voleregard wrote:
Scotia wrote:
The Imitation Game movie, with Benedict Cumberbacht starring. Based on Alan Turing's biography.
Just for the sake of clarity, the Turing in the movie is portrayed with autistic characteristics. However, the film takes liberties and the real Turing was different from the film's portrayal, being described, among other things, as "a man with a keen sense of humor and close friends."
http://tinyurl.com/kz6gzwoQuote:
The film strongly implies that Alan is somewhere on the autism spectrum: Cumberbatch’s character doesn’t understand jokes, takes common expressions literally, and seems indifferent to the suffering and annoyance he causes in others. This characterization is rooted in Hodge’s biography but is also largely exaggerated: Hodges never suggests that Turing was autistic, and though he refers to Turing’s tendency to take contracts and other bureaucratic red tape literally, he also describes Turing as a man with a keen sense of humor and close friends. To be sure, Hodges paints Turing as shy, eccentric, and impatient with irrationality, but Cumberbatch’s narcissistic, detached Alan has more in common with the actor’s title character in Sherlock than with the Turing of Hodges’ biography. One of Turing’s colleagues at Bletchley Park later recalled him as “a very easily approachable man” and said “we were very very fond of him”; none of this is reflected in the film.
Made for a compelling film, but unfortunately not true to life. So the real Turing, probably not autistic; and fitting for this thread, the fictional Turing likely is.
Not necessarily; I read one of Turing's biographies, written by his mother. In describing his childhood and adolescence, he sounds extremely aspie. She talked about how he got upset when his nanny let him win at games, how he stopped and read every string of numbers he came across, how his language was extremely precocious for a small child (upon leaving for a trip when he was three, his mother asked if he would be good, and he replied, "Yes, but sometimes I shall forget."), and his various obsessions with maps, science, and math. He was one of those socially oblivious young aspies who would walk up to strangers and start randomly conversing with them, which is probably how, despite his awkwardness, he wound up with so many friends. I would definitely say that the movie was more accurate than it seems; from what I've read, Alan Turing was definitely a candidate for an AS diagnosis.
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