Monday, December 29, 2014

The Imitation Game and a Lack of Respect for Audiences

Deadline has an interview with the maker of The Imitation Game.  The following quote made me sad:

we wanted to open up the process of code-breaking to the audience. There is a tendency sometimes in pieces like this to (let) the characters jabber technical gibberish that no one in the audience will understand. We wanted you to be able to follow it. 
Maybe one day the people of Hollywood will learn to respect their audiences, or at least learn how to render technical 'gibberish' into more understandable gibberish.  I believe it was Feynman who was of the opinion that if a subject could not be taught in a manner appropriate to first year college students, then that subject was not really understood at all.  Code breaking can be taught in a manner appropriate to first year college students (indeed, cryptography is usually at least mentioned to first year computer science students), and I personally wanted more technical 'gibberish' from the film and less emotional fluff. Personally, I think the problem is not so much the audience as that the writers themselves do not understand technical things, and so of course they can not render it as anything other than the gibberish they understand it as.

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