Sunday Review: The Imitation Game

Barely an imitation

By Chuck Smythe

I finished watching The Imitation Game (2014, directed by Morten Tyldum) with mixed feelings. [The film is a biographical drama about mathematician Alan Turing and the World War II cracking of the Nazis’ Enigma code.]
    On the one hand, I had just seen Benedict Cumberbatch play a riveting portrayal of a man with a profound emotional handicap, something like an extremely high-functioning autistic. He was absolutely convincing in the role. On the other hand, we are talking about Alan Turing, one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century. Could such a man have done all that he did? I was also uneasy with the cliché – the mathematician with emotional intelligence in single digits has been a stock character in the popular imagination for generations. Fortunately, the film credits said it was based on the biography Alan Turing: The Enigma, by Andrew Hodges, so I decided to go to the source.

    I actually wanted to see the movie because of Turing’s reputation. Most of us who have been involved with mathematics and computers are broadly familiar with his achievements. Early in the film, he is complimented on the recent publication of his research paper “On Computable Numbers.” This paper is in fact one of the more important papers in the philosophy of mathematics from the twentieth century, only somewhat less important than the famous proof of Kurt Gödel that mathematics is incomplete. In the sort of crude terms I can understand, Turing’s paper answers a question posed by David Hilbert: can all mathematical questions be answered? The answer is “no.” Of more interest to many of us is the way Turing answered the question. In logical effect, he invented the modern computer, then proved that it could solve every logical or mathematical problem that could be solved. Finally, he found a problem that he could prove could not be solved by his computer. Q.E.D.
    That last step, of course, is almost an anticlimax after those that came before! Turing himself probably thought so, and after the war dedicated his career to building some of the first computers. He believed that brains must operate on the same logical principles as computers and was greatly interested in the new field of artificial intelligence. His most widely known idea is his Imitation Game, a.k.a. “the Turing Test” for machine intelligence: talk to a human and a computer, both by teletype to conceal irrelevant clues. If, after a reasonable effort, you can’t decide which is the human and which the machine, the latter must be presumed intelligent. The Turing Test has generated an avalanche of argument over the decades. The film makes no mention of this, its title notwithstanding.

    Then there was the Enigma project, the subject of the film. Turing was recruited early in the war to help crack the Nazis’ military codes. His team succeeded in doing this, thereby contributing critically to the defeat of the Third Reich. That part is portrayed somewhat factually, though the constant attempts by military authorities to shut the program down, and the scene of Turing trying to physically defend his machines from the Military Police, are largely Hollywood. In fact, early in the war Turing had written to Churchill, complaining of interference by the Brass. Churchill backed him up, so the project remained largely untouchable.
    My interest in the film was partly in learning about Enigma; my study of Turing was before now almost entirely in books on mathematics and computer science, which mentioned code breaking only in passing. All this is by way of explaining why I thought it surprising that the film portrays Turing as so dysfunctional.

Well, it turns out he wasn’t. No doubt he was an extreme character. His dress was beyond indifferent: once given a bit of rope to repair a broken suspender, he wore it for years rather than buying new braces. He was blatantly homosexual in a time and place that made it personally dangerous (and ultimately fatal). He was so politically naïve that he honestly expected reason to carry the day in political debate. He was a hopelessly incompetent administrator. A marathoner a generation before it was cool. Utterly indifferent to social rules and conventions.
    But the film makes him far more deranged than that. It makes much of the unexpected death of a boyhood friend (who was concealing a potentially fatal medical problem). The film has Turing renounce the friendship posthumously. In fact, he remained a close friend of the family for the rest of his life. The film portrays him as ignorant of, and indifferent to, the Nazi threat; he was nothing of the kind. The film makes him a pariah among his colleagues because of his emotional incomprehension. He is shown, for example, as unable to understand “would you like to go out for lunch?” In these and other ways, the film portrays a man fundamentally different from the real Turing, who was in fact regarded with slightly awed affection as “The Professor.” (The film does show a softening toward this affection in the end.)
    All this raises an ethical question for me. Just how much artistic license should be given to a biographical film? Some distortions are unavoidable in compressing a life, or even part of one, into a couple of hours, and surely a few others need to be tolerated for dramaturgy. But to utterly revise the character and history of the subject seems profoundly disrespectful to him – and misleading to any audience interested in the history. This argument would apply to any biographical subject, of course. But when the subject is as historically significant as Turing, we go from revisionist biography to revisionist history, almost a political crime. And I wonder why? Did they want a tour-de-force portrayal of autism? Was Turing the emotional imbecile thought more interesting than the real man? What is the point here?
    Thoughts from the fearless reader?

Copyright © 2015 by Chuck Smythe