Me and Christopher Against the World

I've begun rereading Andrew Hodges's 1983 biography of Alan Turing, Alan Turing: The Enigma, to see how Turing's life compares to the movie version, The Imitation Game.  It seems fair to do so, since the 2014 re-issues tie the book to the film.

I particularly noticed Hodges's account of Turing's relationship with his classmate and first love, Christopher Morcom, who died of bovine tuberculosis in 1930 while still in his teens.  The movie and the book agree that Turing's feelings for Morcom were unrequited, but the movie gives the impression (to me at any rate) that Morcom initiated the friendship as Turing's protector when the latter was being bullied at school.  According to Hodges, Turing initiated the friendship, which took some time to develop.  Eventually Morcom invited Turing to visit his home and meet his family, and their respective parents also developed an acquaintance.  After Morcom's death, Turing sustained a relationship with Morcom's family, visiting them and even traveling with them.  All this is missing from the film, which is understandable to some extent, but the fact that Turing successfully pursued, developed, and sustained a friendship with Morcom is at odds (again, to me at least) with The Imitation Game's portrait of Turing as a socially inept isolate.  Turing clearly was socially awkward, but he learned to overcome it and make connections with other people.

The film continues its depiction of Turing into his codebreaking years at Bletchley, where he is still an isolate, working on his own program, at odds with the other in his unit.  He takes over control of his team by going over his superior's head with a letter to Winston Churchill, who puts him in charge.  He builds his computer almost alone, from nothing, naming it after Morcom, and in a Hollywood-style climax proves his machine's worth against a deadline that would mean pulling the plug on poor "Christopher," symbolically killing Turing's love once again.  But the letter to Churchill was signed not only by Turing but by three others on the team, and the computer (called the Bombe because of the ticking noise it made) built at Bletchley was a development of earlier machines invented by others. Turing worked with another mathematician, Gordon Welchman, who helped make the advances in its design and construction.  And so on.  It's not unreasonable, for purposes of dramatic compression, for The Imitation Game, to focus on just one of the groups that worked on breaking German codes, even to give the impression that only that group achieved anything -- but it is seriously misleading to turn Alan Turing into the One Man who walked into town and beat the bad guys all by his lonesome, fighting against the misunderstanding of the ignorant mob.  Turing may not have been completely comfortable working as part of a team, but he seems to have adjusted to it pretty well, much better than the movie shows.  As L.V. Anderson wrote in a good piece at Slate, "One of Turing’s colleagues at Bletchley Park later recalled him as 'a very easily approachable man' and said 'we were very very fond of him'; none of this is reflected in the film."  Anderson's article goes into detail on the differences between The Imitation Game and history, and is worth a read if you're interested.

There's a common tendency in apologetics for this kind of movie to claim that there's no other way to tell the story, no other narrative, so what else could they do?  As I wrote before, The Imitation Game's portrayal of Turing's homosexuality may not have been motivated by personal homophobia, just creative laziness.  The same goes for its depiction of Bletchley Park, which forces the history into a very familiar narrative straitjacket.  That straitjacket, because of its familiarity, is comfortable for many people, and perhaps The Imitation Game wouldn't have sold as many tickets or garnered as many Oscar nominations if it had gone in a different direction.  Or maybe it would have: Benedict Cumberbatch is a hot property, and would have drawn in audiences regardless.  My point here is that I don't like it, and don't intend to watch it again.  I'm trying to explain here why.

Compare one of my favorite films, My Brilliant Career.  It flouts numerous narrative conventions: the conventionally plain heroine rejects the rich, handsome fellow who loves her and begs her to marry him, and goes on to write and publish her first novel.  To my surprise, some radical gay male critics were annoyed by this.  Yet the movie was a crowd-pleaser, won some awards, and made Judy Davis, who played the protagonist, an international star.  (It did no harm either to Sam Neill, who played her suitor.)  It can be done.  Moviemakers aren't obliged to go against the current and make movies that will please me, but I'm not obliged to like their productions either.  We're in better shape for gay protagonists than we were a few decades ago, but I still see The Imitation Game as a mess of bad creative choices.

The More It Changes the More It Stays the Same, Latest Iteration

I've had some interesting discussions with people about the Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game, which has now received several Oscar nominations.  One such discussion was with a straight friend who loved it because, he said, it was so refreshing to see a positive depiction of a computer nerd in a mainstream movie.  I think that's as questionable as the movie's depiction of a gay man, but I suppose he liked it for the same reason many people have liked its depiction of Turing as a socially clueless yet fearful closet case: because they agree that the only way you can win sympathy (or an Oscar) for Turing, as a queer or as a computer geek, is to make him hopelessly miserable and then put him out of his misery.

I would think it even more tragic if Turing had been shown as he apparently was: a gay mathematician who, despite his social awkwardness, could work with others, had friends, was unconflicted about his sexuality, and had a reasonably satisfying sex life -- but was brought down by the bigoted laws of his time and place. To show Turing in this way would take some imagination and creativity; treating him as The Imitation Game does takes the easiest possible way out, by falling back on every toxic stereotype about nerds and queers.

When I explained this, my friend replied that he thought the film "dealt with his sexuality reasonably well," and "didn't make a 'big deal' out of it" and "it was treated as a secondary struggle for him."  He conceded that "If one does a 'queer reading' of the film, I'm sure there are some problems," but he himself "found the character captivating and intriguing and the central tension of his character played well into the film's overall thematic purpose." I agree with that last point, since I think The Imitation Game's "overall thematic purpose" was to win sympathy for Turing by the use of homophobic stereotypes.  (This is not to say that any of the filmmakers were personally homophobic -- no doubt some of their best friends are homosexuals -- but that the way Turing was depicted used homophobic cliches that have long been part of popular culture.)

I think only a homophobic straight person could watch The Imitation Game and perceive it as not making a big deal out of Turing's homosexuality.  Indeed, it makes it into a crucial plot point, when the Soviet spy (whom the real Turing probably never met, let alone worked with closely) blackmails him into keeping silent by threatening to expose his homosexuality.  (Ironically, Turing's superiors certainly knew that he was queer, just as they knew about the presence of a Soviet spy at Bletchley and -- as someone tells the movie Turing -- chose what information he'd pass along to Stalin.  They would have investigated him quite thoroughly before admitting him to the team.)  As for "queer reading," my reading is structurally queer since I'm queer, but it doesn't use any of the concepts or tools of queer theory.  Of course it never occurred to my friend that his "straight reading" brought no agenda to his understanding of the film or of Turing as "struggling" with his homosexuality.

So I wasn't all that surprised when the authors of a new Young Adult science-fiction novel with non-heterosexual, non-white protagonists mentioned (in a "big idea" post at John Scalzi's blog) that "an agent offered to represent it on the condition that we make one of the protagonists straight or else remove his romance and all references to his sexual orientation."  They refused, and eventually found a home for the book at Viking Penguin.  I'm still a bit annoyed by the authors' repeated insistence that writing a story with such characters is "risky" -- there's not enough fiction out there with non-heterosexual characters of color, but there's still quite a lot of it, and "risky" has all kinds of connotations that I think go beyond the chance that an agent won't represent your work because of its content.

The writers also wrote a piece about their experience that was posted on a Publishers Weekly blog, inviting comments from writers with similar experiences, and got a lot of traffic.  (Though the writers didn't name the agency involved, it identified itself and responded, denying the writer's accusation.)  One author wrote that per "editor went through and deleted all gay references between my copyedits and the first pass pages without bothering to tell me.  I pitched a fit and my agent backed me up. The gay character stayed in the novel, as written."  Another commenter declared the need for fiction about Christian gay characters who struggle with their sexuality and ultimately "leave the lifestyle/choose to go on with their lives from a Christian standpoint."  Personally I think it would be interesting to read such a story -- it would be fantasy, of course, but we're talking about fantasy here -- and I wonder why Christian publishers haven't given us some examples already.  I'd even recommend the acquisition of such a book to my public library, and would welcome the change to discuss it here.

Despite the apparent decline in the US and Europe of homophobia and antigay bigotry, to say nothing of structural/systemic heterosexual supremacy, they're still with us.  It's good to be reminded, even if it's frustrating.

Imitation of (Gay) Life

Today I saw The Imitation Game, the new biopic of the British mathematician Alan Turing.  It has been decades since I read Andrew Hodges's 1983 biography of Turing, which the film is loosely based upon, but on reading some of the online discussion of the movie I found that some things that bothered me about its depiction of its protagonist were well-remembered after all.  I notice that Hodges is doing a book tour for a reprint of the biography, and is being cannily reserved about the movie's accuracy: he's "in Princeton to talk about Alan Turing rather than Benedict Cumberbatch."  As usual, many criticisms of The Imitation Game's departures from fact were rebuffed with protests that the film will send viewers to Hodges' biography.  I hope so, but I doubt it: it's a long, dense book.  For many people Benedict Cumberbatch will be Alan Turing.

One commenter on the IMDB message boards actually appealed to I'm Not There, Todd Haynes's biofantasia about Bob Dylan, as evidence that movies about a real person needn't be factually accurate.  Since Dylan is played in that movie by several different actors, including the female Cate Blanchett and a young African-American boy, I doubt that many viewers are going to confuse them with the real person.  I know better than to expect perfect accuracy from a biopic, but I also know better than to expect most movie viewers to distinguish between actors and the fictional characters they play; add another layer of impersonation and it's hopeless.  I noticed that some people defended Cumberbatch's performance as an accurate portrayal of Asperger syndrome, which they assumed the real Turing had.  If he did, no one knows for sure.  It's debatable.  The diagnosis didn't exist in Turing's lifetime.  But Cumberbatch gave such a convincing portrayal of a Turing with Asperger, who could doubt it?

Numerous people compared biopics to historical fiction, and there's something to that, but in the historical fiction I read, authors often include notes acknowledging, listing, and defending their departures from history.  The makers of The Imitation Game couldn't even get right the date of Turing's 1952 arrest for "gross indecency" with another male; they put it in 1951, and it would be interesting to know why.

Many of the inaccuracies in the film are arguably defensible as compression or rearrangement for dramatic reasons.  I'm not going to complain much about them here; others have done a good job of discussing them, though a writer in the Guardian got one thing seriously wrong.  He says that the film shows Turing intimidated into concealing the identity of a Soviet spy on the code-breaking team, because the spy (whom in reality Turing probably never met) threatened to expose his homosexuality.  "Were the makers of The Imitation Game intending to accuse Alan Turing, one of Britain’s greatest war heroes, of cowardice and treason?" the writer thunders.  Well, no, though I suppose some viewers might see it that way.  I thought the scene was meant to churn up sympathy for Turing: He couldn't turn in the traitor, or he'd be persecuted for his homosexuality!  And for what it's worth, Turing-in-the-film does later report the spy to a superior.

What did bother me was the way the film uses the hoary cliche of the lonely, tormented homosexual in its depiction of Turing. Yes, he was devastated by the early death of his first (but unrequited) boarding-school love. But he seems to have had a circle of good friends as an adult, and he apparently was pretty unconflicted about his homosexuality -- much like many other gay and lesbian Brits of his generation. He was even rather naive about it. One thing that annoyed me from the beginning of the film was that it implies that Turing didn't report the burglary of his flat -- the police refer to a neighbor's complaint -- and that his sexual relationship with the burglar was discovered independently by the police. In fact Turing reported the burglary himself and gave a detailed statement in which he casually referred to his relationship with the young man. That statement was used as evidence against him at his trial for "gross indecency." He wasn't "closeted," as many people referring to this film have called him. By portraying him as lonely and tormented, the film tries to win extra sympathy for him -- as though being arrested, convicted, and forced to choose between "chemical castration" and prison weren't bad enough. But it also plays into a Hollywood stereotype, that of the isolated, miserable, sexless homosexual, that for some reason is still with us. It's especially odd in a film from England, which has given us so many films featuring gregarious, happy, sexually active gay men.  And given the power of moving images to impress themselves on the mind, I expect that even those people who read print biographies of Alan Turing will find it difficult to replace Cumberbatch's quivering, fearful isolate in their minds with the more confident, unconflicted reality.