Imitation Gameに込められた意味

NewsHourにBenedict Cumberbatchが登場していました。PBSでシャーロックを公開している縁もあるのでしょうか、映画関連のインタビューは珍しい気もします。

Imitation GameはTuring Testのことを指すのですが、もちろんそれ以外の意味も込めたからこそ映画のタイトルになったのでしょう。そのあたりのことはIsaacsonもNew Yorkerの記事も触れています。

The Price of Genius
Walter Isaacson @WalterIsaacson Nov. 20, 2014

Turing’s need to hide both his homosexuality and his codebreaking work meant that he often found himself playing his own imitation game, pretending to be things he wasn’t. At one point he proposed marriage to a female colleague (played by Keira Knightley in the new film), but then felt compelled to tell her that he was gay. She was still willing to marry him, but he believed that imitating a straight man would be a sham and decided not to proceed.

＊＊＊＊＊＊＊

NOVEMBER 6, 2014
What’s Missing from “The Imitation Game”
BY DAN ROCKMORE

“The Imitation Game” is made up of entwined personal and professional dramas, and the theme of imitation is, as the title suggests, the driving force of the film. For Turing (played by Benedict Cumberbatch), there is the imitation game practiced by any closeted gay man of the time. There is also an imitation game played by the British intelligence forces, who, having cracked the Enigma code, must imitate a clueless but believably lucky opponent and use the intercepted information judiciously so as not to give away their accomplishment—itself the product of a machine that imitates the actions of an extremely clever puzzle-solver. With this last imitation, “The Imitation Game” alludes to the Turing Test, in which a user having a conversation through a computer—something akin to a computer chat—tries to determine whether the correspondent on the other end is a person or a program. In an early formulation, the participant wasn’t trying to distinguish between human and machine, but between a man and a woman. This test was called “the imitation game.”

伝記映画にありがちな実際は〜〜だという意見はこの映画に対してもいろいろ寄せられているようです。NewshourのサイトではTuringの伝記作者によるトリビアの紹介がありました。実際の本人は同性愛者であることを周り隠していることはなかったようですね。

8 things you didn’t know about Alan Turing
BY REBECCA JACOBSON November 28, 2014 at 1:56 PM EST

1. He was an Olympic-level runner

2. He embodied some values of the Hippie movement

3. He got bad grades and frustrated his teachers

4. The father of the computer also dabbled in physics, biology, chemistry and neurology

5. He developed a new field of biology out of his fascination with daisies

6. He stuttered when talking

7. He didn’t keep his sexuality a secret among friends

8. He refused to let a punishment of chemical castration stop him from working

7. He didn’t keep his sexuality a secret among friends
The laws at the time prevented Turing from being openly gay, but he never kept his sexuality secret either. He was open with his social circles at Kings College in Cambridge, which was “an oasis of acceptance” at the time, Hodges said. Many people would have clung to that oasis, he said, but Turing branched out to continue his work.
In 1952, he was arrested and charged with “indecency” after a brief relationship with another man. Defiant, he did not deny the charges.
“When he was arrested, the first thing he said was he thought that this shouldn’t be against the law,” Hodges said. “He gave a statement that was unapologetic, that detailed what had happened.”

このAndrew Hodgesの著書が映画の種本となったそうで、下記が本の広告です。TOEICにも出るのでcaptivating, absorbingとか、良い本であることを形容する単語を学んでおきましょう。