Imitation Games
So I have a problem. No, this isn't a post about me asking anyone for help, I don't mean it's that kind of problem. I mean, I have issues. Lots of them, yes, yes, thank you. But this one—
I don't like biopics.
Now, that's not really a problem. Nobody ought to like them, almost everybody seems to, hey, lots of people are wrong but tastes differ, blah-blah-blah. No, the problem is that whenever I say in my head, "I don't like biopics," or start to say it out loud, I think:
"Well, I liked The Aviator alright."
Which is true, I really did like The Aviator. It's not the best Martin Scorsese movie, it's not the best movie Leonardo DiCaprio ever did, it's got the usual biopic's historical inaccuracies, but I liked it. I'm not saying it's great, but I liked it. I don't know why The Aviator leaps right to the forefront of my mind when I think, "I don't like biopics," but it does. Maybe it's the letter "A".
"And you loved Ed Wood," my brain helpfully adds after I've struggled to figure out why the contradiction always starts with a mid-rate Scorsese/DiCaprio vehicle.
Which is the movie that should always come to mind before The Aviator. Oh, hell, do I love Ed Wood. A movie you could hack the inaccuracies and misrepresentations to shreds, the Lugosi family was pretty pissed about the way Bela was portrayed (oh, but what a fantastic Martin Landau performance!), but what a great movie. From before Tim Burton and Johnny Depp turning into the toxic, self-parodying bromance they've since become, when both were making good movies (and you could talk about Depp's then-fine acting work without mentioning his domestic violence, there, done), and just such a funny and sweet and sad movie. Brilliant little piece of work, that—
"And they're not really biopics, but you liked Zodiac and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which is not at all especially true to historic events but is based on real characters and inci—"
SHUT UP, BRAIN, YOU AREN'T HELPING. AT ALL.
And yet. Exceptions aside. I don't really like biopics. I just don't.
All of which I'm boring you with because I finally sat down and watched The Imitation Game on Netflix last night, and while I didn't not like it—I sort of enjoyed it, sort of—I think it's pretty much a case study in why I don't like biopics. And, actually, thinking about it, why I don't like a lot of movies that are made these days.
The Imitation Game isn't really a good movie. Oh yes, won tons of awards and nominations, and deserved all of the noms and probably bunches of the awards, too. It's a pretty good movie. Well acted, competently shot, good dialogue. Like I said, I enjoyed it, or "sort of enjoyed it," is what I think I actually wrote, the hedge being there because yes, it's a good movie, and I enjoyed it, no regrets about watching it, no "What the hell was that?", but it's also not really very good, either.
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Please check out the source page for this image
from Information is Beautiful; it's pretty great.
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But—well, no, okay, let's change the subject and come back to this in a minute, because I think maybe it'll help explain something.
I mentioned that The Imitation Game is maybe a case study in why I don't like modern movies, and what I was specifically referring to with that is the crappy CGI that's featured throughout The Imitation Game to contextualize events in the movie in a kind of plodding way. I'm not sure how this CGI looked on a big screen five years ago, but last night on Netflix it was about the quality level of a videogame cutscene. Like, not necessarily even a videogame cutscene from a game released in the past decade. CGI has just gotten too damned cheap and available.
In an older movie, I mean a much older movie, you'd show—you know what The Imitation Game is about., right? Oh, good grief, I am so bleeding rusted at this.
Okay, okay: The Imitation Game is a movie that is (loosely?) based on the life of Alan Turing, the 20th Century English mathematical genius who sort of invented computer science and laid out the foundations of computer programming. He did a lot of this before World War II, which is part of the how and why he got recruited during the War to be one of the chief cryptographers for the Government Code & Cypher School, colloquially known as Bletchley Park because it was headquartered there during the War. As a wartime codebreaker, Turing played an instrumental role in decoding German transmissions that had been encoded using the legendary Enigma Machine, shortening the War and no doubt saving many, many lives. Turing was also gay, which was a crime in Britain until very recently, and while it seems some of his wartime colleagues knew and didn't much care either way, after the War there was an incident in which an associate of a man Turing had a sexual relationship with broke into Turing's home, resulting in Turing's sexuality being made public, resulting in Turing losing all of his security clearances and in his being convicted of several counts of felony indecency. Turing was sentenced to probation that included hormonal injections to reduce his libido, because as bad as so many things are now that was the kind of absurdly barbaric bullshit that passed for reasonableness in the 1950s; a year later, Turing either committed suicide or accidentally killed himself with cyanide. Decades later, Turing's contributions to the war effort were more fully appreciated and people were a whole lot less assholey about homosexuality, and so the Queen pardoned him, which seems a bit late but I guess it's better than never. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Turing, a guy with a name that sounds like Enigma-generated codetext named Morten Tyldum directs, and the supporting cast is made up of a bunch of brilliant people you've seen in other things, including Keira Knightley, Charles Dance, Matthew Goode, Mark Strong, and Rory Kinnear. It was theatrically distributed by a rapist.
So! It's World War II, most of the movie, with flashbacks to Turing's brutal schoolboy days at Sherborne School, where he may have first fallen in love, and flashforwards to The Imitation Game's framing device, Turing's interrogation by a fictional/composite police detective played by Kinnear, who wants to nick Turing for espionage but has to settle for buggery. And we know it's World War II, during the World War II bits, not just because of the clothes and cars and dialogue about oh-my-God-Hitler, but also because of title cards AND BECAUSE OF THE CRAPPY CGI BITS! HAHA! I GOT BACK ON TOPIC AND IT ONLY TOOK ME 466 WORDS! WHAT DO I WIN?!
Ahem.
So, yeah: crappy CGI.
In a much older movie, you would know it was World War II and Britain and things were going badly because you'd have your actors, who in a movie are paid to say things your screenwriter was paid to type up for them to say, saying things like, "Oh my God, Alan, it's World War II!" "Is it really?" "Yes, Alan, and we're all going to die!" "Why is that, Hugh?" "The Nazis are sinking all of our ships, and there's food on them and we're all hungry! If only we could decode their radio messages, Alan! Then we'd be saved!" "Oh, well then, I suppose I shall have to invent a computer to decode their radio messages, then." "Can you do that, Alan?!" "Oh yes, I think I shall. I'm a maths prodigy, you know, and you play chess; we shall save the world together. Have an apple, which is an oblique reference to how I shall off myself in twelve years unless it's a stupid accident." "Huzzah! No, wait, I mean that about the saving Britain, not the foreshadowing and suicide." "Oh yes, I understood. Shall we—?"
And there's plenty of that, don't get me wrong. But because this movie was released in 2014, there's also lots of not-great computer imagery of Nazi subs prowling around and Nazi bombers bombing the shit out of London flying around and burning oil slicks in the Atlantic where ships have been sunk and bombed-out city blocks and so on, because you can. Not because you should, and for a hundred years filmmakers did just fine without it.
I'm not sure it would be any better if the CGI were any better. Because these shots, they don't add much, if anything, to the story, or the characterizations. They're just something to look at, sometimes while the characters are talking (in voice-over) about the very thing we're looking at. "...every imminent U-Boat assault," Cumberbatch-intones-as-Turing, while a computer-animated U-Boat is onscreen in front of us, first imminent in its assault and then firing a computer-animated torpedo at computer-animated ships. It's all very useful for the viewer who might have just forgotten the previous scene where people were standing around, talking about how England's at war and it's going badly, etc.
It's lousy storytelling. I know there's a thing, a slogan or mantra, in moviemaking about "Show, don't tell," but not only is this showing while telling (sort of negating the whole point of the slogan, if you wanted to ask me), but it's perfectly cromulent to show by having people telling, that is, by having the characters who are actually affected by all of this to appear on screen talking about it and doing that thing actors do... what's it called... hang on... it'll come to me—oh yeah, acting.
This is a general problem I have with movies these days, I realize. Imitation Game is what a lot of movies seem to be these days: poorly written and poorly directed in a way that's undeniably competent (we're not talking about boom mics in shot or someone randomly saying, "Oh, hai doggie!" in the middle of a completely unnecessary scene in a florist's shop where the florist then tells a character he's her favorite customer seconds after failing to recognize him because of sunglasses); it's more like the midline of what's acceptable writing and direction even in a prestige picture is lazy storytelling pitched at a really lowbrow level, a level in which the audience is just assumed to be too dim to know what World War II is or that it's happening in your story unless you periodically show them a digital Nazi bomber or a soldier in a soupbowl helmet and maybe have your main character periodically remind the viewer's onscreen proxy of things like, "We were fighting a war" (because maybe he's forgotten it too, despite the character obviously being old enough to have fought in it; head injury?).
(It's the kind of movie that's stupid even when it's being smart-ish: it sets up that Turing has cyanide around, it sets up a bit of a motif with apples, and then we get to the end and a title card tells us, "After a year of government-mandated hormonal therapy, Alan Turing committed suicide on June 7th, 1954." Does the movie let the unwitting viewer in on the belief that Turing committed suicide by consuming a cyanide-laced apple, having set this up? It does not. Why not? I would guess that some version of the screenplay did have Turing's poisoned apple, but that it was cut from a draft or from the final cut of the film for whatever reason; a reason that may have seemed sensible, and may have even been a good call, but that nevertheless leaves these dangly bits flopping around through the rest of the finished film. An alternative, which might even be dumber, is that the cyanide and apples are in the movie as a kind of perverse Easter Egg for the viewer who knows how Turing died; this may be dumber because that viewer is probably also well-informed enough to notice all the inaccuracies and discrepancies in the rest of the film, and also getting cute about a great man's death that way is a bit tacky in context. Oh well.)
There's a reason this folds into my general taste for biopics, one that predates bad CGI but not lazy storytelling.
See, one of the sequences in which this war CGI is used in the movie (this is hopefully going to all make sense when I (hopefully) pull it together) is in a montage in the early middle of the film, a bit in which Turing decides to recruit people to work as codebreakers by publishing a crossword puzzle, and the people who can complete it in a set amount of time get letters asking them to come to a location to perform a difficult mathematical problem, and then the ones who can do it get to save the world. So we get this montage, see, of people working on the crossword intercut with a CGI air raid, and this is how we end up meeting Joan Clarke.
We need to talk about Joan Clarke.
So, in the movie, Joan Clarke completes the crossword. This didn't really happen, because the crossword bit is made up. She shows up to take the math test Turing has designed to winnow out the people who aren't smart enough to codebreak, and this didn't happen in real life either, because this whole bit about the recruitment test is also made up. She faces a nasty bit of gender discrimination, being told that secretarial recruitment is being done elsewhere, and is scoffed at for being a woman who thinks she's good at math, which is sort of true insofar as Joan Clarke faced gender discrimination throughout her life, though not at this math test that didn't occur. Clarke is recruited, which did happen in real life, but we're going to come back to that. She and Turing become close, which is also true, and engaged, which is also true. The engagement happens because her parents disapprove of... well, they disapprove of her lifestyle as a single professional woman, but it's not clear that they have any real idea about her life and we're solidly in trope territory at this point; anyway, Turing proposes to keep her around. The engagement is broken off shortly thereafter, which is true, though in real life the reasons seem to have been known only to Turing and Clarke themselves, not because Turing was mean to Clarke to protect her when his life was complicated by associations (he didn't really have) with the head of MI6 and a Soviet spy (who in the real world worked in a different section of Bletchley Park on breaking a different code and wasn't outed as a Soviet spy until after the war was over for several years). She marries another man (true) and visits Turing sometime in the year before his death (unknown but plausible).
This is pretty much mostly Hollywood bullshit.
The real Clarke was a freaking genius mathematician who was one of the top students in her class at Newnham College, Cambridge University. She was prevented from securing a degree by Cambridge's sexist policy of not granting degrees to women until 1948. Her talents still earned her notice, and she was recruited to Bletchley Park by Gordon Welchman, who isn't in The Imitation Game at all. Despite the prevalent sexism she encountered professionally, her colleagues respected her enough to get her a pay raise as a linguist at Bletchley as a workaround for not being promoted as a codebreaker (despite her lack of qualifications in languages), and by the end of the war she was Deputy Chief of the section working on the German Naval Enigma code (the toughest flavor of Enigma, as the German Navy used a more sophisticated version of the Enigma machine and were more disciplined in protocols for using it). Although her contributions to the war effort were publicly unrecognized for decades (this wasn't sexism, it was postwar secrecy; little was publicly known about anybody working on British WWII codebreaking until the 1970s), she still got her MBE in 1946,
Now, here's what bothers me. A lot. And this is just an example. I get—I said this already, but I'll say it again—I get that you have to take liberties to compress a long, complicated story down to a two-hour running time. Totally get that. But do you see what the people who made The Imitation Game have done to Joan Clarke? They've given her a long, complicated subplot in their movie: solving a crossword to get an audition, solving a math problem at her audition, getting hired by Turing, having all these bits of business (I left out that the movie has Turing stealing documents at night to bring to Clarke so she can offer advice; this almost certainly didn't happen and doesn't seem like it would have been necessary since she'd been working in Turing's department since 1940), parents who don't like her independence, this relationship (which is based on true events) with Turing that's complicated by Turing's (fictionalized) dealings with MI6. There's not less Joan Clarke story to simplify and streamline a historical narrative, there's a completely different Joan Clarke story that manages to leave out almost everything that was interesting and notable about the real Joan Clarke.
I mean, you could do all this bullshit with the crossword test montage and this scene where she argues with a policeman about being late to a test and completes a math problem in record time, or you could just have somebody—it doesn't need to be Gordon "Not In This Movie" Welchman, you could give his role in the story to someone else, Hugh Alexander, say, and all it could just be something like:
ALAN TURING: "Wow, this Enigma Code sure is hard. I'm frustrated and sad. Everybody is dead and Admiral Denniston is going to yell at me again."
HUGH ALEXANDER: "Don't be sad, mate. 'Ay, I know! I'll ring up me friend, Joanie!"
ALAN TURING: "Who's Joanie?"
HUGH ALEXANDER: "Joan Clarke! Only the greatest maths bitch wot ever came outer Camby Uni! Oi, you'll love her, she's great! Eats maths for breakfast, shits diff'rential equations before lunch. You might even want to 'ook up with her, you know, you brainy brains people are all alike an' what! I'll go ring her roight now!"
Boom. There it is. An introduction to Joan Clarke that actually, I know you won't believe this, but I swear to you, that actually hews closer to the real history of Joan and Alan than the version depicted in The Imitation Game. I'm not saying it's close, but it is an Enigma-machine-number-of-possible-solutions miles closer than the version depicted in The Imitation Game. And it has no bleeding XBox quality computer graphics at all, unless you want to hire someone to do an animated render of somebody shitting a differential equation while the dialogue happens in VO.
We get Hollywood tropes like the disapproving sexist parents and the "break-her-heart-to-save-her-life" scene, while there's a real character out there who was basically a badass. In a totally nerdy way, but still.
And this kind of thing is run through the whole movie. Movies need to abstract and simplify, so instead of being the story of how a super-smart boy genius helped WWII by writing a lot of papers and inventing a lot of groundbreaking analytical techniques that became foundational for computer programming, The Imitation Game becomes a story about a man who wants to build a machine. One that already had been built by the Poles in the 1930s, and there's a whole interesting story there, but all the Poles get in the movie is name-checked and forgotten, which is about par for the treatment of Polish History in the Anglo-American world. And you have to have conflict for the story, so we'll have people working at Bletchley Park who want to keep Alan from building his machine and try to destroy it (which makes no sense when you think about it); nevermind that there's this entire, you know, war to save Western Civilization from fascism conflict going on and the stakes of failure are Britain's destruction. And it's the Twenty-Teens, so let's have positive statements against homophobia (even though we're really just going to spin our wheels a bit, having our main character pine for a boy at school and talk about being gay as an adult, but mostly leaving the social commentary to title cards at the end of the film) and sexism (which we'll address by reducing a brilliant and groundbreaking woman to a bunch of tropes about conservative parents and rude cops).
The problem here isn't that they take liberties, is what I'm trying to get at. The problem is that instead of just taking liberties, they take these real people who had interesting lives, who did interesting things, who were interesting people, and they tell some other story that's sort of but not really like what happened to them. The filmmakers will say and believe that they had to simplify the story and they're not necessarily wrong, but then they'll replace it with a not as good story that takes about as much time as it probably would have taken them to tell a more interesting story that also just happened to be nearer the truth of what happened.
Alan Turing had an interesting life and did great things, only to have it all end tragically because the people he saved from Hitler also kind of sucked in their own gay-panicking way. He was surrounded by interesting people who also did great things, like Joan Clarke, and they all worked together in interesting ways to do great things in collaboration, but they weren't always recognized and some of them (like Clarke) were disparaged because of some of the other ways in which the people they saved from Hitler suck. Why not make movies about all that? Why not make a movie (or movies) in which Polish codebreakers narrowly escape their home country just before their homeland is invaded, give to British intelligence the imperfect means to defeat the bastards who just ruined them, where that imperfect tool is made perfect and beautiful by a brilliant man who will be judged and torn down by the very government he serves, with the assistance of a boffin whose genius is only recognized by her peers, who have to play games and work the system to help her get the compensation she deserves for her ability and work? There's so much historical treasure here, and The Imitation Game leaves nearly all of it on the table to give you a movie you've pretty much seen before, however well-acted and well scored and decently shot it all is this time 'round.
And this is just so damn many biopics. To some degree. The old ones don't have the digital effects crap. Have I happened to mention how I don't like the way that's in so many movies these days? I have? Alright, I won't keep flogging it. But I don't like it. Anyway, biopics. Don't ask me if I've seen the latest one, I'm sure I haven't. Probably won't.
I don't care for them.
Except The Aviator.
And Ed Wood.
And I haven't seen it in forever and I get why the critics slagged it, but I remember liking Tucker—
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