Myth Happens

I dreamed of Alan Turing early this morning. I'd forgotten until a few hours ago. He was hanging around the house in his shirtsleeves, tinkering with something—it should have been a radio, but all I remember is that he could use a screwdriver on it. I feel I should blame strange_selkie. Also my choice of last night's movie.

Being unable to sleep and annoyed with thinking about The Imitation Game (2014), I borrowed the DVD of Codebreaker (2011) we gave my father for Hanukkah last year. It is a very fine documentary that refrains from making any sensational claims about Turing's life, although it has to stop itself from speculating about what British science would have been like if he'd lived. ("More creative.") The dramatized portions ask for their own play. Henry Goodman as Dr. Franz Greenbaum is mostly there to listen, although he is, delightfully and accurately, depicted as a sympathetic and perceptive psychiatrist who doesn't want to treat Turing for his sexuality, because sleeping with men is not actually Turing's problem, it's being persecuted for it that's giving him a hard time. Ed Stoppard is an excellent Alan Turing. The stammer is confined to the occasional stopped breath or sticky consonant, but the script doesn't downplay his eccentricity or his social naïveté; he has familiar habits of fiddling with his nails or chewing on the edge of his fingers or tapping them against his mouth and he does very badly at sitting still. He is articulate, self-aware, and, by 1953, actually quite angry. Not some kind of remote machine, not too comic to be in pain, and I have no idea which team the actor bats for, if any, but he speaks with frank warmth and remembered desire of Turing's lovers, with aching wistfulness of Christopher, with a kind of frustrated regret of Joan Clarke, whom his body never wanted in the same way as his mind. He even got around my resistance to his physique (Alan was bricky; Stoppard is lanky, with hard bones at jaw and cheek, and only the disheveled dark hair is really similar), so that even when photographs of historical Turing came and went from the screen, seeing Stoppard didn't snap me out of the illusion. The structure of the documentary is one I hadn't seen before, curiously theatrical and effective: it's framed as the sessions of analysis Turing underwent with Greenbaum, with the narration and interviews standing in for many of the things Turing couldn't talk about, even with his therapist; the Official Secrets Act. When he goes silent, another voice takes up the story for him.

And the documentary is filled with amazing voices. We return several times to Dermot Turing, Alan's nephew, who looks startlingly like his uncle from several angles, although fortunately the side parting is no longer a mandatory hairstyle. (I suspect the resemblance would be more pronounced without the glasses, but I don't expect anyone to take off their glasses in a documentary just to gratify the curiosity of the viewer who has spent too much time looking at pictures of Alan.) Likewise to Greenbaum's daughters, Maria Summerscale and Barbara Maher, who knew him as children; thought of him as family, this shabby, gauche man who stayed for dinner after his sessions and explained the mathematical principles of solitaire. We meet Bernard Richards, who was Turing's last grad student, and Asa Briggs, who worked as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park, and Rolf Noskwith, who worked in Hut 8 with Turing. Joan Clarke appears in archival footage, confirming the story that Turing told her about his "homosexual tendencies" the day after he proposed to her—and they still continued with their engagement. (Turing finally broke it off at the end of the summer, realizing it would not be fair to Clarke. They continued to play chess, go to the cinema, and talk mathematics together.)

And there is an interview with Christopher Morcom's nephew. I hadn't known he existed. He's named after his uncle. He speaks very sympathetically of both Christopher and Alan; I shouldn't have been surprised. He tells the story of the winter of '29, when Alan and Christopher both tried for scholarships to Trinity College—even though Alan was a full year younger—hoping to continue as inseparably as ever and not have to endure a year apart, and instead Alan failed to win a scholarship and Christopher died, in February, before he could go anywhere on his. Codebreaker carefully differentiates between the idea of the ghost in the machine as an inspiration and the idea that Alan somehow believed he could reconstruct a mechanical Chris; he debunks the latter suggestion in sessions with Greenbaum. The script is very close to quoting Turing's letters when he says, though, that if he were able to create a conscious, sentient machine, it would be a way of carrying on Christopher's brilliance, showing that his death was not meaningless; that a part of him was still in the world, immortal.

It is an angry-making documentary, not an elegiac one, which I think was the correct choice. It is not the first mainstream portrayal to discuss the effects of Turing's court-ordered chemical castration, but it's the first I've seen delve as deeply into the psychological as well as physiological effects. (Greenbaum was an ethical psychiatrist and kept his patients' confidence, but the documentary leaves the impression that he left notes. Alan's three books of dream journals are gone, however, which is at once a shame and a professionally respectable decision. Greenbaum's notes were his own thoughts about Alan; Alan's thoughts about himself were private.) Imagine a year of mood swings that don't break. Throw in the growth of breasts, the loss of libido, other physical changes that accompany high doses of synthetic estrogen without any other endrocine balance, and that's a lot of dysphoria to ask from a man whose equilibrium with his own sexual self had always been impressively undisturbed. Some contemporary biologists are interviewed and agree that Turing's "organo-therapy" was absolutely unethical, especially since he was told that the effects were reversible and, well, some of them would have been, given enough time, maybe. His suicide is not a surprise ending.

The DVDs are readily available from the website; the film is also available to watch streaming, if you don't need hardcopies. Ed Stoppard is a very talented actor and I'm only sorry—this is not my complaint about most documentaries—there weren't more fictionalized scenes.

Otherwise it rained today, and then it snowed, and then it rained again, and then the cats broke my umbrella. derspatchel and I baked two apple pies for Thanksgiving with my family tomorrow. There is a cat asleep in my arms, which makes typing difficult.