The Bare Bones of…”The Imitation Game” (movie)

What: “The Imitation Game” (2014 movie)

Why: Alan Turing was a very interesting man who had had greater impact on modern life than most people know – and still the writers needed to take liberties for his story to be an interesting one.

Spoiler Alert: Low | Medium | HIGH!

Because for this historical tale, they didn’t tamper with the actual outcome.

Summary:

Alan Turing was a brilliant British mathematician, these days reasonably well known for his work on breaking Enigma, the cipher used by the German forces to encrypt their communication during World War II. Even before the war, he worked on mathematical models that would eventually become the very foundation of modern computers. However, even geniuses have secrets. Devastating secrets.

The movie, an adaptation of Turing’s biography as written by Andrew Hodges, focusses on Turing’s struggle with Enigma, taking only short trips to the past (the loss of his first love, Christopher) and the future (Turing’s conviction for homosexuality, and later his death).

The story itself is at first very digestible for anyone who is not offended or estranged by open references to homosexuality or stereotypical depictions of Asperger’s syndrome (a type of autism best known for brilliant intellect aside social awkwardness), the latter being what the movie relies on for second-hand embarrassment disguised as ‘a light note’.

Story-wise, the movie shows Turing’s arrival at Bletchley Park, where the British decoders were stationed, his assignment to a team of cryptologists and how he fails to fit in from the start. He has very clear ideas of what he wants to do to solve the problem – namely Enigma, the code which changes every day at the stroke of midnight – and sets about doing just that in a singular fashion. By himself, if need be.

His talents not go unnoticed, and soon he is put in charge of the team, much to their dismay. And he receives permission to construct a machine that will aid the decoding process. He also selects and hires two new people, one of them being a woman: Joan Clarke. She accepts Turing’s strange behaviour, but the budding romance is nipped in the bud by his homosexuality.

Meanwhile the machine is finished and works, but not fast enough. Facing impatient superiors now out to fire him, Turing receives unexpected support from his team members and they solve the problem, using the German code’s inherent patterns to save their machine – a very crude but effective computer – essential time.

The day seems saved for the Allied Forces in Europe, but while the movie over-simplifies the process of finding the key to Enigma, they take time to explain the consequences of finding this key: if the Allied Forces act on every bit of intelligence that is captured from the Germans, the German will change their cypher completely, rendering the decoders’ work useless. And thus is born operation Ultra: Turing and his team select what intelligence is or isn’t passed on to the army and navy, based on statistics. How many people can they save without the Germans discovering that the Allied Forces can read Enigma? It is a balancing trick that take a high toll.

The movie glosses over the time between the end of the war and Turing’s arrest for homosexuality (then illegal) eight years later. The secret he only told Joan Clarke now comes out, with devastating consequences. Convicted, Turing is given the choice between prison and chemical castration. He chooses the latter. Joan Clarke, now engaged to another man, comes to visit and finds him in shambles due to the hormones he is injected with. His suicide a year later is announced, but not shown on screen.

Story Skeleton:

As a genre, the historical biography doesn’t have much of a story arc. Generally the audience already knowns what happened to the person in question and what the main events in his or her life were, and these much be highlighted to appease the audience’s expectations. But that same audience also wants to be entertained. So the story must be satisfying.

In this case, the movie caters to this demand by Turing showing clear symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome. Although Turing’s kind of genius (which manifested early in his youth), natural aptitude for mathematics and related sciences, and general materialistic outlook on life is – at least in my personal experience – often seen in people with Asperger’s, it remains to be seen whether he was an autist. And if he was, whether his social awkwardness was truly as bad as the movie portrays it.

The same goes for the subplot of Joan Clarke. It is true that the real Turing proposed to the real Clarke and that his revelation of being a homosexual cut their engagement short, but whether he was truly in love with her, as the movie suggests he was, is less likely for the same reason.

While introducing these emotional complications, the adaptation also removes a lot of intricacies from Turing’s story. Most of those pertain to his work – which was and still is far beyond the comprehension of us non-specialised mortals – but where Turing’s death is concerned, we are shamelessly guided to believe that his distress over the chemical castration are what caused his suicide.

However, to this day, it is not at all certain that Turing’s death was intentional: he was notoriously sloppy with the chemicals he worked with, including the cyanide that was confirmed to have caused his demise. On the other hand, if his death was intentional, there are those who believe it was not suicide but murder, instigated by the British secret service or a similar government body. Either way, sources claim that he was not depressed and that the chemical castration had been stopped a year prior to his death. That is quite some artistic license to take.

Lesson learnt:

Real life does not follow the rules of good storytelling. This is a simple and irrefutable fact. While this means that dramatized biographies tend to be blessedly void of melodrama, excessive explosions and other pointless plot inserts, it also means that a person’s life story is often outright boring. As a consequence, all dramatized biographies cannot help but be inaccurate. The only question is: how much?