Are you human? Are you alive?
I had managed to forget until last night that there is a film about Turing coming out this year. I wish it were not starring Benedict Cumberbatch.
I need to be clear on this point: I don't dislike Cumberbatch. He's marvelous in Cabin Pressure (2008–), a radio series that I strongly recommend everyone run out and listen to now. I don't think he needs to be granted an automatic monopoly on portrayals of famously brilliant people, but I've quite enjoyed the episodes of Sherlock I've been shown and I remain sorry that I missed his National Theatre Frankenstein. It's just that—Tumblr notwithstanding—as far as I know, he's straight. And I am all for being an ally, but . . . I think I actually mind. Turing is an icon. Don't tell me there were no queer actors who couldn't have knocked the role out of the park. Aside from the fact that it is a big-budget production and I worry generally. I worry it won't trust the audience with science or mathematics or the life of the mind. I worry it won't trust them with eccentricity that doesn't fit a familiar shape. I worry about its handling of Joan Clarke—I don't want her erased, because she was a fucking amazing cryptanalyst, but I don't want her reduced to a pining would-be love interest, either, as in Whitemore's Breaking the Code (1986). They were engaged for six months and broke it off by mutual agreement and never stopped playing marathon sessions of chess all the while; they were friends until he died. Keira Knightley's playing her. I want my fears to be groundless, but I know what happens to history when it meets Hollywood. I don't want them to screw this one up. And I don't want it to be so hagiographical no one fucks in it at all.
(This is a small point and a nitpicky one, because I haven't cared in many other historical instances, but it jars every time I see a photo: haircut or no, Cumberbatch's weird looks aren't Turing's. Turing was brickier. Breaking the Code at least got that right with Derek Jacobi. Who's been with his partner Richard Clifford for thirty-seven years. No points for the raving Oxfordianism, though.)
Apparently this is my day for shouting about film, because![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
yhlee listened to me very patiently on the subject of Gentleman's Agreement (1947), which holds the weird distinction of being the first time I realized a story was about the wrong person. (At least, the first time that I could articulate the problem. I was in high school.) Mostly copied from comments:
Gentleman's Agreement is an absolutely classic narrative of the type "person of privilege has their social conscience awakened by observing how bad it is for people whom the narrative doesn't bother to extend much interiority to, if any." And it was groundbreaking in its direct treatment of anti-Semitism and it won the Academy Award for Best Picture and I'm not saying it wasn't valuable, especially in 1947, but it was still incredibly frustrating to watch. On some level the script recognizes that John Garfield's Dave Goldman, being actually Jewish, might have something to say about anti-Semitism that Gregory Peck's Phil Green is never going to understand in two weeks undercover as "Phil Greenberg" or maybe a lifetime. He spends a lot of time calling other characters on their casually racist bullshit. There's a great scene late in the film where he meets with Phil's (white, Christian, well-bred) ex-fiancée and she tells him that she had to leave a party recently because someone told a racist joke and Dave, far from being impressed, tells her flat-out that if she let him get away with it—if she left without saying a word about why—she's just as much of a problem as the man who told the joke or their friends who laughed at it. That's something many people don't get even now. And I give the film genuine credit for not making Dave a long-suffering saint; he's John Garfield, all right, he's quick, scrappy, angry. He fights back and he expects anyone who claims to be on his side to do the same, whether they lose friends for it or get punched in the face. But he's still the supporting character whom the film uses as its moral center and we are meant to feel warmer and fuzzier about Phil opening his eyes to the realities of America and writing his searing exposé of polite upper-middle-class anti-Semitism and aaaaaargh.
Writing this out, I realized: that's because the film expects us to be Phil, not Dave. The nice white Christian upper middle class who deplored the Nazi atrocities, but still wouldn't like those people in our golf club. The ones who need their horizons broadened. Whereas I watched the film in sympathy with Dave; Phil's world was the alien one to me. I can't believe it took me until now to parse that. High school movie-watching me was not the most discerning critic. Mostly I got: Anti-Semitism is terrible! Good thing our protagonist is only pretending to be Jewish for a newspaper story and can drop it at any time and return to his life of newly enlightened WASP privilege! Dave Goldman should have been the protagonist.
It all comes back to voices, doesn't it. Who speaks and who is spoken for. More voices, dammit.
I need to be clear on this point: I don't dislike Cumberbatch. He's marvelous in Cabin Pressure (2008–), a radio series that I strongly recommend everyone run out and listen to now. I don't think he needs to be granted an automatic monopoly on portrayals of famously brilliant people, but I've quite enjoyed the episodes of Sherlock I've been shown and I remain sorry that I missed his National Theatre Frankenstein. It's just that—Tumblr notwithstanding—as far as I know, he's straight. And I am all for being an ally, but . . . I think I actually mind. Turing is an icon. Don't tell me there were no queer actors who couldn't have knocked the role out of the park. Aside from the fact that it is a big-budget production and I worry generally. I worry it won't trust the audience with science or mathematics or the life of the mind. I worry it won't trust them with eccentricity that doesn't fit a familiar shape. I worry about its handling of Joan Clarke—I don't want her erased, because she was a fucking amazing cryptanalyst, but I don't want her reduced to a pining would-be love interest, either, as in Whitemore's Breaking the Code (1986). They were engaged for six months and broke it off by mutual agreement and never stopped playing marathon sessions of chess all the while; they were friends until he died. Keira Knightley's playing her. I want my fears to be groundless, but I know what happens to history when it meets Hollywood. I don't want them to screw this one up. And I don't want it to be so hagiographical no one fucks in it at all.
(This is a small point and a nitpicky one, because I haven't cared in many other historical instances, but it jars every time I see a photo: haircut or no, Cumberbatch's weird looks aren't Turing's. Turing was brickier. Breaking the Code at least got that right with Derek Jacobi. Who's been with his partner Richard Clifford for thirty-seven years. No points for the raving Oxfordianism, though.)
Apparently this is my day for shouting about film, because
yhlee listened to me very patiently on the subject of Gentleman's Agreement (1947), which holds the weird distinction of being the first time I realized a story was about the wrong person. (At least, the first time that I could articulate the problem. I was in high school.) Mostly copied from comments:Gentleman's Agreement is an absolutely classic narrative of the type "person of privilege has their social conscience awakened by observing how bad it is for people whom the narrative doesn't bother to extend much interiority to, if any." And it was groundbreaking in its direct treatment of anti-Semitism and it won the Academy Award for Best Picture and I'm not saying it wasn't valuable, especially in 1947, but it was still incredibly frustrating to watch. On some level the script recognizes that John Garfield's Dave Goldman, being actually Jewish, might have something to say about anti-Semitism that Gregory Peck's Phil Green is never going to understand in two weeks undercover as "Phil Greenberg" or maybe a lifetime. He spends a lot of time calling other characters on their casually racist bullshit. There's a great scene late in the film where he meets with Phil's (white, Christian, well-bred) ex-fiancée and she tells him that she had to leave a party recently because someone told a racist joke and Dave, far from being impressed, tells her flat-out that if she let him get away with it—if she left without saying a word about why—she's just as much of a problem as the man who told the joke or their friends who laughed at it. That's something many people don't get even now. And I give the film genuine credit for not making Dave a long-suffering saint; he's John Garfield, all right, he's quick, scrappy, angry. He fights back and he expects anyone who claims to be on his side to do the same, whether they lose friends for it or get punched in the face. But he's still the supporting character whom the film uses as its moral center and we are meant to feel warmer and fuzzier about Phil opening his eyes to the realities of America and writing his searing exposé of polite upper-middle-class anti-Semitism and aaaaaargh.
Writing this out, I realized: that's because the film expects us to be Phil, not Dave. The nice white Christian upper middle class who deplored the Nazi atrocities, but still wouldn't like those people in our golf club. The ones who need their horizons broadened. Whereas I watched the film in sympathy with Dave; Phil's world was the alien one to me. I can't believe it took me until now to parse that. High school movie-watching me was not the most discerning critic. Mostly I got: Anti-Semitism is terrible! Good thing our protagonist is only pretending to be Jewish for a newspaper story and can drop it at any time and return to his life of newly enlightened WASP privilege! Dave Goldman should have been the protagonist.
It all comes back to voices, doesn't it. Who speaks and who is spoken for. More voices, dammit.
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This.
The Turing film looks expensive. Its producers want Names, and will justify them by afterdrag: the us guy, Cumberbatch, will speak for Turing. He will pull "our" sympathy.
I shudder any time Keira Knightley is cast as anything.
And there's no one listed as Dilly Knox, damn it.
Nine
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The good news is that no film is the only version of the past and I can hope for more. The bad news is that this one looks like it wants to be definitive. And if it's good, I'll be happy! But there are queerer tellings out there and I want someone to throw $15 million at them.
I shudder any time Keira Knightley is cast as anything.
I don't dislike her, either! I have very little sense of her outside Pirates of the Caribbean, but I love those movies (okay, I love the first movie and I love a combination of storylines from the second and third. Everything about the cannibal island should please go away forever and I remain bemused by Sao Feng). But she is a known quantity of mainstream attractive female star and I worry, seeing her cast, that the film wishes its audience to think of Joan Clarke as a romantic lead. Co-protagonist is one thing, but it's more important to the history of the war that she invented her own codebreaking techniques than that Turing proposed to her. She was recruited straight out of Cambridge with a double first in Mathematics.
Also, I really hope she's not portrayed as the only woman at Bletchley. The GCCS had fewer women on the books as cryptanalysts than clerical staff or number-crunchers—and they were paid less for the privilege; Clarke herself was promoted to "Linguist" just so she could draw a salary comparable to her level of work, despite knowing no languages other than English—but the wartime Bletchley population was something like eighty percent female. The more stories are declassified, the more the picture breaks down of men doing mathematics while the girls made tea. Dilly Knox ran an all-female team that broke the Abwehr Enigma in 1941. I have the impression that was not unusual. I mean, read this article. Or this one. Or this. Or this.
And there's no one listed as Dilly Knox, damn it.
Their Morcom has an interesting face. There are few pictures of Christopher, but the two I've seen agree on the cheekbones.
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Also, I really hope she's not portrayed as the only woman at Bletchley.
Hear hear!
Cambridge didn't even grant her a proper degree until after the war.
O my. That Morcom has an excellent face.
Nine
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Understood. I do not think Clarke was sugary. Quiet, apparently, rather than confrontational, but she can't have been shrinking; she was Deputy Head of Hut 8 by 1944. She wasn't shocked to learn of Turing's sexuality. The mistake they both made was in thinking for half a year that it wouldn't make a difference to their marriage.
O my. That Morcom has an excellent face.
Their young Turing isn't bad, either: softer face, but the hair is right. I am . . . weirdly endeared by his Twitter.
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And double augh on Gentleman's Agreement. I hope that desk is big enough for two heads.
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Oh, hey, yeah, I can see that. His ears stick out the right way and he's got the slightly blocky look around the cheekbones and jaw; he'll look boyish into midlife and a combination of handsome from some angles and goofy from others. Dammit, Black Bear Pictures. You had several jobs, but this one was important!
And double augh on Gentleman's Agreement. I hope that desk is big enough for two heads.
Come on over! I inherited it from my mother! It's huge!
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AAAAGH YES. HER INTERNALIZED RACISM DOES NOT GIVE YOU THE MORAL HIGH GROUND MR. PHIL GREEN IF ANYTHING YOU SHOULD FEEL WORSE.
. . . Also the scene at the beginning where Phil briefly considers interviewing Dave for an article about anti-Semitism in America before dismissing the idea as inauthentic—when he wrote about Okies in the Depression, he lived in roadside camps and took migrant work, when he wrote about coal mines, he got a job as a miner, so obviously the way to write about anti-Semitism is to experience it firsthand. AS OPPOSED TO, SAY, INVITING AN ACTUAL JEW TO TALK ABOUT IT.
Now I want to see an alternate version of the movie with Dave as the protagonist.
Write that poem.
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Good idea. I'll see what I can do!
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Did you ever write this poem? (Just had occasion to link back for Gentleman's Agreement and was wondering.)
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I'm oddly glad it's not just me.
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Burn Gorman would make a beautiful Turing, which is pretty much what I thought as soon as I saw the film. He's slighter, but he has the right bones in his face, and that haircut doesn't look any better on him.
What's Turn?
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Have you heard about The Bletchley Circle? Turing doesn't appear to be in it, but I'm very curious to see if and how it makes reference to him. it's another series I haven't yet seen, but a couple of my friends speak very highly of it.
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Huh. I . . . know almost nothing about that period. That sounds like it could be very neat. Let me know what you think wen you get hold of it?
Have you heard about The Bletchley Circle?
Both
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*hugs*
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Yeah. It's possible I would feel significantly better about the movie if anybody in it ever apologized.
*hugs*
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Heh. It's not even that I can't separate him from his persona. He's just very firmly not who I would have cast as Turing and it annoys me a little that for much of the internet he seems to be an unquestioned choice, as if he were the only actor for a smart role. And . . . no. Also, still not queer.
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Yes, this is the mindset of movies that need there to be a middle-class schoolteacher in an inner-city school, or a white social worker on the res, etc--the notion that the public needs those a focus like that because the public doesn't identify with the inner-city dwellers, or with Indians on the reservations, etc. Insofar as it's true, it should be combatted--but it's not even true.
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Seriously!
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Thank you! I'm really glad.
and the comments are all excellent as well.
I have a really excellent friendlist.
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Argh, seriously? And the audience is meant to take it at face value? I guess I no longer need to feel bad about missing it on Broadway. Dammit. It had such a great-looking cast.
(I want to ask what it would take for Theatre@First to put up Breaking the Code, but I don't know if it's possible to direct enough against the text to salvage the character of Pat Green, who remains my one screaming argument with the play. Rant here.)
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Alternately, we're about to announce a workshop program for new plays, so if you have time and interest in drafting a better take on the story (or anything else) by September 1st, that's also a possibility.
As for VSM&S, yes, seriously. I kept waiting for the script to expose itself in some way, but it stayed true to the end. As far as I could tell, the message was that old people (e.g. those over 50) should abandon any hope of having any kind of meaningful life. The way Sigourney Weaver was treated on that stage was embarrassing to watch--in her opening scene she is humped by her much younger lover, the script includes a stereotypical cat fight (the women scripted to hiss and claw at each other) and she is eventually abandoned by her lover because clearly the only reason a 28 year old man might want to fuck Sigourney Fucking Weaver is for what she might do for his acting career. And David Hyde Pierce's pathetic "why bother coming out at this point, it's not as though any man could ever love me" role was chilling, especially coming from Durang. Yes, I get that it's a riff on Chekov, but Chekov's characters had to embrace "life sucks and then you die" because they were 19th century Russians. Upstate New York trust fund babies have no excuse for that sort of bullshit. Watching the blue-haired audience eat it up with a spoon was nauseating and the idea that it was the Best Play of 2013 offends me on behalf of American Theatre. It was certainly the worst play I saw all year.
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Yes. It was written in 1986; it's not a direct transfer of Turing's life, but it draws heavily on Andrew Hodges' groundbreaking Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983), which remains in many ways the best and most comprehensive biography to date. (Among other reasons, Hodges is a mathematician and a gay rights activist and could, in the 1970's, interview a lot of people who'd known Turing personally.) It won all sorts of awards and there's a 1996 television adaptation I don't recommend, because it excises the play's ability to float in and out of layers of time and double- or triple-cast evocatively at need. The play itself is funny, clever, unapologetic, and includes long passages of mathematics and other passionately treated ideas, which as a person who hates to see science dumbed down I appreciate immensely. The one thing I don't like about it is its treatment of its primary female character for the reasons I detailed to
Alternately, we're about to announce a workshop program for new plays, so if you have time and interest in drafting a better take on the story (or anything else) by September 1st, that's also a possibility.
I'm honored. My sole attempts at dramatic writing have so far been confined to freaking out Rob.
(the women scripted to hiss and claw at each other)
Aaaaaaagh.
but Chekov's characters had to embrace "life sucks and then you die" because they were 19th century Russians. Upstate New York trust fund babies have no excuse for that sort of bullshit.
That is a beautiful statement. I hope you put it in print somewhere. I'm very sorry that play took up space in your brain.
[edit] I'm sorry that play took up space in anyone's brain.