The Imitation Game Movie Blurb by Shale January 17, 2015 This movie was one of two World War II setting movies that opened in December, which I had avoided seeing because I just wasn't up to seeing a war movie and I already knew the tragic story of Alan Turing. However, on seeing all the good reviews, with the aggregate critics on Rotten Tomatoes giving it 90% "Fresh" and audience approval of 94%, plus a facebook post by one of my nieces saying "The Imitation Game is going to be very hard to beat as my favorite movie of Oscar season," I felt I should steel myself and check it out. This biopic actually opens in 1952, when the police enter the home of mathematician Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) investigating a reported burglary. While Turing denies there was a burglary and sends the officers on their way, one inspector felt he was hiding something. Remember this was the Cold War paranoia. The movie then uses flashbacks to show the history of this brilliant, tho socially inept man while flashing forward to the investigation that would ultimately be his downfall. Since the movie is likely in its last week at the Cinema, this blurb is now being made for DVD or Streaming in future, so this is just a quick highlight of Alan Turing and his times During the war the German Navy was isolating England by destroying all the convoys of food and supplies being shipped from the U.S. No one could track the U-boats or the German fleet, but they were communicating orders thru their new Enigma code machine, which could not be broken by conventional code breaking methods. Alan Turing was brot on to the team of codebreakers at Bletchley Park, where he was by nature not a team player. (Consider the character Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory TV show is based on Alan Turing). The movie shows his interpersonal problems, with flashbacks to his being bullied at his boarding school as a child and his growing affinity to a particular older boy named Christopher who took him under wing. It also shows his affinity to a young genius woman, Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley) who aced his initial test for applicants, which was a published crossword puzzle. Anyone who completed it within 10 minutes could apply and she qualified (much to the chagrin of the male applicants of the day who saw women as cooks, secretaries or servers). When Joan decides to leave the group and go back home to her parents because she was 25 and unmarried, Turing proposes to her to keep her on the team. By this time in the movie, Turing is concerned that altho she is a good friend, she doesn't do it for him in "that way" because he is a homosexual. Turing Dancing with Fiance With much conflict he finally gets his team to support his radical idea to make a codebreaking machine to beat a code machine. He names his device "Christopher." Turing with "Christopher" With initial problems getting the machine to go thru all the possibilities of the code before the deadline when the Nazis change the key, they finally solve it with a simple solution and the code is broken. Enigma Code Breakers Breakthru SPOILER WARNING: This may be a spoiler if you do not know the whole life story of Alan Turing. Back to where the movie started, with the police investigation, they finally found a poufter (Brit. derogation for effeminate male homosexual) who confessed to making it with Turing. This was a criminal offense under the antiquated blue laws of England (and parts of the U.S.) and he was convicted of "gross indecency." Facing either a two year jail sentence or chemical castration with hormones, he chose to remain free tho the side-effects of the hormones were debilitating. Joan visits Alan after conviction However, as is all too common with bullied and persecuted ppl today, by 1954 he killed himself.
How The Imitation Game Impacts on Shale As is often the case with my Movie Blurbs, I interject my personal experience as it relates to the movie viewed. This movie has several things common to my experience. Altho I was born during the last year of WWII, it was still a part of my early life thru those wartime movies on TV in the '50s and my family members involved in the war, especially my namesake uncle Bob the bomber pilot. So, the era of WWII was not distant from my life. In fact, I had an affair with an older woman in 1968 who was in London during the "Blitz" and would tell me stories about it as we relaxed in bed so you could say I was intimately involved with ppl who went thru the war in England. Except for the fact that I am not a genius or particularly brilliant, I also had many things in common with Turing. Besides a desire for order (which mean ppl call OCD), I also had a propensity for breaking code. When I was a kid there was a show on daytime TV where you could send away for a code ring that would allow you to break the coded messages on the screen. I didn't send for the plastic ring, which had sliding sections of alphabet but actually deciphered the code using sliding cardboard with the simple monoalphabet code, which just slid the letters to different positions. I later learned in the Air Force introduction to cryptography that this was a cipher first used by Julius Caesar in the first century BCE. They also taught us about phi count or the frequency of certain letters to appear in a language so you could guess which encrypted letter would equate to that. This was a start at playing a game of reconstructing the message around these compromised letters. Something like this was mentioned in the movie. Just a decade after Turing's death, I was in the U.S. Air Force Security Service, which operated under NSA and which also worked with GCHQ which was the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) in Turing's time. In the field we were still pretty much working with WWII methods. The Russian Missile Command was still communicating by Morse Code over radio and the most advanced communication we had was radioprinter. Later, when stationed at Ft. Meade Maryland and working in NSA, we were dealing with 'scrambler' technology and as mentioned in this movie, someone told me then it was no longer humans trying to decipher this traffic but was our machines against their machines. This is sort of what Enigma was about in this movie. To this day IDK if all that printout and tape stored in the huge warehouse at NSA was ever decrypted. THE TRAGEDY As I mentioned in the movie blurb, in 1952 Turing was prosecuted for homosexual acts and sentenced to degrading and dangerous chemical castration with synthetic estrogen, which caused gynecomastia (enlarged breasts) and erectile dysfunction. With this sentence he could no longer have a security clearance to work at GCHQ nor could he travel to the U.S. Altho some say he could have accidentally killed himself with cyanide, there is no wonder that he did. He was just a few days shy of his 42nd birthday when he died and considering the service to his nation and the war effort, where it is estimated that his work with Enigma shortened the war by two years and saved thousands of lives, this is a compounded tragedy that he was so ill-treated by an archaic puritan law from 1885. The same despicable law that destroyed the life of Oscar Wilde who served a 2-year sentence for "gross indecency" in 1897 and died at age 46. Great Britain has a horrible history of persecution of homosexuality, perhaps even worse than our own. And these two exceptional men had their lives cut short by this idiocy (which now has been rescinded in UK and US). What a waste! To give an indication of how advanced Turing's thinking was, some of the classified work he did during the war was so innovative to the subject of code breaking that it was not declassified by GCHQ until 2012. After the war he was on the cutting edge of computer technology, both the fysical application and the theory of it. How much more he could have contributed to computer science and the exploration of artificial intelligence we can only guess. The fact that I too have engaged in the same "gross indecency" that both he and Wilde were convicted of gives me an even closer tie to him and the injustice of his treatment. Ultimately, it was a sad movie for this reason. Posthumous apologies are worthless to the person dead, but in 2009, the British Prime Minister made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for "the appalling way he was treated," and Queen Elizabeth II granted him a posthumous pardon in 2013. Alan Turing
