THE IMITATION GAME ... The Enigma Of Cinema "Truth"

THE IMITATION GAME

I am too picky about pictures like this — I mean those with “based on a true story” disclaimers prefacing a movie that dramatizes the lives of real people and real events.

I accept the notion that certain liberties (dramatic license) will be taken in order to enhance the story-telling.  Characters may be embellished or eliminated or combined into one person, events can be telescoped or re-arranged to fit into the time limits.  

But aren’t there limits, rules that the dramatist should follow, especially when dealing with a historically or culturally important person or event? Oliver Stone has been accused of crossing this imaginary line in NIXON and JFK. Of course the most notorious and often cited abuses are Griffith’s BIRTH OF A NATION and Riefenstall’s TRIUMPH OF THE WILL. Both of these films are considered masterpieces, landmarks of cinema art because of their outstanding technical achievements in editing, pacing, and emotional impact. But as documents purporting to tell true stories, they are tragically flawed. Both contain many blatant lies, distorting the events and people depicted so much that they should be labeled propaganda.

The line between a true story and propaganda includes the intent of the artist, of course. Griffith was trying to glorify the heroes of his Southern youth, the Klansmen who “defended white rights” in the post Civil War era. Riefenstall was selling her patrons, Hitler, Goebbels, and the other Nazi leaders of Germany. Oliver Stone had an agenda, too. His bitterness about the 1960’s is a recurring theme of his films and his paranoia saturates his work.

Alan Turing is a fascinating person, a fit subject for dramatic treatment. Although he died sixty years ago, his story involves two issues that concern us today: computers and the plight of homosexuals. Turing, like many geniuses, had colorful eccentricities. In an academic paper, he imagined a “thinking machine” that seemed to foresee the computer age. In World War II, he used his genius as part of the Bletchley Park secret code and cypher school to create a calculating machine (the Bombe) and other techniques (called Banburisms) that aided in breaking the Enigma code.

Turing’s work during the war was known to very few because of the secrecy required. After the war, he taught in Manchester and while there continued his occasional sorties to underground gay bars. He met men and boys and brought some to his digs. One of them burglarized his home, and stole his father’s watch. Turing reported the burglary to the local police, and told them that he suspected one of the young men who had done it. The police knew the bar and instead of pursuing the theft, arrested Turing for the same crime that Oscar Wilde had committed.

Turing was offered a choice by the judge: prison or undergo a treatment that was considered a cure of homosexuality. He chose that; large doses of estrogen, known as chemical castration. He lost his security clearance, his sex drive, grew breasts, and felt depressed and humiliated. Eventually, he committed suicide by ingesting cyanide.

Fifty years later, his achievements were finally recognized, both as to computers and the war work. The homosexual laws were by now repealed and the government apologized to his memory.

That is a terrific story, an important one to tell.

So why did the filmmakers feel compelled to lie to us in important as well as trivial details and fail to focus enough on the real drama?

The first disturbing distortion is the depiction of Turing as seeming to suffer from some form of mental illness like Asberger’s. He is shown to be socially inept, obsessive compulsive (as a student he carefully separates his peas from carrots on his dinner plate, is ridiculed and tortured by classmates).  According to most witnesses, this is a gross exaggeration. He was eccentric, but by no means was he anti-social. He had many friends, had a sense of humor, was polite (in a professorial way).

The filmmakers decided to use the formula of A BEAUTIFUL MIND (which had its own significant distortions) and Turing becomes a sort of John Nash. In fact, they contrive scenes in pubs in which he shows his social awkwardness and then suddenly hits upon the key to break the code that reminded me of similar scenes in A BEAUTIFUL MIND.

The second distortion was the fictional character of Detective Nock, who is insulted by Turing who says he does not want the burglary pursued. This is not true. Turing reported the burglary in the naïve belief that the police would want to solve the crime rather than punish him for his honesty admitting his homosexual acts. 

The entire plot of Nock deciding that Turing’s secret must be that he is a Soviet spy is complete nonsense.

The same is true of the egregious fiction related to Alastair Denniston that almost amounts to malicious slander of the man’s reputation. Denniston was a career codebreaker, having served in World War I in Room 40 the famous British team that broke the German code in that war. Their work was responsible for bringing the U.S. in that war when they translated the Zimmermann Telegram that showed German intentions to side with Mexico in a war against the U.S.

 Denniston (played by Charles Dance, a frequent film villain, usually as an upper class snob) is depicted as hating Turing, accusing him of being a Soviet spy, and then trying to fire him.

In truth, Denniston had recruited and consulted Turing and many other academics even before September 1939. When the war started, Turing was hired full time. Denniston did have disagreements with Turing and others and eventually was replaced in the job, but he didn’t accuse Turing of spying. That is simply invented to spice up the plot and add conflict.

John Cairncross (played by Alan Leech) was not one of the team in Hut 8. He was at Bletchley but probably never met or knew of Turing. In 1951, he was revealed to be a Soviet spy. The scene in which Turing discovers his secret and Cairncross threatens to expose Turing’s is a total fabrication.

The same is true of Stewart Menzies (the head of MI6 – played by Mark Strong). In the movie, Turing tells Menzies about Cairncross. Menzies says he knows all about it and uses Cairncross to relate secrets to the Soviets because Churchill foolishly refuses to do so. This is completely untrue.

In truth, Menzies was fooled by all of the Cambridge Five – the traitors who were his friends and colleagues for many years. He refused to believe that he had been deceived by people of his own class and education.

There are other distortions that are more or less significant. Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode) is not given enough credit for his contributions. Turing didn’t build The Bombe alone – Gordon Welchman helped him to build the first one.

 “He had also been busy devising a machine, called the Bombe, after the Bomby, although it was a more complex piece of equipment than its Polish namesake. This would test the encyphered messages against commonly used streams of text – known to the codebreakers as cribs – to narrow down the possibilities for the keys, settings and wheel orders of the Enigma machines. Turing enjoyed a good degree of
progress on both. Menzies agreed funding of £100,000 for the construction of the first Bombes and the British Tabulating Machinery company (BTM) was commissioned to build it, with the work supervised by the BTM research director Harold ‘Doc’ Keen. Then in December 1939, Turing managed to work out the indicator systems for five days of pre-war Naval Enigma traffic.”

Smith, Michael (2011-10-31). The Secrets of Station X: How the Bletchley Park codebreakers helped win the war (Kindle Locations 644-648). Biteback Publishing. Kindle Edition.

One thing the movie does almost get right is the clue (called a crib) that led to the first successes in breaking the Naval Code. One of the women whose task was to listen to and record Morse code transmissions noticed that the operator was using the same letters – probably a girlfriend’s initials – as identifiers at the start of each message. This was a violation of German protocol that ordered using random letters, changed every day. Once the codebreakers had this head start their task was easier.

But it was by no means the breakthrough that won the war. Many more Bombes were built to shorten the calculating time and when the Germans distributed a new Enigma machine that was even more complex, the British were lucky to capture one along with codebook from a German ship – and to keep it all secret.

The movie oversimplifies and flattens a complex story. In so doing, they reduce heroism and tragedy into a trite movie formula. The hope is always that people will be intrigued enough by the subject matter that they will seek the whole truth but the fear is that movies will become the legend and then will become history.