AUTISM AND WAR CRIMES: TURING’S MORAL CHARACTER IN THE IMITATION GAME

Last night I attended a packed screening of The Imitation Game. My thoughts on the movie are below, but tl;dr: I thought the film was great. If you have any interest in mathematics, cryptography, or the history of computing you will love this film. But this isn’t just a movie for nerds. The drama of the wartime setting and the arresting performance from Cumberbatch make this film entertaining and accessible to almost everyone– despite the fact that it’s a period war drama with almost no action or romance and doesn’t pass the Bechdel test.

Of course, as a philosopher I have questions and criticisms. But don’t let that confuse you: go see this film. Turning history’s intellectual heroes into media’s popular heroes is a trend I’d like to reinforce.

Turing’s story is timely and central for understanding the development of our world. I’m happy to see his work receive the publicity and recognition it deserves. Turing is something of a hero of mine; I spent half my dissertation wrestling with his thoughts on artificial intelligence, and I’ve found a way to work him in to just about every class I’ve taught for the last decade. I know many others feel just as passionately (or more!) about his life and work. I have been looking forward to this film for a long time and my expectations were high. I was not disappointed. The Oscar buzz around this film is completely appropriate.

Spoilers will obviously follow. There are minor inaccuracies in the film: Knightley mispronounces Euler’s name; Turing’s paper is titled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence“, not “The Imitation Game”; the Polish bombe machine was eventually named Victory, never Christopher. But I’m not so interested in that sort of critique.

I’d instead like to talk about two subtle but important themes in the film: first, Turing’s eccentric behavior is depicted in such a way as to strongly suggest that he was on the autism spectrum. Second, the film raises issues of Turing’s involvement and moral culpability in the war that are not resolved. Although I think the film (in both the script and Cumberbatch’s performance) successfully incorporate these themes into a convincing character, I’m not sure how much this character reflects on the historical Turing.

Just to be clear, there’s more to the movie than what I’m focusing on here, and in any case I’m not the kind of movie snob that would complain about embellishing the drama a bit for the screen. But I was already pretty familiar with the story of Turing before seeing the film, and these two themes stood out as deserving further investigation.

Turing and Autism

The film shows Turing both as a child and an adult being told that he’s different from other people, and that these differences make him unique and capable of doing extraordinary things. Turing explicitly synthesizes this lesson during the film’s very brief discussion of artificial intelligence. In the course of a police interrogation, Turing argues that we talk of “thinking” in a way that admits of great differences between thinkers and may even extend to the thinking performed by copper wire and steel. I’ll talk more about this scene at the end. The central lesson of the scene, that Turing is different from ‘normal’ people, is also found in the repeating and somewhat clunky motto of the film: “Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.” The phrase functions like a “with great power comes great responsibility‘ line in the Turing origin mythology portrayed the film, told to him as a child and repeated by him to Knightley’s Clarke as an adult. The superheroic set up of Turing’s genius makes his untimely end all the more tragic.

But Turing’s abilities aren’t merely depicted as extraordinary or eccentric, they are depicted as explicitly cognitively atypical. As a child Turing is shown obsessively separating his peas and carrots into neat piles, a behavior for which he is bullied by his peers. He avoids eye contact and refuses to engage in pleasantries with his colleagues, resulting in many awkward social situations. He has few friends and has difficulty making friends. He doesn’t get jokes. He works obsessively and in isolation, seeming to care more for his machines than his own health. He stutters frequently, especially when he gets passionate. I was watching the movie with a psychologist who agreed that the performance in the film was suggestive of autism spectrum behaviors.

I had never considered whether Turing was autistic before the film. Of course autism was not diagnosed in Turing’s time, but some research online shows that several people have attempted retrospective diagnoses of Turing. For instance, this book devotes a chapter to Turing as a case of Asperger Syndrome. This article in the Guardian from 2012 about Turing’s childhood and family life states very matter-of-factly that Turing would have been diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome today. We should be clear that since the DSM-5 Asperger Syndrome has been folded into the autism spectrum, so no one is being diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome after 2013. In any case, both sources seem rather light on evidence supporting the diagnoses, drawing the conclusion simply from Turing’s somewhat eccentric habits and interest in mathematics.

The best resource I found on Turing and Autism was this blog post, which discusses an article published in a psychology journal in 2003 doing a retrospective diagnosis from biographical details of Turing’s life. The post lists the evidence cited in support in that paper. Unfortunately I don’t have full academic superpowers and can’t find a copy of the original article. But if the post is accurate, the case seems rather thin and doesn’t fully support the portrayal Cumberbatch provides. I’m compelled to believe the conclusion of the blog post:
The difficulty with making historical diagnoses is that there’s no opportunity to ask further, more targeted questions. What happened if Turing didn’t get his nightly apple? Did it bother him, or did he eat some other fruit?
A proper diagnostic interview might uncover further evidence that would provide a more compelling and watertight case for diagnosis. Even so, Turing’s case highlights the subjective nature of diagnosis. This is particularly true around the edges of the autism spectrum where, as Lorna Wing put it, Asperger syndrome “shades into eccentric normality”.

Attempts to diagnose Turing arguably reveal more about our current fuzzy concepts of autism than they do about Turing the man. And they make plain why we’re still a long way from understanding the enigma that is autism.

If the diagnosis of autism is questionable of the historical Turing, it raises some issues about the performance in the film. Turing’s social isolation in particular seems overplayed. The historical Turing had a decidedly more active social and family life, as evidenced by, for instance, his letter to a friend in distress or the memoir from his brother. Turing was undoubtedly unique and eccentric, but the film’s presentation of Turing as socially and intellectually isolated and autistic is stronger than the historical record seems to support.

In Cumberbatch’s hands,