottish coins of the later Middle Ages.)

Here’s Clarke’s version of how the engagement happened.

Doing a Bad Imitation

Both Graham Moore, the film’s screenwriter, and Knightly have insisted that they ought not be restricted by historical accuracy because they need creative license to produce their art. As Moore has said, “you don’t fact check Monet’s ‘Water Lilies’.” Let’s leave aside the fact that scholars do actually fact-check artwork all the time. One problem with Moore and Knightly’s argument is that what they’ve invented isn’t particularly creative. The film falls into standard Hollywood patterns and clichés. Turing, as I noted, is played as Christopher Columbus, the one man who understands something important and who has to overcome the ignorant opposition of those around him. If they want to be creative, that’s fine, but then they should actually show us things we haven’t seen before.

Additionally, Moore has insisted that historical accuracy was incredibly important to him. That’s obviously not true; he’s made significant deviations from the facts in almost every part of the film; the last act, in which Turing is being blackmailed by a Soviet spy, is entirely invented, as is a scene in which Denniston literally unplugs Christopher. But even if Moore was trying to be extremely respectful of the facts, he’s trying to have it both ways. He’s insisting on historical accuracy as a selling point of his film and then demanding the right to not be historically accurate so he can be artistic. These are mutually exclusive goals. The historical Turing’s life wasn’t art and this movie isn’t really Turing’s life. If he wants the freedom to fabricate plot points and details for the film, then he has to admit what he’s doing is not a historical film, but historical fiction.

Finally, Morton Tyldum insists that his historical liberties were about giving the audience a sense of who Turing really was as a person. “Our goal was to give you ‘What does Alan Turing feel like?…What does his story feel like? What’d it feel like to be Alan Turing? Can we create the experience of sort of ‘Alan Turing-ness’ for an audience based on his life?’” But ‘Alan Turing-ness’ is a lot like truthiness. It might give the audience an idea that they know who Turing was, but Cumberbatch’s semi-autistic Turing wasn’t the Turing his co-workers at Bletchley knew. Moore’s script leaves out Turing’s charm, the sweetness he showed while engaged to Clarke, and even many of his actual eccentricities. Ultimately the viewer emerges from the film knowing some facts about Turing, but knowing a lot of falsehoods about Turing that will probably make it harder for them to get a sense of the real man. If this film is playing the Imitation Game, it’s doing it quite poorly, because I was never fooled into thinking this film was Alan Turing’s life.

Update: Cumberbatch and Stephen Fry have discussed the issue of Turing’s pardon and have some interesting things to say about it here.

Want to Know More?

The Imitation Gameis available on Amazon in a couple different formats.

Turing has been the subject of a number of works. The film is based on Andrew Hodges’ Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film “The Imitation Game”, which is probably the most highly-praised on them. Also worth a look is a biography written by his mother, Sara. Alan M. Turing: Centenary Edition was, as the title suggests, reissued for the centenary of his birth, and includes new material by his brother.

Bletchley Park, as I noted, was not a one-man show; Turing was part of a team of very talented men and women, most of whom get short shrift in the film. To help balance the film’s skewed take on Bletchley, consider reading The Secret Lives of Codebreakers: The Men and Women Who Cracked the Enigma Code at Bletchley Park.