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.

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.

The Limits of Language: Andrew Hodges's "Towards 1984"

I missed Alan Turing's centenary, though I didn't have much to say about it anyway.  Turing was a brilliant man, brutally mistreated by his government for his queerness, and he deserves to be remembered for a number of accomplishments.  One of the most impressive things I've learned about him as a person was that he doesn't seem to have felt any guilt about being queer, which was unusual though not unique among British buggers of his generation.  (The circle of friends that included W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, for example, seems to have been just as comfortable with their sexuality as Turing.)

But the mentions of Turing that I encountered online often mentioned Andrew Hodges's 1983 biography of Turing, Alan Turing: The Enigma (Simon and Schuster).  When I read in the gay press that Hodges was working on the biography, I began looking forward to it.  Hodges was well-qualified to write it, for he not only had the mathematics and technical background to understand Turing's professional work, he was a gay activist and writer, co-author with David Hutter of an important Gay Liberation pamphlet called With Downcast Gays, published in 1974 but available online.  This was important because even in the 1980s, most biographies of important gay or lesbian figures were marred by homophobic armchair psychoanalysis purporting to show why the Subject had turned out That Way.  Hodges was having none of that, and his groundbreaking biography not only did justice to Turing but helped set the tone for future biographies.

Aside from With Downcast Gays, I'd also read an article by Hodges published in the Canadian radical gay magazine The Body Politic at the end of 1979.  Its discussion of the way language affects our ability to think about homosexuality made a big impression on me -- it was the first critique of Orwell's dicta about language I'd read till then -- but it was never reprinted anywhere and wasn't available online as far as I could discover.  The flurry of attention to Turing's centenary and to the biography reminded me that I'd been meaning to write to Hodges and ask him about it.  I knew he had a website with some of his writings on it, but "Towards 1984" wasn't there, so I hoped to persuade him to add it; I could even send him the text if he didn't have it.  So I wrote to him, and he kindly gave me permission to post it here.

As its title implies, "Towards 1984" is dated now, but as Hodges wrote, the issues it (and Orwell's novel) deals with are still current.

TOWARDS 1984

by Andrew Hodges

(This article first appeared in Body Politic #59, December 1979 / January 1980.)

As the real 1984 approaches and becomes just another calendar year, one thing is certain: there will be no lack of voices claiming to draw political lessons from George Orwell's book. Indeed, the election posters for Mrs Thatcher's Conservative Party have already suggested that we should believe Labour policy to be leading Britain into an Orwellian nightmare. 1984 has sold millions of copies; it is a standard text for school examinations. But what does it hold for us?

A number of Orwell's suggestions have become reality; a number have not. That is not the point. The real value of the work is as a modern Gulliver's Travels, as serious political satire, and in particular as a thesis on the politics of language. It was Orwell's idea that language was not simply a means of communicating thought, in the way that an open road affords space for every kind of traffic. Rather, language could be more like a railway system, with a laid-down schedule which could convey only ideas of a defined shape and size, fitted into the compartments which the managers provided. Only these right ideas could ever be used.

But Orwell's target was narrow and distinct: not the language of everyday conversation, but the official languages of his own class and time, the British educated middle class of the 1930s and 1940s. Wartime censorship, Communist Party theory, military euphemism, Times leaders and newsreel journalism -- every case involved its own trahison des clercs in which state violence of revolting enormity could be justified or concealed by the manipulation of language. It was his thesis that language was not merely symptomatic of engineered thought; rather, that language determined what thoughts it was possible to have. "How could they believe it?", "How could they accept it?", Orwell asked of his contemporaries, and his answer was that once they had accepted a political language, then their thoughts could not be other than would fit inside its concepts.

It was a small step for him to suggest in 1984 that the State might consciously impose its official language upon its servants with that very objective in mind. This was a major theme of the book, summed up in its definition of "Newspeak", the officialese of the Anglo-American superstate. It was its purpose that:

...the expression of unorthodox opinions, above a very low level, was well-nigh impossible. It was of course possible to utter heresies of a very crude kind, a species of blasphemy. It would have been possible, for example, to say "Big Brother is ungood." But this statement, which to an orthodox ear merely conveyed a self-evident absurdity, could not have been sustained by reasoned argument, because the necessary words were not available....

The modern Newspeak of "extremist", "moderate", "security", has continued to keep Orwell's critique as alive as ever. But our reaction to Orwell's ideas must necessarily be more critical. In 1984, it was possible to escape from the official thought by means of ordinary language, the old English language, associated with good old ordinary decent things and feelings. Orwell seems to have thought the common language of his day to be a perfectly adequate vehicle for thought. But was it? Was it only the official, or state-imposed language that constrained what it was possible to think? Clearly we can see that it was not: in Orwell's own description of Newspeak, he wrote:

In somewhat the same way, the Party member knew what constituted right conduct, and in exceedingly vague, generalised terms he knew what kinds of departure from it were possible. His sexual life, for example, was entirely regulated by the two Newspeak words "sexcrime" (sexual immorality) and "goodsex" (chastity). Sexcrime covered all sexual misdeeds whatever. It covered fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and other perversions, and, in addition, normal intercourse practised for its own sake....

Millions of readers must have swallowed unquestioningly Orwell's definition of homosexuality as a "perversion", together with the connotations of "immorality" and "normal" -- just as they would have gone along with the use of "he" in that paragraph to imply (as a "rule of grammar") a person of either sex. Why not? These were the available concepts, the "proper words" that English had to offer. Whether Orwell intended this classification consciously or not is beside the point; in either case this was simply the ordinary written English of 1949, in which sexual expression had to be packaged and valued by a tiny range of nasty words.

To be more precise, a writer who was sufficiently sensitive to value-judgment might, by a sufficiently laborious discussion, avoid the unconscious communication of received ideas. Thus in 1948, the authors of Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male had been able to use the word "homosexual" in a very precise sense, carefully detached from the connotations of "abnormal." It was no easy task, as they themselves explained, and one which met with profound resistance from the "scientific" world as well as from popular opinion. But for those without access to the language of academic authority, words imposed the bounds of possible thought, in which "queer is good" was almost as self-evident an absurdity as "Big Brother is ungood."

Another observation to be made on reading 1984 is that all those features of the State which Orwell presented in imagination as the most deeply appalling were none other than those which in 1949, were being experienced in reality by homosexual people in Anglo-America. Not only the commonplaces of censorship, blacklisting, guilt by association; not only imprisonment on police say-so; but compulsory drug treatments, castrations, electric shocks, even brain surgery; the implication and betrayal of friends or lovers; the required confessions of thoughtcrime in the dock. Worst of all, according to Orwell's book, defiance was robbed of all meaning when history would never know or care, when the past would not even be known to exist.

But Orwell would never have perceived the connection. And we too are so well trained to think of homosexual oppression as not counting, not mattering, not being "real" politics or history, that it seems fanciful to make the comparison, a slur on "real" political martyrs. But this training is itself performed by the available language, which has defined homosexual oppression as a "non-political" form of dissidence, as a "social" or "psychological" or "medical" problem. Perhaps most poignant of all is the fact that Orwell chose as a symbol of escape from the official system the drama of a spontaneous heterosexual affair. For the millions of readers, the ultimate dreadfulness of 1984 has been brought home as the system where love to be a crime, where lovers could not even be seen to touch, even to know each other for fear of the State; where the smallest sign of affection was a political gesture. And how many of them have considered that all of this was so for homosexual lovers in the real world of 1949, of 1959, of 1969, of 1979? Indeed, our position is in a sense worse than that of Orwell's rebels, who at least had the cultural resources of "ordinary language" in which to express their spontaneity. But for us, the ordinary language of sexuality is something that must be fought for: childhood training and cultural values discarded and a second language learned in order that spontaneous feeling can be realized.

And yet, for that reason, one cannot but be cheered by reading 1984. The figure of Winston Smith was brought to say and believe that "Big Brother is good," just as so many of us have succumbed to "Queer is bad," yet so many of us have not given in. Not only have we continued to utter the "crude heresies" that the old available words allowed, but we have, since 1949, since 1969, found new words, new images, new language to express ourselves. So often we are immersed in conflicts over what seem mere words: our words (the straightforward use of "gay") are hated; the available "ordinary" words ("promiscuous", for example) constrict a million different experiences into one foolish epithet; the official words of psychology and of law degrade and imprison thought as well as people.

Yet we are gaining: with an ever-expanding vocabulary of word and picture, poetry and history, music, film and art. Orwell, against his own will, reminds us that the expansion of language is no ignoble cause, nor some unreal shadow of "real" politics, nor our own strange peripheral problem. 1984 has touched so many people because it touches the heart of things that matter. That is its lasting integrity and heroism -- and that is ours, too.