August 17, 2026
(I originally wrote this in Turkish, as a writing sample to apply to Dergi Melatonin as a writer. Due to popular request, I translated it to English and published it here. Enjoy!)
PLEASE, JUST HOLD ON! I CAN EXPLAIN!
Has anyone here heard of Alan Turing? Okay, from where have you heard of him? Be honest. If the answer was "There was a movie about him called "The Imitation Game"," you might've been victim to a psyop. The movie has gained notoriority for altering historical events for the sake of dramatization, and contains a lot of traits that would make one suspicious about the intentions of the people who worked on it, and the support behind it (some of those traits I'll be talking about is actually linked to its historical inaccuracy, you'll see later on).
While watching, there might've been people who've asked "How the hell did Turing manage to build a whole machine and manage the team?" Valid question because it wasn't just him who did all that work! From that perspective, Benedict Cumberbatch's Alan Turing is a character more fit for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you know, those sorts of characters that do everything by themselves. If you exit the Graham Moore Cinematic Universe and look into real life, you'll see that there were actually around 10.000 (point used as thousands separator) people working in Bletchley Park doing various jobs, that around 7500 of them were women, and that the Bombe (that machine with teeny little wheels on it) was worked on more people other than Turing (more specifically by Gordon Welchman and Harold Keen), and in fact, that there were other machines made to break Enigma before the Bombe (Marian Rejewski's "Bomba," in fact the Bombe was based off the Bomba).
Doesn't the movie essentially erase other people's labor, especially that of women's? "Wait, wasn't there Joan Clarke in the movie?" Well it feels more like she's there so that we don't say such things about the movie. Where is the other 7499 or so? Why don't we see them at work?
Speaking of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, let's not forget that Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which released recently, allegedly has mass surveillance propaganda in it.
(If you find topics such as child sexual abuse triggering, please skip this section.)
In the Epstein Files, File EFTA00355074, we see an invitation sent to Jeffrey Epstein himself through e-mail. An invitation for what? A cocktail party to honor the success of The Imitation Game! The director Morten Tyldum, the screenwriter Graham Moore, the producers and some of the cast members will also be there! The hosts are Michael Bloomberg, Eric Schmidt, George Stephanopoulos and Christine and Stephen Schwarzman.
Michael Bloomberg is one of the co-founders of Bloomberg L. P., which deals with software, data, and media. Eric Schmidt is a former CEO of Google, you know what Google is already. George Stephanopoulos is a TV personality, political commentator and also managed the White House's media campaigns during the Bill Clinton presidency. Stephen Schwarzman is the CEO of Blackstone, and Christine Schwarzman is his wife (I couldn't find much information about her).
Dangerous people. On one side we have the people of Silicon Valley, on the other side we have people familiar with media. These people all meet at a cocktail, a cocktain hosted for a movie about Alan Turing. But why this movie?
Oh would you look at that! The screenplay was bought by Warner Bros. in October 2011. AlexNet, the piece of software that is said to have started the whole "deep learning" thing, was released in September 2012, and the article "Attention Is All You Need," which laid out transformers, one of the pieces of tech behind software like ChatGPT, released only around 3 years after the movie released, in 2017. And when you consider who Alan Turing was...
The Epstein class bought a One Wish Willow, and wished for a Turing that would "be compatible" with them. What they really wanted is to take what he started and turn it towards their favor, to lay the ground for their new source of wealth, to manufacture public consent for it. And their wish got fulfilled. (Personally that thing was in their favor from the start, or at least was lenient to be used towards their favor... Oh Turing, you made a big mistake.)
One of the other despicable things The Imitation Game has done is to make Turing's queerness invisible. Have you ever seen the Graham Moore Cinematic Universe Turing in a relationship with a man? You haven't! You've always seen him with Joan Clarke! And whenever he talks about his homosexuality he's like, I dunno, melancholic about it in this universe. The real-life Turing was nothing like that. He was open about himself being gay, let alone being ashamed of it. Well, when Epstein and co. are involved in the making, one becomes very afraid to talk abou that. As if this wasn't enough, the movie argues that one should respect Turing's homosexuality because he saved the world or something. Why can't we respect his queerness just because he's human?
I'll quote Cüneyt Cebenoyan (the original quote was in Turkish, English translation by me): "[Turing] being punished being a crime against humanity has nothing to do with Turing's achievements. Even if he was an unsuccessful jerk, it would've still been a crime against humanity to [chemically] castrate him for his homosexuality. The movie mixes everything in while going "Oh don't let the peas touch the carrots," taking a conservative approach. [...] It takes a liberal approach while not letting go of conservativism at the same time. There must be space for a Turing with a less palatable sex life in the world."
So what you should take from all this is that The Imitation Game (2014) is the Alan Turing fantasy of the Epstein class. It has nothing to do with the real Turing.
Go back to the /turing main page