Review of the film Enigma

R. A. Hettinga rah at shipwright.com
Tue Jun 18 20:08:51 EDT 2002


http://www.cryptographic.co.uk/enigmareview.html


Review of the film Enigma

by Andrew Hodges
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ENIGMA (2001, directed by Michael Apted, screenplay by Tom Stoppard, based
on the novel by Robert Harris).

Review written for the British Society for the History of Mathematics
Autumn 2001 Newsletter

There is a contradiction at the heart of any work of fiction, especially
avowedly 'historical fiction': falsity has somehow to be grafted on to
truth. Nothing can satisfactorily resolve this logical impossibility:
without falsity the work is not fiction; without an element of truth it is
not historical. We must somehow suspend belief for the fiction, yet at the
same time give credence to its historical 'accuracy.' The political writer
and novelist Robert Harris is alive to such questions, and when writing his
fiction Enigma, (Hutchinson, London, 1995), set amidst the World War II
codebreaking work at Bletchley Park, made a thoughtful choice of the period
in early 1943. Others might have tried to latch on to more famous moments
in war history, but Harris deliberately set his work in the unglamorous but
critical period of the Atlantic war. This self-denying setting also had
another advantage. A story set in the early period of the war could not
have avoided the unique and central figure of Alan Turing. He devised the
British Bombe to break Enigma-enciphered messages by the mechanisation of a
complex chain of logical deductions based in guessed plaintext. He also
made in 1939 the single-handed break into Naval Enigma material. To
'fictionalise' this would be as gross as 'fictionalising' Churchill. But by
1943, use of the Bombe was routine, Turing was in America, and there were
other hands at work on U-boat messages, so that interposing a fictional
character into the story did not make so obvious a contradiction with
history of the war and the history of mathematics. Harris recognised this
by putting into his novel 'the great Alan Turing' with a few awkward spoken
lines ('I'm researching Riemann') which conveyed that he was the early
figure in British Enigma-breaking. The fictional mathematician Tom Jericho,
Harris's lead character, was clearly distinct.

This sensitivity has been abandoned by director Michael Apted and writer
Tom Stoppard in the film based on Harris's book. They have also jettisoned
the efforts by Harris to convey some sense of a mathematician's background
and outlook, for instance by labouring the concept of 'proof' with some
quotations from G. H. Hardy. Instead, they have thoughtlessly and
pointlessly invested the fictional hero with feeble references of Turing's
work and ideas. At one point, some pages on 'the Entscheidungsproblem' fall
out of Tom Jericho's pocket, as something to do with 'theoretical machines'
he is thinking about. Jericho is also vaguely credited with devising the
Bombe. This is also referred to as a 'thinking machine,' thus alluding to
Turing's pioneering ideas on Artificial Intelligence.

The PR puffs put out by the production company further confuse the issue by
referring to Turing's work and his role as founder of modern computer
science. The intention seems to be to latch on to Turing's fame and
importance to boost publicity for the film, yet to eliminate the
inconvenient Turing from the story told in the film itself. It also leaves
viewers with the suggestion that in some way Jericho is 'really' Turing,
which if anything is even more offensive, given that he has a completely
different personality. In particular, Jericho's story is a rip-roaring
heterosexual drama with much jealous, violent action and a femme fatale, as
different from Turing's world as it is possible to imagine. (Alan Turing
was a shy gay man who at this point in 1943 was on the verge of full
self-acceptance and a very modern-minded attitude of self-disclosure). An
underlying assumption is perhaps that the world of science and mathematics
is fair game for grave-robbing in a way that would not be countenanced in
politics or literature; that all mathematics, science and engineering is a
grey blur of people whose incomprehensible lives and ideas can be regarded
as interchangeable.

Some aspects of Enigma demonstrate how splendidly film can illuminate truth
when it chooses to. The central historical episode of the film, the losing
and regaining of U-boat Enigma breaking at a critical point, is as fair as
any documentary reconstruction, and the makers of the film have taken care
with details of the U-boat messages. The way that they are used for a
cryptanalytic breakthrough has been scrupulously constructed by Tony Sale,
the original curator of the Bletchley Park Museum, and his detailed
explanations and simulation of the processes are available on-line (see
below). The superb visual appearance of the Bombes in action has also been
contributed by the Bombe Reconstruction Project. However, virtually nothing
of the cryptanalytic plot is explained, and no attempt is made to explain
the principle of the Bombes. There are a few efforts to 'explain' aspects
of Enigma breaking, but they are all dumbed down to trivial observations.
For instance, Jericho announces the mantra that successful breaking can be
detected by the fact that the emergent text is recognisable German, and
this is dramatised by a sequence in which an Enigma machine is used to
decode a ciphertext: many viewers may see this as 'codebreaking' but it is
in fact no more than careful typing and reading. I do not find it
surprising that press reports of the plot are wildly misleading, with the
Guardian referring to 'the Enigma codebreaking machine.'

Instead of dramatising intellectual discovery, as Harris made some effort
to do, the film has played up the spy-thriller elements that made his novel
a 'best-seller'. If you want to see a mathematician in country-lane car
chases, then swimming fully-clothed in a heavy sea, while shooting a pistol
at a spying colleague trying to reach a surfacing U-boat, then you should
see this film. The best I can say is that it pays faithful homage to Graham
Greene's 1943 atmospherics. A deeper problem is that throughout the film,
the codebreakers appear as browbeaten by spymasters in the Secret
Intelligence Service, and that betrayal of material to Germany is pivotal
to the plot. In fact, spying played very little role in the Anglo-American
war with Germany (though no doubt it was more significant in relations with
the Soviet Union): cryptanalytic intelligence, obtained through scientific
ingenuity and organisation, was all-important. The problem lay not in
treachery but in implementation: successful use of the intelligence would
tend to give it away. The British success largely continued because the
German command were quicker to suspect treachery on their side, in reality
non-existent, than to doubt the efficacy of the Enigma machine. There are
passages in the film where the radicalism of the scientific revolution is
made clear enough: the resentment at the 'swots' suddenly being 'stars,'
the amused contempt of the codebreakers for irrelevant brass-hat pep-talks.
There is also a fine passage where Jericho quickly calculates on
information-theoretic grounds whether the coming convoy clash will supply
enough material to break back into the U-boat Enigma. But these are
disconnected exceptions to the overall emphasis on a traditional war-story
plot.

The plot is particularly unfair to the Polish heritage. In one line it is
stated that the Polish 'cypher bureau' had supplied an Enigma machine at
the outset of the war: this greatly understates the brilliance of the
Polish pre-war mathematical work. After that it gets worse: the silent Pole
amongst the codebreakers (already a severe distortion of the reality at
Bletchley Park) is credited with having betrayed the significance of the
weather report code book to Germany, and then with intending to give away
the entire thing. In fact the Polish analysts never betrayed anything about
the Enigma, despite the pressures of captivity, and it is they who could
justly feel betrayed in 1945. Again there is an irony here; for Harris has
done well to find a pivot for the plot, the discovery of the Katyn massacre
(the mass murder of Polish officers by the Soviet Union after the 1939
partition of Poland), which encapsulates all that was sickening in the
post-1941 alliance. Furthermore it could well be said that the film does a
fine job of integrating this into the plot rather than leaving it as an
acute moral symbol (compare the Stalingrad 'Sword of Honour' in Evelyn
Waugh's trilogy of that name). Its neat (perhaps over-neat) plotted
connection of the Atlantic war with Polish and American issues gives a
vivid picture of the emergent globalism of the modern technological world,
something to be contrasted favourably with the British drawing-room
class-conflict genre. Nevertheless, in building a fiction of Polish
betrayal this film has done an injury.

The best that can be said is perhaps, as a letter-writer to the Independent
suggested, that it introduces the question of Katyn to audiences who are
not likely to have heard of it. Indeed the plot turns on understanding the
significance of the discovery of the bodies under German occupation. This
illustrates the fact that this film is by no means dumbed-down in its
expectations of the audience's political knowledge; one must remember that
American teenagers, who are the prime audience for film productions,
generally do not know even that Germany was the enemy of America in World
War II.

For this very reason, however, those who see the film are liable to assume
that the material is all well-founded, and thereby give all the more
credence to its distortions - in particular, returning to the theme I know
most personally, the disgraceful exploitation yet elimination of Alan
Turing, and behind this, a certain contempt for intellectual history. Some
people may think that it is valuable to have a film which illustrates
morsels of mathematical work. I certainly cannot take an absolutist view,
having acceded in the production of 'Breaking the Code' out of my biography
of Alan Turing. But I am inclined to conclude that in the dangerous and
basically impossible task of welding fiction and fact, it is essential to
keep some basic grip on authenticity in thought and ideas. Props and
technical details can be brilliantly lit while still shedding darkness on
central truths.

Andrew Hodges, October 2001.

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Web references:

Enigma - the movie
Alan Turing home page
Tony Sale's work on the U-boat messages for the film
Bombe reconstruction for the film

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Notes added March 2002:
Peter Bradshaw's review in The Guardian, 22 February 2002, of the equally
contentious film A Beautiful Mind made a similar point about Alan Turing's
sexuality. This drew forth a letter from Robert Harris on 23 February,
stating that in his novel the hero Jericho was 'never meant to resemble'
Turing, but failing to address the merging of identities through allusions
in the film.

My criticism of the Enigma film has been quoted in an article in the
on-line Spiegel by Michael Lenz.

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Back to my Crypto Index page

andrew at synth.co.uk
-- 
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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