The movie even shows a copy of the 1928 article by David Hilbert’s paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem (Decision Problem).” It goes into some detail describing what a Turing machine is.
A couple of the revelations might spoil your enjoyment but you have been warned.ĬB spends a fair amount of time on Turing’s work on computability. I guess at this point I should give a SPOILER ALERT that I am about to describe some pivotal events in his life, which are revealed in the movie.
Remarkably these two films give almost disjoint accounts of his life. I would have to work for a while before I came up with a genuinely unified theory of how the movie approaches sexuality, and I'm pretty sure that my gender and sexuality analysis is all over the map - I was coming up with and adding new stuff as I was writing this.The Imitation Game (IG) is a great movie which has brought a lot of attention to Alan Turing but if you like it, you should also watch the 2013 film Codebreaker (CB), which can be streamed on Netflix. The only way to survive is to burn the whole thing down - and then, at the very end, it's like that old Robert Owens line: "All the world is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer." They can't tell if the other person is gay/The Thing or not, but they can die while they're trying to figure it out. He doesn't joke around with them, he doesn't interact with them, he loves nobody and nothing when the intimate horrors of the Thing surface, he's immune because he doesn't make himself vulnerable. McCready is the only one to survive, but notice how little he's willing to be friendly with the other men in the camp he stays off by himself in his own little shack, surrounded by artificial women. It kills the dogs, the only thing that Clark really cares about in the camp - in fact, it makes the other men kill them, so that Clark will have further reason to distrust the men around him.
Windows is killed by a giant head-vagina with teeth Copper has his arms severed by one as well. The only way to stay safe is never to go off alone with somebody, because they might be one of them.Īnd the nature of the violation is always body horror - there's always tentacles, or malformed hands, or glistening slime, or normal body parts opening up to reveal vast, moist caverns surrounded by flesh. Every time somebody is left alone with somebody else, there's the chance that some kind of awful, taboo physical contact will take place, and then the people will be the same, but also, terribly, different.īut you won't be able to tell if they were intimate or not. Once somebody breaks the taboo once something is infected by the Thing, the taboo on intimacy is broken. They hate each other because they've been cooped up for so long.īut. They've been cooped up in a confined, claustrophobic space for months, without any female companionship at all - in fact, the closest thing that the movie gets to a woman is the voice of the chess computer (voiced by Adrienne Barbeau), and, I think, a blow-up sex doll. If you're used to the 1950's model of sexuality, in which homosexuals are considered perverts, it's the end of your world.Ĭonsider: All of the main characters are men. Think of it in terms of 1982: Homosexuality is out of the closet and gaining a lot of attention due to the fact that there's a devastating disease spreading among them, which in turn makes them much more visible than they used to be. I woke up shortly thereafter - which is good, because my nerves can only take so much Wilford Brimley - but it occurred to me shortly thereafter that The Thing is the ultimate gay panic movie. Long story short, I remember that one person was being taken over by Wilford Brimley/The Thing you could tell because Wilford wouldn't move more than a foot away from the dude that he was taking over at the time. So, I had a dream - a brief one - the other night about The Thing.