The
cinema-goer realises he read Alan Hodges' book on Alan Turing, the
University of Cambridge and British Military Intelligence
mathematician who may single-handedly have invented modern discourse
on Artificial Intelligence, almost twenty years ago. The cinema-goer
hopes the film is as good, in its own way, as that fine book.
Enigma
is a machine. A very well-designed machine. Maybe our problem is that
we’re trying to beat it with men. What if only a machine can
understand another machine.
The film is
determinedly mannish. As the times (1939-1954) were. The women are
decorous, smart in alluring ways, sometimes sexually active and
most-times clerical. Their costumes are glorious. The woman
cryptographer Joan Elizabeth Clarke, played marvellously by Keira
Knightly, is peripheral until near the end when she manages to be in
the shed, the film's significant location, with the men and the
machine named Christopher. The echo with contemporary Mens' Sheds
groups pleases the cinema-goer.
That’s
the whole point. All this time we’ve
been trying to beat the machine; but we should have been trying to
beat the people who use the machine. Enigma is perfect. It’s human
beings who are flawed.
This is a film full
of secrets. Secrets of sexual orientation and practice, within and
between genders, secrets within families, secrets of State, between
States and between departments within States. Thus it is no surprise
to the cinema-goer that the strongest character (the hero?) is the
MI6 officer, Stewart Menzies, the secrets-meister, who is always there, played by ace actor Mark Strong.
False
jobs — pay stubs, bank accounts —
will be created for you. No one can know what
you really do.
The cream of
contemporary London-based screen actors appear in the film. Rory
Kinnear hasn't much to do as the cop who brings Turing down for
indecency in 1951 and he does it well. Charles Dance harrumphs around
brilliantly in a naval uniform. Mathew Goode is a star turn as
handsome cad and brave sport, Hugh Alexander. Benedict Cumberbatch
mixes fey with antic to good effect in playing Turing, though it all
serves to present Turing as a very bold, precocious boy right up to
the end, who would have his way, and stamp his foot if he had to,
because he never got over the loss of his first love, his
public-school mate Christopher.
I
am well aware of my obligations, legal
and otherwise. And I assure you that what I choose to tell or not to
tell you will be entirely up to me.
And despite all the
running about, as the Turing machine triumphs and the Enigma code is
broken, the cinema-goer experiences a deflation as the film winds
down. The scene where the MI6 officer, Menzies, tells Turing and his
team to destroy everything and to go home and never speak about their
work again carries no chill, simply the damp acquiescence of
intelligent people. It calls out for a Julian Assange of the day,
dressed in high-waisted trousers, with a floppy, side-creased hairdo
and hang-dog look, to stand by the resulting bonfire, stuffing papers
into his pockets and not into the flames.
No.
They’re just... Normal people. Smart
people. Creative people.
But this a bio-pic
and it must stick to the facts of the life, as the film-makers see
them. Thus, there is a lot of writing on the screen at the end, as
they run out of images and dialogue. Film is shorthand in the end and
writing on screen the most basic from of such shorthand.
In
this case, love just lost the Germans
the whole bloody war.
The cinema-goer
wonders if the writing had run on would it have noted that MI6
continues to weave its devastating mysteries into all our lives; that
public schools and elitist universities persist; that homosexuals
still occupy less favourable positions in the world; that women,
despite their best efforts, are often peripheral, even today. And
that war-mongering rages on, now and into the future. That is no
secret. Where is the victory for which so many lives were wasted?
Humans
find violence deeply satisfying. But
remove the satisfaction, and the act becomes... Hollow.
Turing's great
achievement is the concept and possibility of Artificial
Intelligence. The challenge is how to use intelligence; really,
artificially and without secrets.
The
game was obviously a very simple one.
The film is a
decent, well-made mid-twentieth century costume drama of middle
England's experience of World War 2, principally as a site of
bureaucratic in-fighting. For a fuller treatment of Turing's life and
times, it's back to Hodges' book, nicely re-packaged as a film
tie-in.
It
is the very people who no one else
imagines anything of who do the things that no one else can imagine.
The cinema-goer
smiles to think Andrew Hodges may make a few bob from his good work.
www.facebook.com/DaveDuggan/Writer
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