Imitation Game

Morten Tyldum intercuts two Alan Turing stories, which play variations on the title, The Imitation Game. 

The first, in 1951, has a cop interviewing the suspected Commie or gay. Turing sets this up as a game, where the interrogator is the judge asking questions and inferring from the answers who/what Turing is. Man or machine? A machine can’t think but can imitate the man who can. As Turing is human, unlike a machine he’s unpredictable and full of quirks, some debilitating, some empowering. But Turing can’t pull off his imitation of normalcy. When he’s defined as homosexual he chooses chemical castration over jail so he can continue work with his ur-computer, Christopher. He commits suicide within a year. Having failed to play the game of “normalcy” Turing loses. 

But he wins the major game, from 1939, when he leads a small group of cryptographers to crack the Germans’ Enigma machine and (spoiler alert) win WW II. This is a high-risk game but it’s still imitation. He invents a machine that will imitate and thus subvert Enigma. When Joan at the end summarizes the magnificence of Turing’s achievement— not just winning the war and saving millions of lives, but establishing the foundation of the electronic revolution — she is sadly bolstering the man already broken by the cruel state he so brilliantly served. By starting the later story first Tyldum introduces the tragic victim and then fills in the story of his heroic success — which renders his abuse all the more terrible.

Young Turing discovers the larger resonance of Enigma. To him everything human is enigmatic, a mystery he can’t understand. When his only school friend — and first love — Christopher introduces him to decrypting codes, Turing reflects on the everyday social codes he can never understand: “When people talk to each other, they never say what they mean.They say something else and you're expected to just know what they mean.” The young boy intuits this when he poignantly denies being close to his friend, who just died. This is the essence of all the misfit Turing comic scenes — e.g., the lads’ ambiguous invitation to lunch, his lessons from — and relationship with — the brilliant Joan, his interviews with the antagonistic Intelligence director, when he’s dragooned to abet a flirtation, etc.           Having saved his nation he’s shocked to discover the web of lies and hypocrisy that define British politics at the highest level. Honor is as fakable as  normalcy — if you’re unscrupulous enough. 

Of course Britain has a tradition of eccentricity and nonconformity — belied by its rigid social layering and prejudice. So Turing is the typical British hero, a stiff upper lip outcast chap whose solitude leads him to brilliant discovery. But he’s equally the victim of a society that punishes the outsider, that until only recently hounded to death tens of thousands of men whose sole crime was being gay. Men compelled to walk on the Wilde side.

The real Commie spy in the unit is played by Alan Leech, who is better known as the promoted socialist of Downton Abbey. Acting is the pervasive imitation game.
     For an exposure of the film's liberties with the truth see Christian Caryl, "Saving Alan Turing from His Friends," New York Review of Books, Feb 5/15.