Through a stroke or two of good luck I was fortunate enough to see The Imitation Game twice before its release on 14 November (28 November in the U.S.). One screening was actually free thanks the Radio Times. It did involve a long Tube trip on three different lines down to Wimbledon but it was well worth the journey. This film is quickly becoming a contender for my favourite film of all time and has sparked a need to know more about the topic.
Briefly, The Imitation Game is the story of Alan Turing, an English mathematician who, along with a team at Bletchley Park, created a machine that was able to successfully break the German Enigma code during World War II. Breaking this code shortened the war and saved millions of lives. Turing was also a gay man at a time when being homosexual was illegal and punishable by a prison sentence or hormone injections which were meant to take away homosexual inclinations. The movie does an excellent job of weaving through Turing’s life and illustrating how an awkward and different man was able to do remarkable things. One of the most poignant lines that is echoed throughout the movie is, “Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.” It’s a movie that has all the elements of good film-making: a gripping story, a mixture of emotions that range from fascination to triumph to sadness and anger, it has humour, and most of all, it makes you want to know more.
Even before seeing the movie I had decided I wanted to learn more about Alan Turning. Being an American, I had never heard his name or his story until the movie started filming last year and the buzz started. Sadly, his name was not well-known in his own country for a long time. His work on breaking the Enigma code was kept secret for over 50 years and few people seem to know of Turing’s contribution to the modern computer age.
I have been reading Andrew Hodges’ biography on Turing for a lot longer than I would like to admit. It is slow reading since it’s a biography of a mathematician, written by a mathematician and read by someone whose mind shuts down at the mention of maths or mathematical theory. I am stubbornly trudging through this book because I know, in the midst of all the stuff that I do not understand, is a story of an extraordinary person whose accomplishments are only now being celebrated. I’m fairly sure this won’t be the only biography I will read about him nor will my need to learn more stop at Turing. I feel a whole new urge to learn more about World War II and from a different perspective I was given in history classes in school.
This is the way I am. I’m one of those people who when I get interested in something I tend to latch on and research the hell out of it. When I was a pre-teen I fell in love with the music of Daryl Hall and John Oates. I was, admittedly, obsessed with them and, to this day, they remain my favourite band. It wasn’t enough for me to listen to their music; I needed to know what their music was about, who these guys were, and what inspired them. I read every article I could get my hands on (which, at the time, was mostly rubbish teen magazines) and even wrote a very informed research paper on them at university (not using those rubbish teen magazines as sources).
The obsession actually branched off a bit. Early on, I learned that Daryl Hall had been influenced by The Temptations, Motown, and the whole Philly Sound of the 60s. This prompted me to listen to the Temptations, The Four Tops, The Supremes and Marvin Gaye, to name a few. At the age of 13, when popular music was more along the lines of Duran Duran and Pet Shop Boys, I started listening to 20-year-old Motown songs. It didn’t matter to me that listening to this kind of music was considered a bit odd; I loved it. I still thank Daryl Hall’s influence in turning me on to a genre of music I probably wouldn’t have paid much attention to otherwise.
This wasn’t my only obsession-turned-research project. I fell in love with dance after seeing Flashdance (don’t judge) and it grew even more obsessive after seeing Mikhail Baryshnikov in White Nights. Ballet became my love in high school. I started taking classes again (after an eleven year hiatus) and, while I wasn’t great, I did reach my goal of being able to dance en pointe. I learned everything I could about ballet. I watched every ballet I could get my hands on. Because I lived in a very non-artsy city, I was forced to get my ballet fix through videos and the occasional performance shown on PBS. I explored the history of ballet, including the choreographers, dancers, and storylines. My walls were a crazy mixture of ballet posters and Hall & Oates posters. Again, I wrote a of couple dance related research papers in high school English, one on Baryshnikov and one on the Royal Ballet Theatre. At least all my research didn’t go to waste!
I won’t even get into the time and depth of research that occurred when I fell in love with Ireland. Let’s just say that, at one point, I could have told you an awful lot more about Ireland’s fight for independence than that of my own country. Pretty crazy since I only just had the opportunity to visit the country, for the first time, this past summer.
I know I’m not the only one like this. I think it’s almost a natural tendency to want to know more about something that interests you. It may not go to fanatical levels that some of my research has gone but the quest to know more is, hopefully, something most of us have whether it be about science, history, arts, or the origin story of a the latest superhero movie. I sometimes worry that I’ve acquired a large quantity of useless knowledge when maybe I could have applied that time spent researching to something like, I don’t know…maths? But at the same time, I don’t really believe that any knowledge is useless or the time spent learning about something is a waste. It’s how we discover new ideas and explore worlds that we never knew existed.
On that note, I will give one last plug to The Imitation Game. It opens in cinemas in the UK this Friday, 14 November and in the U.S. in two weeks on 28 November (a brilliant way to escape the shopping crowds on Black Friday!). Maybe it’ll have the same effect on you as it has on me and you’ll want to learn more.
On My Mind 