How ‘The Imitation Game’ Castrates Alan Turing, Again

How do you make a film about the meticulously slow, solitary work of breaking codes entertaining? That’s the question that drags at the heels of The Imitation Game, a biopic of Alan Turing, the man who invented the machine that broke the enigma code, which is largely credited for the victory of the allies over Germany in the Second World War, and was ostensibly the first ever computer. Michael Apted’s 2001 film, Enigma (based on a novel by Robert Harris) attempted (and failed) to do this by turning the story of the Bletchley Park code-breakers into a spy thriller and replacing Turing, an antisocial gay genius, with a dashing heterosexual hero who gets involved in all sorts of contrived wartime intrigue.

The truth is that Turing and his colleagues spent the entire war sequestered from intrigue and violence, painstakingly creating a machine that would break codes used by the Germans to communicate strategies of attack. Once the machine was invented, they all continued to live at Bletchley, determining which attacks to scupper or not, so that the Germans wouldn’t cop on to the fact that their radio communications were being decoded.

The drama in Graham Moore’s screenplay for The Imitation Game is smaller than that of Enigma, focusing at first on conflict between the socially inept Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his debonair competitor at Bletchley, Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode), and then with his suspicious superior, Commander Denniston (played with a suitably gimlet eye by Charles Dance). Turing wants to build his machine, his nemeses, one after the other, want to stop him. There’s not much else in the way of conflict on show, bar a failed romance with a bright colleague, Joan Clarke (Kiera Knightley) and a particularly muted run-in with the police later in Turing’s life, which is both the horrific heart of this film, and a wasted opportunity.

Turing was prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952, when homosexual acts were still illegal in the UK, and rather than go to prison for two years he accepted chemical castration. This fact is tacked on to the end of the film, which is bookended with a star-crossed teenage romance during Turing’s prep school days, and while the injustice is palpable, the idea of Turing as a persecuted gay man is not. There’s the briefest suggestion that the British government might have had a hand in his demise, but it’s never explored. Rather than even hint at Turing’s adult homosexual relationships, his final scenes involve a deepening of his quasi-heterosexual romance with a simpering (as always) Ciara Knightley, not to mention a fetishised relationship with his machine, which is called Christopher after the object of his childhood affection. There is literally no fleshing out.

Having said all this, the performance at the centre of The Imitation Game makes it soar above the film’s own limitations, self-imposed or not. Benedict Cumberbatch’s deeply expressive face is almost always in close-up throughout the proceedings, and that face embodies a character that you feel for at every turn, even when Morten Tyldum’s direction is clunky, or we’re being fed lots of obvious exposition, or Kiera Knightley is talking through her teeth. Indeed, without Cumberbatch, this film would be nothing worth writing home about.

In the closing credits we learn that Queen Elizabeth II gave Turing a posthumous royal pardon in 2013, which of course was too little too late, given the man’s contribution to winning the war and the millions of lives saved by his machine. It’s also a case of too little to late with this film, which could have really explored the deep injustice meted out against Turing, and what it meant to him as an emotional, sexual adult. As such, while celebrating Turing’s achievements, The Imitation Game castrates him again.

Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World: A Review

 

At the beginning of Janet E. Cameron’s book, Cinnamon Toast and The End of the World, Stephen Shulevitz’s world as he knows it comes to an end. He’s reached the sudden realisation that he’s in love with his best buddy, Mark, and that he desperately wants to kiss him.

This is a ‘coming out’ novel. You know from the opening scene that Stephen will have to overcome a series of emotional obstacles before eventually coming to terms with his sexuality; that towards the end he’s going to tell Mark that he fancies him, for better or worse; and that there’s going to be some deep issues with Stephen’s parents that he’s going to have to sort out along the way. There’ll probably be a story arc featuring Stephen’s close female friend too. As with any romance novel, where the two paramours are introduced in the opening chapter and you know that on the very last page they will get together, the table is set for a three-course meal you’ve consumed several versions of before.

The desire to keep reading a novel in such a well-trodden genre is founded in questions about how the journey will unfold, and the mark of success is whether it keeps the reader questioning.

Luckily Cameron knows how to keep the questions popping up. She’s a talented writer, and the journey she takes us on is always pleasurable, sometimes moving, and has a lyrical literary style that separates it from the masses of ‘coming out’ fiction that litter the queer cannon. It also dares, at times, to jumble up the equation and come up with different answers, as in a later reunion scene between Stephen and his absent, drop-out Dad, Stanley, in which a lesser novelist would have given her readers warm, fuzzy emotional resolution.

Before any conclusion is reached, Stanley says: “I think this conversation has run its course.” Stephen, instead of getting his father to say he loves him, is left in confusion, and Cameron resists any urge to move Stanley centre stage again for the tying up of loose ends.

The tale is set in 1987, mostly in the small Canadian town of Riverside, where boredom rather than outright prejudice drives the violent motivations of its teenage population. Cameron clearly loves the eighties. The book is filled with playful cultural references to the era. When Stephen contemplates suicide, he does so through the filter of watching an umpteenth Friday The 13th sequel. At the inevitably excruciating prom, he dances with rebellious abandonment to Aha’s The Sun Always Shines on TV.

He may be surrounded by stalwarts of the genre – the best girlfriend (Lana) who secretly fancies him, the ambivalent but unavailable love interest, the school bullies – but its in her depiction of supporting characters, like Lana’s immigrant father, Mr. Kovalenko (“a look on his face like he’d been chewing old sardines”), and Stephen’s fleeting, sexually gluttonous girlfriend, Tina Thompson, with her “muscular tongue”, that Cameron really lights up. Stephen himself is a sharply drawn protagonist, his teenage view of the world suitably cynical, but underlined with almost poetic, acute observation.

Towards the end the inevitable happens, and as Stephen’s orientation becomes known to his peers, he becomes more and more vulnerable. Cameron isn’t afraid to shift the lighthearted tone of the first half of the novel into much darker territory, and during the penultimate, chaotic scene between Stephen and Mark, you begin to think this might not turn out the way all ‘coming out’ novels turn out, after all.

You’ll have to read the book to find out if it does, but in the meantime I’m taking bets that Cameron’s second novel will leave the ‘coming out’ genre behind. She’s simply a writer, a good one, who likes to tell a cracking story. That this story is about a gay boy finding himself is incidental.

An Experiment in Love

 

I love when an author hits the big time later in his or her career, like Hillary Mantel, who won the Man Booker in 2009 for Wolf Hall, and who won it again this year for its sequel, Bringing Up The Bodies. Having read both books, and loved them, I started searching Mantel’s back catalogue and came up with a piece of treasure, namely An Experiment In Love. 

Set in 1971 its the story of three girls, Carmel, Karina and Juliette who leave their bleak northern town to go to university, and halls of residence, and a whole new world of post-teenage concerns. Beautifully written, with extremely black humor, the book truly comes to sparkling life in the passages about Carmel’s childhood relationship with her angry, dominating mother. They bring to mind Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, andt the same writer’s recent memoir, Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?

Carmel’s bleak outlook on life, underpinned by her dysfunctional relationship with her mother and her childhood friend/nemesis, Karina, is the glue that holds this book together, as the girls face anorexia, unwanted pregnancies, and a shocking denouement none of them could ever have imagined.

If you want a good. absorbing read, look no further.