The Imitation Game
with Benedict Cumberbatch

Hollywoodizations



The Imitation Game is a good movie, and it captures the look, feel, and zeitgeist of Alan Turing's world. It also does an excellent job of depicting the technology. However, it has distinct Hollywood fictionalizations, mostly to create the tensions and conflict necessary for an interesting movie. In reality, Alan's codebreaking work was tremendously tedious and boring. Plus, there actually wasn't much conflict at Bletchley Park. The whole operation had the complete support of Churchill during the entire war.


Fictional aspects of The Imitation Game:

Benedict Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing as if he were almost autistic. In reality, Alan was socially awkward, a slovenly dresser, but definitely not autistic or Aspergers. He had a good sense of humor and was well liked by his co-workers.

Alan Turing had a very slight stutter and a high, thin voice, according to contemporary accounts. He appeared on a BBC radio program in the early 1950's, but no recording of his voice has been saved.

Joan Clarke did not come to the attention of Alan Turing by a puzzle contest. She was recruited from Cambridge University before he got to Bletchley Park.

There was no confrontation with Alastair Denniston or threat to close down the operation. Alan had a good relationship with Commander Denniston, who supported him fully.

Alan and his co-workers did write a letter directly to Churchhill, but it was simply a request to break a bureaucratic logjam to get more staff and supplies. It had nothing to do with Commander Denniston or British Intelligence, and Churchill immediately gave them everything they requested.

The Imitation Game portrays Alan's group making life and death decisions about how to use the intelligence they decoded. This did not happen. They simply forwarded the decoded messages to the proper military intelligence units. To do otherwise would have been a serious war-time offence. Alan Turing was very apolitical in his real life and had little patience with military pompousness, but he knew the importance of what his group was doing and got the decoded messages to the proper authorities as quickly as possible.

There was no young codebreaker in Alan's group that had a brother on a ship that was sunk. That scene is entirely fictional.

The Nazi's should have realized their codes were being broken. They could have quickly altered their procedures to make their codes much more secure, frustrating the British and American codebreakers for the rest of the war. Their failure to do so was caused by an almost arrogant belief that the Enigma Machine was completely unbreakable.

The codebreaking machine was not called "Christopher", although Alan Turing probably would have approved of the name change. It was called the "Bombe" because it ticked like a bomb as it ran. It was actually first built by Polish codebreakers, who broke the Enigma code before Hitler invaded Poland. Alan updated the machine, along with auxilliary human procedures to break the much more complicated updated German Enigma Machine. He had help from mathematician Gordon Welchman, who is not mentioned in the film.

The Bombe did not completely solve the Enigma code. It only found possibilities. When it stopped, the settings were read and then tried by a human on a real Enigma machine to see if they made sense.

The "great realization" and plot turning point in the film -- the idea of looking for "Heil Hitler" as a key to breaking the code -- is complete fiction. Looking for common phrases within an encrypted code has been well known since Julius Caesar's time. It was a standard codebreaking strategy that was already being used when Alan Turing arrived at Bletchley Park.

The biggest breakthrough came when a lowly German soldier sent the same message twice with different encoding. This was a serious breach of well establish German protocol. It allowed Alan to analyze the coding process by comparing the different encoding for what he knew were the same letters.

Hugh Alexander was a real person, but his portrayal in the film is mostly fictionalized. He didn't start working within Alan's group until a year after Alan arrived, and was never Alan's boss. He did take over the group after it was running smoothly and Alan became more interested in developing a telephone scrambling system. Hugh Alexander and Alan Turing had a good working relationship, and Hugh testified as a character witness at Alan Turing's trial in 1952.

Stewart Menzies, the chief of the British Intelligence, and John Cairncross, a spy, are two real people. However, neither worked with Alan Turing or his group of codebreakers.

In the movie Alan Turing and Christopher Morcom are the equivalent of middle school boys. They actually knew each other for three years during their upper form years of the (English Public) Sherbourne School, with Alan one year behind Christopher. Unlike the actors in the movie, Alan was larger and more athletic than Christopher throughout their entire relationship. Christopher was the English equivalent of a high school senior when he died of Bovine tuberculosis, and had already been accepted by Cambridge University. Christopher was 19 years old when he died and Alan was 18.

Christopher Morcom probably didn't reciprocate Alan's feelings toward him. Unlike the movie, however, the intense friendship was well known within the school and accepted as normal. Alan's classmates remarked in letters about his devastation after Christopher's death.

There were no detectives investigating Alan Turing's homosexuality trying to prove a case. He naively admitted to having a homosexual affair very soon after he reported his home robbery, and was surprised when the robbery investigation quickly ended and his "Gross Indecency" investigation began. The legal case quickly ended with a short trial and a guilty plea with the modern equivalent of a plea bargain keeping Alan out of jail. There are similarities in the way the English legal system turned on both Alan Turing and Oscar Wilde. However, Alan's "crime" was naivety. Oscar Wilde's "crime" was arrogance.

There is still doubt whether Alan committed suicide or not. There is evidence on both sides. He was reported by friends as cheerful and optimistic just before his death, and he left no written indication of any suicidal intentions. A cyanide solution was boiling in his small home the night he died, so he might of died of accidental inhalation. The famous apple was never tested for cyanide. However, it was probably likely that he would make a suicide look accidental to spare his mother from additional grief. We will probably never know if Alan Turing actually committed suicide.

Alan Turing's estrogen based chemical castration treatment ended 14 months before his suicide. He continued to work and have good social relationships through and after the required one year treatment. If he committed suicide it was probably because he was being constantly watched by British Intelligence as a security risk.


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