Incoherent Icon

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The first volume of Milestone Comics’ Icon asks two provocative questions: “What would a black superhero be like?” and “What would happen if Superman landed on earth in the antebellum South and was found by an enslaved black woman?” Unfortunately, as it turns out, these two questions are antithetical; trying to answer them both at once results in storyline that, despite some intelligence, resolves into incoherence, it’s most provocative possibilities drowned in genre default fisticuffs and capitulation to unexamined tropes.

But let’s start with the positive. Dwayne McDuffie, M.D. DBright, and Mike Gustovich’s answer to their first question is smart, funny, and so brilliantly obvious it makes you slap your forehead. What would a black superhero be like? they ask. And the answer is that a black superhero would be…a conservative Republican. Why on earth would a black man like Augustus Freeman, with Superman level powers, spend his time arresting low level criminals and attempting to aid the cops? Because he has politics like those of “Rush Limbaugh” (who gets a call-out) or Clarence Thomas. He’s a reactionary — and it’s that which puts him in line with the reactionary politics of the superhero genre. The iconic (if you will) moment of the series comes when he tells his young-but-hip sidekick Rocket that they need to aid the police. She tells him he’s nuts, and he replies pompously, “Don’t assume everything’s racial” — and then of course he asks the cops if he can help them, and they start shooting at him. “Don’t assume everything’s racial, huh?” Rocket says in exasperation. “I’ll try.”

McDuffie and his artists do that rare thing in black superhero comics — they acknowledge the tension between the law and order imperative of the superhero and the fact that law and order, in real life in the U.S., is inevitably directed against black people. Icon (both comic and superhero) work consciously to bridge or finesse that gap. The hero subscribes to a black conservative self-help philosophy that goes back to Booker T. Washington (who is mentioned by name): he tells black criminals they discredit the race (“Your behavior reflects poorly on our people and on yourselves”) and his goal as a superhero is to be an inspiration by showing black people that they can be heroes, and succeed, according to white cultural norms which he accepts — but which other characters, like Rocket, do not necessarily. (As she says upon learning Icon’s origin, “I think I just figured out how a black man could be a conservative Republican…You’re from Outer Space!”)

Rocket both inspires Icon to take responsibility for the black struggle, and (to some degree) argues with him about how to do that. Her own acquiescence in his brand of superheroing isn’t really thought through as well as it might be, but incidents like those with the cops, and a later pointless slugfest with some supergang members, nicely illustrate the problems of black conservatism and the contradictions of black superheroism. But while the comic sees Icon’s ideology as flawed, it also sees him as admirable and as having qualities — inspiration, hope, and (given his wealth and power) resources — to contribute to the black struggle. Black superheroes, Icon suggests, are silly and don’t always make sense, but, like black conservatives, they can still be valuable and meaningful. By acknowledging the contradictions inherent to black superheroes, Icon makes perhaps the best mainstream case possible for their value.
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But then there’s the answer to the second question. What would happen if Superman were a slave in the antebellum South?

Icon is an alien; he lands in a damaged ship on earth, and takes on the genetic imprint of the first human he encounters — a woman who is a slave. Icon then lives through the last century and a half plus of black history; he helps slaves escape through the Underground Railroad, fought with the Union in the Civil War, got a law degree from Fisk, met his wife during the Harlem Renaissance, and fought for the U.S. in World War I. “Icon” is not just his superhero name, it’s a description of his character — he embodies the black experience.

Symbolically, you can see the appeal. Logistically, though, it’s nonsense. Icon is, again, at Superman level powers. If there were a slave in the antebellum South with Superman level powers, would he be mucking around with the Underground Railroad and joining the Union army? Surely not; a superpowered slave would be able to have a much more direct impact.

Successful slave revolts were impossible in the South because of the massive disproportion of weaponry, personnel and power. The arrival of Icon would have changed all that irrevocably. You can think through various scenarios, but presuming Icon was not a pacifist (and he fought in the war, remember), surely he would have made some attempt to liberate the slaves. And given what we know of his powers and of technology in 1850s America, that attempt was likely to have been at the very least partially successful. There would have been successful revolts; you can easily imagine a free state carved out of large chunks of the American South, with Icon as a protector and guarantor. A black superhero in slavery times isn’t just a cool origin idea; it’s an idea for an alternate history. If Icon is Icon, then black history, and world history, could not be the same.

The comic can’t imagine that, though, precisely because it’s a superhero comic. For the most part, superhero comics say that the present is just like our present, except with powerful beings zipping around. There are revisionist exceptions (like Watchmen) but those are presented as exceptions. Icon wants to be just a standard superhero story. And as just a standard superhero story, it can’t radically alter history, or radically reimagine the present. McDuffie is able to criticize (with love) black conservatism, but in a broader sense he is wholly trapped by a vision more reactionary than even Clarence Thomas could manage. No matter how much power they had or acquired, slaves in Icon still have to wait on white people for their freedom.

Maybe these issues are explored in greater detail later in the series. But in the first collected volume, McDuffie and his cocreators have smart things to say within the limits of the superhero genre, but they have little ability, or interest in pushing at the edges. As a result, Icon can see the contradiction between superheroes and blackness, but can’t really address it beyond making a joke or two. Superheroes can fly to distant moons and free the inhabitants from tyranny, but when confronted with a giant prison camp in the Southern United States, all they can do is a bit of remediation around the edges. In the context of superheroes, the goal of black empowerment can literally mean nothing more than black people flying and hitting bad guys. A more just world is something the comics can’t even dream of.

Gillette Ads and Gender Roles

This first ran on Splice Today.
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Pop culture is everywhere and inescapable, so there’s a very understandable knee-jerk reaction to wish that it not be horrible and soul-destroying. The most recent manifestation of this phenomena centers, somewhat desperately, on a Gillette ad, in which some random narrator receives body-grooming advice/dictats from models Kate Upton, Hannah Simone and Genesis Rodriguez.
 

 
Obviously, no one thinks that this is a great blow for freedom and sexual equality or anything. But various commenters have argued that it’s at least a pleasurably clever rejiggering of gender norms. Paul Farhi at the Washington Post argues that the ad reverses the usual roles of objectified and objectifier:

What’s remarkable about the Upton TV commercial is not just its basic message — guys, you should be shaving down there — but who’s delivering the message. In the spot, set amid a pool party that suggests the last days of ancient Rome, women are set up as the arbiters of what it means to be manly, a role women rarely play in TV commercials. In this case, the women want what men demanded of women long ago — that they become hairless.

Hanna Rosin at Slate agrees — and manages to find an even more cheerful message The ads aren’t just reworking gender roles; they’re capturing the small intimate sweetness of moving in together (with supermodels, no less.)

No one really thinks that Kate and Hannah and Genesis are doing these men any damage. Why? Because the vibe they tap into is not really “last days of Rome, women rule the world,” but “first days of moving in together, girlfriend throws out my La-Z-Boy.” The ad takes for granted a truth that is sometimes overlooked: that men welcome their partners’ small interventions, the way we steer them through the endless set of never-done tasks that constitute women’s work.

I hate to be a party pooper but…okay, I actually kind of like to be a party pooper. We need more party poopers. Because, for the most part, pop culture is not transgressive or sweet or inciteful. It’s predictable and awful. And that goes doubly (or triply) for advertisements. And, certainly, for this advertisement.

If you watch the ad closely, you’ll notice something odd. It’s true that the supermodels are consulted about their preferences in male foliation. But, those preferences are almost entirely routed through the male narrator. He doesn’t even ask the women what they want; he states their desires for them. He tells the (presumably male) audience that Kate likes men with a little hair on their chest, and then lets her finish the sentence by saying she doesn’t like hair on the back. Then he goes to Hannah…and she doesn’t even get to speak, instead merely winking in acknowledgement when he declares that she likes men with smooth stomachs to show off their six-packs. Finally, he declares that Genesis likes men completely hairless and she doesn’t think that’s weird — to which Genesis does a little model shimmy and affirms, “I don’t.” And that’s all she gets to say.

Contra Rosin, then, the ad isn’t really about intimacy between men and women: how can it be, when the women don’t actually get to say anything? Nor are we actually having women arbitrate male beefcake — again, to be an arbiter, it seems like you need to be the one talking, rather than the one on the sidelines cheering the arbiter along.

To me, in other words, this ad doesn’t really seem to have much to do with women at all. The primary relationship in the ad is not guy/girl, but guy/guy; the ad is 1:22 of a guy talking to other guys about how to be a man. That this male/male instruction is more than a little homosocial shouldn’t be especially shocking. As Eve Sedgwick discusses at length in her classic book Between Men, patriarchal relationships within men are often sealed and charged with a not especially suppressed eroticism. But, as Sedgwick also argues, acknowledging that eroticism is verboten — which means that male/male erotics have to be routed, or deferred, through women. Thus the supermodels, who stand there in their evening gowns helpfully vocalizing and validating narrator dude’s kinky desires. They don’t say much (or in Hannah’s case, anything) because it isn’t their words or desires that are at issue. They’re just window dressing to make it okay for men to seduce each other into being men.

That seduction involves conspicuous consumption, gratuitous treatment of women as voiceless window dressing, and complicated and deliberate repression of homosexuality as an acknowledged possibility. Contra Farhi, it doesn’t reverse gender roles: women are still window-dressing for male psychodrama. Contra Rosin, there’s no intimacy; instead, the ad is an almost ludicrously neurotic effort to leverage intimate emotions it simultaneously wishes to deny. Being a man, according to Gillette, involves deceiving yourself about who you love, treating women as things, and buying shit. Which is not exactly surprising, but doesn’t really seem like cause for celebration, either.

Best Music of the Year So Far

What have you all been listening to so far this year? Here’s a couple things I’ve liked:
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“Valis” — Mastery: avant noise black metal.

 
“Sundial” — Jonny Faith: zoned out trippy electronica; you can hear a bit at the link.
 
“A Rush”— Jordannah Elizabeth: psychedlic soul: again, you can hear it at the link.
 
“Blackheart” — Dawn Richard: electric rock soul R&B

 
So let me know what you’ve liked from this year in comments, if you’re so moved.
 

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Utilitarian Review 3/14/15

Wonder Woman News

I am reading at the Urbana Free Library today! At 4:00; hope to see you there if you are an Urbana-ite.

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Jeet Heer on Shakespeare hate.

My list of best women comics creators.

Caroline Small on how women challenge the comics canon.

Kim O’Connor on Mahou Shounen Breakfast Club, the Times Literary Supplement, and the limits of awareness.

Chris Gavaler with a time travel adventure, and the real Kennedy assassination plot.

Kristian Williams on Alan Turing, superhero.

Me on how OITNB’s focus on Piper’s privilege is confused.

Stephan Gray on tabletop roleplaying vs. computer roleplaying (i.e., violence vs. sex.)
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

My first piece for UrbanFaith.com, I interviewed the amazing anti-prison and anti-police brutality activist Mariame Kaba.

At Salon I wrote about Miranda Lambert and doing bro country better than the bros.

At the Atlantic I wrote about Books of Magic the little known predecessor of Harry Potter.

At Pacific Standard I wrote about how racism has damaged job recovery.

At Ravishly I wrote about:

why progressives need conservatism.

— how my dog’s butt is ruining my marriage and my life.

Jane Austen hate and why popularism doesn’t include romance.

At Splice Today I wrote about Hillary Clinton’s email scandal and why I will be voting for her without any enthusiasm.
 
Other Links

Jason Thompson on manga by folks outside of Japan.

Stoya on revenge porn and the importance of consent in the porn industry.

Kelis doing Smells Like Teen Spirit is pretty fun.

Ijeoma Oluo on the unberable whiteness of Kimmy Schmidt.

Nick Baumann on how the Free Beacon is actually doing conservative journalism.
 
 

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The Shapes Roleplay Takes From Its Rules

DaveTrampierPlayersHandbook

 
I love roleplaying. There’s something very liberating about indulging in some mild escapism by jumping into the heart of another person to briefly write another life. It’s nestled somewhere between playing pretend, improvisational theatre, and gaming. I’d like to briefly explain how the mechanical framework for these games shape the stories they produce, specifically by contrasting free-form, chat-based play versus the more common tabletop varieties. When I was a teenager and younger adult, I roleplayed away a huge chunk of my free time in graphical MUDs (Multi-User Domains) like Furcadia or on internet relay chat groups. Eagerly looking for new experiences, I dipped in and out of tabletop roleplaying groups, but I was taken aback at how different the focus was. It wasn’t the mechanical underpinnings that pushed me away, it was how my previous stories about romance, poverty, family life, and skullduggery got replaced with punching goblins in the face. At the time I wrote it off as differing tastes, but now I understand that these characters and players were really just reconfiguring to fit into the mechanical systems of interest.

To give you an idea, my previous experience is generally classed as a variety of free-form roleplay, where players write segments either in real time or via a bulletin board, and players accept that the post exists within that fiction or is unacceptable and rejected. So the narrative that takes shape is a consensus one, and its incentive structure resembles the shape of a continually iterating Coordination Game…of sorts. A player may, in a vacuum, accept or reject any given segment unilaterally (or with agreement from others), but their positive cooperation and investment in the stories both by being accepting and presenting material that is interesting will likely please their partner and make their own segments more likely to be accepted.

All sorts of different incentives and relationships grow out of that game theory soil like a particularly stubborn weed. Generally it’s easier to be passive and get to know other players’ characters than it is to punch them in the mouth and take their things. In most tabletops, however, violence has a consistently predictable quality. People and creatures are rendered into numbers that quantify if one could or could not “take that guy”, and that psychic comfort of knowing “what should happen” pulls on motivations and incentivizes play towards Conan the Barbarian instead of Spice and Wolf.

The end result is that free-form stories are usually based on continued relationships, positive and negative, rather than overt violence. More interestingly, the interaction between characters and material things takes something of a weird left turn. There’s no reason why a player cannot be a king, a dock worker, a powerful demon, a serf; the system of consent dictates a player’s role in the community, so the traditional arc of accumulation of gold, experience, accolades, simply evaporates. The things that a character acquires or possesses are not about what they can let the player do anymore; they’re about what they mean to the character, the story, and the setting. It’s not: “What can this thing I’ve acquired allow me to fantasize?”, but instead: “What are the things worth fantasizing about?”

It gets more complicated, however, because unlike a tabletop, an online space can be subdivided with incredible ease, so what before would be three to five people cloistered around a single series of events, you now have tens of people bouncing against each other, with their own personal stories that intersect in these different spaces. Characters and players traverse room after room in a shared setting just as they would space, situating personal events in a perpetually changing context that’s unique to the perspective of each individual player. In a graphical MUD like Furcadia, the segmentation of space becomes an even finer gradient, as rooms are no longer discrete, and are maps instead, where one can only “hear”, or see posts from characters from the screen they currently inhabit. The twists and turns of a brief encounter aren’t from a humorous critical failure or heroic critical success, but from the strange misfortune of bumping into your worst enemy in a large, shared space where one was never guaranteed to cross paths ever again.

Serendipity is alive and well without dice in these systems, but the tensions surrounding fate are very different. When one plays with a more traditional game, the Dungeon/Game Master is constantly walking a thin line: making a more or less unilateral decision whether or not a rule or roll is going to be followed, in the interest of story-telling. In a free-form setting, there’s all sorts of crosswise motivations, the plot of a character, the immediate respect of your peers, the maintenance of a firmer canon, and so on. This reflexive, continual criticism and investigation means that players have to respect each other and their stories in order to continue or else be pushed out via slowly increasing social tension. When a player or DM gets out of hand at a tabletop, the entire campaign can simply explode, but a problematic player in a free-form group could be squeezed out to different areas to avoid certain players/characters/scenarios, or could be pushed out of the shared area altogether without so much as causing a wrinkle in the shared continuity.

In many ways my fundamental criticisms of mainstream roleplaying are essentially the same that I have for mainstream gaming: I think these games are a regurgitation of Capitalist ideology, and squeeze characters and stories through an arc of accumulation, and violent conflict when none of those qualities are a necessary element of character or story in other contexts. They have antagonism and violence as a fundamental assumption, and often enjoying them means an additional layer of strange, hierarchical consent above and beyond a mere suspension of disbelief. I did a quick summary of the characters I played over the past seven or so years, and I’m really unsure if their central dramatic conceits could exist in normal roleplaying frameworks, or would be improved by layering the core assumptions of tabletop roleplaying games on top of them.

Characterizing tabletops as only about slaying beasts and free-form to be heartfelt stories is disingenuous however, if only because I have skewed the data for my argument, which I will now rectify. Those involved in fantasy and sci-fi are probably well aware of Sturgeon’s law: “Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. is crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other art forms” As an addendum to this law, I’d like to posit that the constraints of any given genre or form have the most profound effect on the crap that forms the 90%. So it follows that since tabletops have violence and Capitalism baked in, and reproduce it, what kind of crap does free-form play generate?

The bottom of free-form play is a crust of barely literate, adolescent sex romps, to the point where some roleplaying services like F-List allow players to list their preferred sexual activities, and at the time of writing, only about 10% of its user base lingers in its non-sexual oriented areas. In an ideal world, free-form is an excellent vector for adult entertainment, but given the quality of both a lot of play being undertaken and the occasionally poisonous communities that exist…It ain’t perfect. Because space, sessions, and conversations can be so readily subdivided into every more private segments, these spaces breed play and players into remarkably unfiltered, queer dreamers.

At the outermost reaches of these spaces, the cis het male of mainstream media begins to look foreign and alien in an endless stream of octuple titted furries, Eldritch sex horrors, and confused Sonic remixes looking for edgeplay or fantastic scenarios of partners being swallowed whole by a urethra of a double-dicked Moloch. This regurgitation of pop culture mixed with the unfiltered sexual id of young adults could not exist nearly as easily in any other space, especially not in tabletop settings where one either needs to find or create rules to describe and constrain these characters and topics. In a free-form space, the only real barrier to finding the double-dicked Moloch of your dreams is to find another player who shares that particular kink.

This is the inevitable product of players exploring themselves and their desires in areas that are as public or private as they wish, and are respectfully constrained by their consent and the consent of their partners/other players. Through different forms, you see different faces of the same culture, and if one were to ask me what I saw in others through free-form roleplay, I’d say I saw a bunch of lonely perverts and socially maladjusted weirdos thirsty for physical and emotional connections, whether a simple hookup, or a shared dream that spanned years of time.

Free-form play naturally creates romances and intrigues while attracting the queer and the perverse specifically because of the mechanical vacuum that exists in that play style. The identities of characters, their desires, and their actions don’t have to be explained by a set of rules, and then mediated by a judge, so they spring outwards into all sorts of strange shapes to fill that void. It isn’t that any of these things couldn’t necessarily exist in a normative tabletop setup, it’s that the levers of power and of certainty, the things that players normally gravitate towards, are ineffectual in describing and mediating social interactions and identities. These mechanical levers, however, are astoundingly effective at describing violence and material accumulation in great detail, and bend players and their motivations towards those things as an end. It’s because of these distinctions in form that two different styles, sharing the same goal of fantasy escapism, can nevertheless create very different stories for very different people.

Prison and White People

This first ran on Splice Today.
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After the first season of Orange Is the New Black, some writers like Yasmin Nair criticized the show for its focus on, and subtle bias towards, white women, especially towards star Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling). The second season addresses these complaints head on. In episode eight, Piper gets a furlough to visit her dying grandmother, despite the fact that many other prisoners, mostly black, have been refused furloughs to see ill loved ones. Piper becomes the (understandable) target of much resentment, and after getting angrier and angrier, she stands up in the cafeteria, apologizes on behalf of white people everywhere, tells them that even though her grandmother is white, she still loves her, and encourages her tormentors to “shut the fuck up.” After which, Suzanne (Uzo Duba), on behalf of the other inmates and (presumably) the viewing audience, throws cake at this privileged, whiny little ass. End of moral.

But in the book on which the memoir is based, Piper didn’t actually get furlough. She asked to see her grandmother die, but the state said, “no.” Piper in real life certainly was middle-class, and privileged in many ways—not many ex-prisoners go on to write famous memoirs that get turned into hit TV series.  But the privilege presented on the show in episode eight, what she’s punished for, wasn’t actually a privilege she had. On the contrary, she was, in this matter, treated just like every other prisoner; with callous, bland disregard and petty authoritarian vindictiveness.

You could say that this doesn’t really matter; the dramatic point is that Piper is middle-class and white and is therefore better off than her cellmates. The incident in the cafeteria demonstrates that; why nitpick about details?

I think it’s worth nitpicking about details, though, because the moral here about Piper’s privilege is a little confused. Specifically, the show seems in many instances so eager to pull Piper down a peg, and to show that she’s privileged, that it can elide the fact that, white as she is, she’s in prison. Moreover, she’s in prison on a decade-old charge of having transported heroin. She committed a pretty low-level crime a while back, and so she’s taken away from her family and robbed of her freedom. She may be privileged in comparison to some of the people in prison with her, but compared to many viewers (and not just white ones) her life, as chronicled in the show, sucks.

This isn’t to say that race is irrelevant. But for the real Piper, racism did not allow her to go see her grandmother: racism prevented her from seeing her grandmother. Racism was used against her, not in the sense that she was discriminated against because she was white, but because the mechanisms and institutions built to police black people ended up policing her.

Racism against black people has been used as an excuse to target certain white people throughout the history of the U.S. White abolitionists who opposed slavery were subject to violence along with blacks in the Cincinnati riots of 1836. During Reconstruction, Northerners who supported black rights could be attacked and killed—The KKK killed white and black civil rights workers. Gone With the Wind gleefully recounts the murder of a Yankee official during Reconstruction who dared tell black people they could marry whites. For that matter, whites who did want to marry blacks, like Richard Loving, faced harassment and discrimination. Even beyond that, Ta-Nehisi Coates points out that politicians who’ve been associated with black causes, whether the Republican Party before the Civil War or the Democratic Party in more recent years, have been subject to racist attacks. As Coates says, “Abraham Lincoln’s light skin did not save him from a racist political attack, any more than it saved him from a racist assassination plot.”

Piper (in real life and in the TV show) wasn’t a civil rights worker or a political figure. But the fact remains that our prison system, the largest in the world, has been justified and sustained by a cultural commitment to policing people of color. As many historians have argued, the war on crime was inaugurated by politicians like Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, who argued that civil rights demonstrations and movements were leading to a breakdown of law and order, the solution for which was more cops and more prisons. The result was an ongoing rhetoric of race-baiting around crime and imprisonment, exemplified by George H.W. Bush’s notorious 1988 Willie Horton ad. That rhetoric in turn fueled a 700 percent growth in prison population between 1970 and 2005.

In 2010 blacks were incarcerated at a rate of 2207 per 100,000 people and Latinos at the rate of 966 per 100,000, as opposed to only 380 per 100,000 for whites.

Nonetheless, there are still a lot of white people in prison: white males were 32.9 percent of the prison population in 2008, as opposed to 35.4 percent black males.  And a large number of those whites were in prison for the same reason as blacks—because America, in an excess of racial panic, has built a massive drug war and a massive prison system in an effort to police and control black people. America’s prison system disproportionately affects black people, through sentencing disparities for crack and other systemic biases. But the drug war machinery sometimes, almost incidentally, catches white people in its gears as well. The white rate of incarceration in the U.S., at 380 per 100,000, is still in the top 20 incarceration rates worldwide, and is twice as high as rates in England and Wales.

Since the moment it enshrined slavery in its Constitution, American authoritarianism has been built upon racism. Piper may be privileged in some ways, but at least for a while that racist authoritarianism has gotten her by the blonde locks as surely as it’s got her cellmates. Once you’ve built your prison, you can put anyone in it. Which is just one way that racism has made America less free, especially for black people, but not for them alone.
 

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Decoding Turing: Queer Superhero

2014, THE IMITATION GAME

 
Genre Conventions

Socially awkward, personally abrasive, math-obsessed, “agnostic about violence,” and gay—Alan Turing makes for an unlikely superhero. Yet the recent Oscar-winning film The Imitation Game gives us a biography largely assembled from tropes native to that genre: an origin story involving childhood trauma and the loss of loved ones, unusual gifts bringing extraordinary power, social persecution, and grave moral dilemmas.

Turing builds a “universal machine” — an “electrical brain” that “could solve any problem.” It was not just the largest or fastest or smartest computer, but the first — an entirely new kind of thing. The British military used the device to break the “unbreakable” code of the Nazi enigma machine. But that only created a new problem — how to use the intelligence they acquired. For the utility of breaking the code depended crucially on the Nazis never realizing that the code had been broken. Each time the Allies used the decrypted information to intervene militarily, they risked losing the advantage they had gained. Turing and his team used “Christopher” to decode the messages; then they had to calculate the odds and decide which Nazi attacks to thwart — and which to let go ahead: “Statistical analysis. The minimum number of acts it will take to win the war. The maximum before the Germans get suspicious.” Their intelligence made possible, among other things, the victory at Stalingrad and the invasion of Normandy; it is thought to have shortened the war by as much as two years. They saved millions of lives, and may have literally rescued the world from tyranny. But in the process, they deliberately allowed many thousands of people to die, soldiers and civilians.

The film rather overdramatizes this dilemma. Literally the first set of messages the excited cryptographers decipher concerns a u-boat attack, and as it happens, one young code-breaker has a brother serving aboard a targeted ship. Obviously the first impulse is to rush to save him, but Turing refuses. “Let the u-boats sink the convoy,” he advises. “Our job is not to save one convoy. Our job is to win the war. . . . Sometimes we can’t do what feels good. Sometimes you have to do what is logical.” With horror the rest of the group slowly realizes that he is right. The ships go down, the brother dies. The scene is meant, I think, to call into question to morality of the whole exercise. But it serves just as well as a justification. It is because they are willing to sacrifice their own loved ones that they have the right to sacrifice others. Their “blood-soaked calculus” allows for no special cases.

Turing makes sacrifices of his own, but of a different sort. Realizing that his engagement to fellow code-puzzler, Joan Clarke puts her at risk, he breaks it off. He begins, “You need to get far away from me” — but then, realizing that he cannot explain why without revealing MI-6 secrets and putting her at greater risk, he changes tack: “I don’t . . . care for you. I never did. I just needed you to break Enigma. I’ve done that now. So you can go.” The irony here is double: The engagement is a cover story, but he is covering for her (to maintain independence from her parents), not her for him (to hide his homosexuality). And second, it is precisely because he cares for her that he must leave her.

The scene mirrors the final and most heroic scene of the 2002 Spiderman film. Over the course of the movie, a lonely nerd, Peter Parker, becomes a wisecracking superhero, defeats the Green Goblin, and finally wins the love of “the girl next door, Mary Jane Watson — the woman I’ve loved since before I even liked girls.” But Parker is weighed down by guilt. He caused the death of his Uncle Ben by a sin of omission; he directly caused the death of his best friend’s father; and he has repeatedly put the people he loves — Mary Jane and Aunt May, in particular — in mortal danger. At the end, Mary Jane realizes that Peter is the “one man who’s always been there for me.” She confesses that she loves him.

The whole movie has built toward this point. We are told in the very first scene that “this, like any story worth telling, is all about a girl.” Peter has spent years vying for her attention, and now, at last, he has his chance.

“I will always be your friend. . . ,” he says. “That’s all I have to give.”

She cries, and he walks away.

It’s a bold way to end the film, the boy getting — but then not getting — the girl, choosing heroism over happiness. By the logic of Spiderman, Peter Parker did the right thing; in The Imitation Game, however, Turing does not come across so well. He seems, instead, unnecessarily, if also somewhat unconvincingly, cruel. Joan, who loves him, probably more than anyone else does, slaps him across the face and says, “You really are a monster.”

She is not alone in the assessment. Others call him “irascible,” “inhuman,” and “an arrogant bastard.” His young colleague, debating the fate of his doomed brother, demands: “Who the hell do you think you are? . . . You’re not God, Alan. You don’t get to decide who lives and who dies.”

“Yes, we do,” Turing replies. “No one else can.”

Later Turing recalls this exchange. “Was I God?” he asks. “No, because God didn’t win the war. We did.”

But what did they become by doing so? Turing offers his confession, and then poses the question to a police detective: “So tell me. What am I? Am I a machine? Am I a person? Am I a war hero? Am I a criminal?”

Like Frank Miller’s Commissioner Gordon 1 in The Dark Knight Returns, the policeman concludes: “I can’t judge you.”

“Well, then,” Turing sighs, disappointed and resigned, “You are no help to me at all.”

Stay Weird

The parallels to superhero stories are numerous and fairly apparent. Peter Parker and Batman have already been mentioned. And with Benedict Cumberbatch playing Alan Turing, comparisons to Sherlock Holmes are inevitable. The willingness to calculate odds and sacrifice thousands to save millions clearly echoes Ozymandias’ scheme in Watchmen — at a somewhat smaller scale, admittedly, but on the other hand, in the real world, so in that sense the stakes are infinitely higher. In fact, there is a bit of every obsessed, lonely scientist — from Dr. Frankenstein to Dr. Doom — in the figure of Alan Turing. (In one scene he rants: “You will never understand the importance of what I have created here!”) And then there is the fact, sadly central to the story, that like Marvel’s mutants, Turing was a member of a persecuted minority.2

Of course it is extremely unlikely that those responsible for the film intended Turing’s story to echo Peter Parker’s, Adrien Veidt’s, or the Charles Xavier’s. And, given the late date of the de-classification of Turing’s war record, it is positively impossible that Stan Lee, Alan Moore, and company based their science hero fictions on Turing’s science hero reality.

But, while some of the similarities are superficial, others are surprisingly deep. Turing’s dilemmas, for example — accepting responsibilities that put loved ones at risk, or sacrificing many lives so that many others might live — are just the sort of decisions certain morally unlucky people have to make. In particular kinds of stories, such people may be heroes, but in others they are villains, and in some they are pitiable, tragic victims. However, the most important parallel, I think, between The Imitation Game and the superhero genre is in the treatment of difference. Each views difference as both a burden and a blessing, and celebrates as heroes those who use their gifts to serve, not merely themselves, but humanity more broadly — in other words, those who in expressing their difference also remind us of what we all share in common.

“No one normal could have done [what you did],” Joan tells Alan. “This morning I took a train though a city that wouldn’t exist were it not for you. . . . Do you wish you could have been normal? The world is an infinitely better place because you were not.”

Alan Turing was a homosexual at a time when homosexuality was not only disapproved of, but also a statutory offense. After the war, when his secret was discovered, he was fired from his job, disgraced in the papers. He was arrested, tried, and convicted of Gross Indecency — the same charge that sent Oscar Wilde to jail half a century before. Rather than go to prison, Turing agrees to a course of “hormonal therapy” — “Chemical castration to cure me of my homosexual predilections.” The film shows him shaking, stammering, losing focus. He was unable to complete a crossword puzzle, much less continue his work in mathematics. After a year of such treatment, he committed suicide.

The film suggests — or rather, it insists — that Turing’s homosexuality was specifically tied to his genius. His difference — sexually, socially, psychologically — is stressed throughout. He is unpopular at school, imperious with colleagues, insubordinate to his superiors. He does not especially like, or even care to understand, other people — and he does not care if they like or understand him. Others in society, such as bullying schoolmates and intruding policemen, treat his intellect as being suspicious in itself. (In fact, it was his intellect that leads to the discovery of his criminal sexuality. The police — responding to a burglary in which nothing was missing, and meeting there a Cambridge professor with a classified war record — initially suspect espionage.) But Turing is “an odd duck,” even when compared to his intellectual peers, and this oddness, this queerness, is what sets his thinking apart from theirs. He is maddeningly literal, unconcerned with convention, dismayed by social niceties. He is strange because he sees things differently, and it is that difference of perception that lets him attack unsolvable problems from new angles.3

Was that difference in perspective related to his sexuality, whether as cause or as consequence? We can’t say for certain, but surely it might have been. Turing, as the movie shows, developed his interest in codes at the same time that he discovered his attraction for other boys. And then, decades later, the effort to cure his homosexuality also robbed him of his genius.

The Imitation Game
offers a moral, and to make sure we don’t miss it, we hear it three times, from three different characters. It supplies the last line of dialogue: “Sometimes it’s the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.”

Of course Alan Turing was not a superhero, for the simple reason that there are no superheroes. (“Superheroes didn’t win the war. . . ,” he might say.) Turing was a real human being. Whatever The Imitation Game may have gotten wrong about him (and I am in no position to judge), it got at least this much right: The world was infinitely better because Alan Turing was not normal. And it cost him his life.
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1.– In The Dark Knight Returns, Commissioner Gordon tries to explain his relationship to Batman by talking about Pearl Harbor: “A few years back, I was reading a news magazine — A lot of people with a lot of evidence said the Roosevelt knew Pearl was going to be attacked — and that he let it happen. . . . I couldn’t stop thinking how horrible that would be. . .and how Pearl was what got us off our duffs in time to stop the Axis. But
a lot of innocent men died. But we won the war. It bounced back andforth in my head until I realized I couldn’t judge it. It was too big. He was too big. . . .”

2.– Writing in the Hooded Utilitarian, Noah Berlatsky has noted that, in many of its particulars, the whole superhero concept is pretty gay: “To begin with, super-heroes generally have a secret life, a ‘secret identity,’ that they can’t talk about even to their closest friends and
relations. In other words, they are all closeted. And what’s in that closet? A hypermasculine, muscle-bound body, swathed in day-glo tights; an uber-manly man whose physical tussles with the bad guys preclude any meaningful relationship with the leading lady. Out of costume, on the other hand, the hero is a feminized sissy-boy, whose painful secret prevents him from having any meaningful relationship with the leading
lady. Either way, what looked like iconic maleness starts to look, from up close, rather queer. And that’s not even getting into the whole boy sidekick thing.”

3.– Turing tells his interrogator, “Of course machines can’t think as people do. A machine is different than a person. Of course it thinks differently.” But then, he notes, how astonishingly different people are
from each other, and concludes, rhetorically: “What’s the point of variation if not to say that we think differently?”