We were in Kingston yesterday to celebrate my mother's 89th birthday, so we took the opportunity to see a movie, given that the Belleville multiplex refuses to show anything that isn't aimed at persons under the age of sixteen. We chose to see The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Kiera Knightly. The many positive reviews are well deserved. Cumberbatch and Knightly are excellent in their roles as rather odd individuals recruited during World War II to solve the Enigma coding machine developed by the Nazis. With it the German military machine could send orders to carry out destructive missions without fear of interception. Alan Turing (Cumberbatch) was a young mathematician with a love for crossword puzzles and it doesn't spoil the story to say that he decoded Enigma and undoubtedly shortened the war and saved millions of lives.
Of course the rub to this entertaining film is the "based on a true story" caveat at the beginning. There are aspects which are fiction, but they are enjoyable fiction. What is heartbreaking is the grim reality that Turing died by his own hand in 1954 at the age of forty-one. He had been arrested and convicted of the "gross indecency" of homosexuality and while he escaped a prison sentence by submitting to chemical castration he tragically died by suicide.
I was at the point of tears when I saw this scroll across the screen. In part it was the waste of the fine mind, but also the humiliation suffered by a man who should have been celebrated as a hero. He was pardoned forty years after his death, but what a hollow gesture.
I was also moved because the Christian church has been so actively involved in harassing and humiliating gays and lesbians through the years. We know that there is a high suicide rate amongst LGBT youth, and faith communities often contribute to the shame and rejection. Recently we reluctantly told a youth organization that they could no longer use our Bridge St. facility because of their strongly anti-gay stance. I was grateful that our governance board understood why I felt this was important, even though we want our facility to be used and to collaborate with other organizations. I assured them that we would be open to discussion should their stance change.
Has anyone else seen The Imitation Game? Have you been aware of folk who were persecuted because of sexual orientation, or were your own attitudes judgmental? Mine certainly were.
5 comments:
We haven't seen it yet but it is on the list. The other interesting part of that story is that his female counterpart (Keira Knightly) was not allowed to acknowledge her role in the 'decoding' because she was a woman. It would be great to think that times have changed. Sigh....
...and we still include scriptures in our Lessons and Carols service that blame a woman for the Fall... hmmm....
It is an important sub-plot in the film, and while it might not be historically accurate, at least in terms of the Alan Turing story, it was the experience of many women who played important roles during the war. We have enjoyed The Bletchley Circle series, available on Netflix, which is about women who served at the same centre depicted in The Imitation Game.
I received the book "Alan Turing: The Enigma" written by Andrew Hodges. This is the book that inspired the film.
At just over 660 pages and small print it's quite a tome.
It's also very important to remember that Turing laid the theoretical and developmental groundwork for the computer, which we take so much for granted today.
Turing's contribution to the development of computers is acknowledged in the film.
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