The Imitation Game

Alan Turing is now established as one of the great heroes of the Twentieth Century, as well as a beacon of our progressiveness. Formally pardoned of his gross indecency crimes by the Queen – symbolic of how the vast majority of such convicts should be pardoned – and with an apology from Gordon Brown for how he was treated, he is now recognized for having given perhaps the single greatest individual contribution to the war, for his contributions to cryptography, the development of computers and to the philosophy of artificial intelligence. That he could have been arrested for having a sexual relationship with another man and sentenced to be chemically castrated is a hugely significant example of how barbaric this supposedly enlightened society can have been just a few short decades ago over something like being gay.

Thus, we have this biopic. And I actually loved it – but more for its artistry as a screenplay than for its central messages. This is the fictionalization of a subject done in a remarkable and rather odd way. This is actual human life, just on the edge of living memory, made into melodrama. It came over as very artistic and allowed for a wonderfully heavyweight and varied performance from the media’s current absolute favourite Benedict Cumberbatch, but ultimately it was Hollywood cheese about a worthy subject. Everything was framed in the simplest, most easily-recognised terms: Turing is essentially written as Sheldon Cooper, unable to understand others, convinced of his own genius and quite open to taking jokes literally, at one point going over everyone’s heads with a letter to Churchill. All his drive and motivation derives from his first love at boarding school. His commanding officer is the cliché of an authoritarian. The whole thing is neatly framed not only as an account in a police investigation, but as a Turing test. Enigma is cracked not thanks to the work of prior Polish teams or in a variety of complex ways, but with a Eureka moment over three words always found in morning messages. When it is cracked, there is an intriguingly grey-area dilemma about using that information, made mawkish by the possibility of a team member’s personal loss. It is in large part sentimental drivel, but in fact it works well to move, entertain and hold the interest. These have become the clichés of modern film-writing for good reasons.

And in a strange way, the film made me glad to have lived my life. In many ways the 1940s were the end of the old Britain, but I feel like the 1980s were the last wonderful time to be a British child. I am happy I grew up in a sleepy village, and experienced both simple state schools and a daft opulent private boarding school before Cambridge. There’s a faded romance to that – and I did not live in a time of such absurd persecution of gay people. Though it probably ought to be noted that in keeping with Hollywood schmaltz, the real during didn’t lose his mind and develop some kind of pseudo-Parkinson’s from oestrogen. He got flabby and developed man-boobs. But that doesn’t send such a clear message, does it?