If you haven’t seen The Imitation Game yet, go see it. It’s one of the best movies I’ve seen in years. Spectacular acting, beautifully made, and it has Tom Branson in it. (You can tell I’m not an actual movie critic.) How life-affirming it is when something beautiful, nerdy, and emotionally moving is also replete with lesson materials. Here’s what I think we can all learn from The Imitation Game. (I make a point not to give any spoilers beyond what the trailer and the simplest biography already reveal.)
1. Everyone has a stake in ensuring equal access/opportunity to marginalized groups.
Even if we were to put aside the timely argument that #BlackLivesMatter inherently (i.e. all lives inherently matter, but our current sociopolitical climate demands particular attention be paid to the disproportionate physical and structural violence this particular group experiences), a selfish person would still have a plainly compelling reason to care about marginalized groups’ rights: their life might depend on it. The Imitation Game, by spotlighting women’s and gay issues in its temporal context, shows how denying any group the opportunity for self- (or group-) actualization thwarts an unknowable number of potentially humanity-saving ideas.
2. Barriers to actualization come in many forms and should be responded to accordingly.
Woman raises hand in STEM setting.
In The Imitation Game, Joan Clarke experienced barriers to participating in cryptography research despite the fact that she had passed a qualifying test. It is important to note the myriad of forms these barriers took. Some were in the form of now-antiquated workplace rules regarding which jobs women were allowed to do. But it wasn’t just policy that got in her way. She also experienced a barrier to participation in the form of family and social pressures to prioritize finding a husband, even if she was able to find work. And she faced a barrier when she tried to enter an academic space and was nearly denied entrance because the guard could not wrap his head around the fact that she wasn’t actually trying to find the room full of secretaries. Her barriers included policy, cultural values, and individuals’ prejudices.
Other examples of how these things intersect: Requiring colleges to report sexual assault to the police vs. ensuring people don’t think it’s fun to take advantage of others; offering more scholarships to get women into the sciences vs. making WIC more functional (i.e. less corporate).
3. Brilliant invention is most likely when people with all sorts of ways of seeing things are included in the process. This includes the importance of understanding social nuance and other subtle yet important perspectives.
Teamwork FTW
One of the central “morals” of The Imitation Game was classic: yay teamwork. That although Turing was clearly brilliant in and of himself, and he came up with the initial notion of a computing machine himself, the implementation and eventual success of his machine wouldn’t have happened without the inclusion of other perspectives, most importantly people who were fluent in the subtle language of social cues. I love nerds probably more than the next person, but I acknowledge that often their downfall is their lack of understanding of social and movement nuance. I had an expert computer science friend tell me once that he thought I’d make an excellent computer scientist because, with my dance background, I can invent, visualize, and even experience multiple physical processes happening simultaneously, influenced by each other in non-apparent ways. Indeed, in a post-bac computer theory class I took once, we had an assignment to draw cubes of dimension >3, and I went ahead and drew up to dimension 6 because it was fun, while some of my classmates gave up on their pencils and came in with computer-generated images. This is not to toot my own horn but only to say that all types of different minds are important!
4. Lack of social skills is less bad than simply being an asshole.
There’s not a lot to explain here.
5. Drawing your personal morality from current law makes no sense.
I wish we were past the argument that someone should be arrested simply because they broke the law. Yet it’s a common trope. This movie serves as a blatant reminder that we come from a long history of laws that have since been revised to fit our less and less socially conservative society. Turing’s untimely and soul-crushing demise was a response to the torture of chemical castration, that era’s legal punishment for having gay sex. If your response to this is, “well, that’s what the law was, it’s only fair, that’s just what the punishment was for breaking that law,” then kindly get off my blog and go live in a cave without internet. Yet people say this about current policies all the time.
Body language tells a lot.
6. Military structure is not good for invention (and military money should not fund STEM education).
In the military, people move up by successfully following orders and being good at what they are ordered to do. A quick online search gave me the below result from www.military.com, in an article called “Stay on Track to Move Up in Your Career.” The very first point was:
Disagreements with Higher Management: Obviously, this is a no-no, even if your point of view is correct. Those who would rather be right than promoted almost always get their wish.
One of the last points was:
Assuming Something Other Than Your Own Hard Work Will Take You Where You Want to Go: Being overly dependent on a powerful boss or some other advocate, or even on your natural talent [emphasis mine], sometimes causes high-potential people to get a little lazy.
Note the active deflection from the value of ideas. Indeed, there is greater value placed on obeisance than invention, exploration, or even being correct. If Turing had one main barrier to his endeavor to create a cryptography machine, it was the military management of his assignment. An extent of groupthink may be important in moving troops around, but it is a completely inappropriate governance for scientific research. By extension, it is a travesty that public education funding is now being replaced, in the STEM sector, by funds from the U.S. Army—and certainly not with an invisible hand, either.
7. People are whole people, and it’s beautiful to explore all of that.
A large part of what made this movie so wonderful is the multi-faceted exploration of Turing’s character and life. To me, this is, in a way, a feminist perspective/framework. While many of us already knew Turing for his contributions to science and technology, The Imitation Game presented his character as not always in control, unprotected from the emotional and existential effects of a personal life. Giving weight to a person’s quietly staggering inner life, friendships, process, flaws—really anything other than a laundry list of accomplishments—is a humanizing process that undermines the objectification and unquestioned power of fame. That’s the opposite of James Bond, and it’s beautiful.
Arts 'n' Maths 