Film review: Imitation Game/Kill the Messenger

Feb 07, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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When I returned to Guyana after working in Grenada, the next day I went on the seawall to jog. As I passed the CID Head Office at Camp Road, I saw an expensive speedboat. It was seized in the then illegal flour trade. People went to jail for selling flour. That was more than thirty-five years ago.
Today, you can buy flour, throw it on the ground and stomp on it and it is legal to do so once you don’t litter the public space. One of the best British novelists, Oscar Wilde, (see his philosophical novel, “Picture of Dorian Grey” the theme of which continuously haunts civilization) died a broken man because he was jailed for homosexuality. Today in many countries, man can marry man; woman can marry woman.
The movies, “The Imitation Game,” and “Kill the Messenger,” now showing in cinemas around the world and released on DVD are about themes similar to the seized speedboat in the police compound and the fate of Oscar Wilde. The Imitation Game is about the tragic life of one of civilization’s greatest geniuses, mathematician, Alan Turing.
Turing changed the course of history in a fantastic way only to find that his country had no gift to give except humiliation. He committed suicide instead of living without dignity    He died a tragic figure.
During World War 2, Turing built what is now known in the world as the computer. He was the inventor of the forerunner of the computer. He built a machine to break the back of ENIGMA, the German code machine. Using his genius in mathematics, Turing’s machine had decoded the messages of Enigma thus effectively reducing the power of the German Leviathan. Breaking Enigma was the beginning of the end of German supremacy during the war.
After WW2, a court sentenced Turing to chemical castration for homosexuality. This wrong of history is so painful because that judge couldn’t even match in at least one percent the nationalist contribution that Turing had made to his country. Decades later, as late as 2013, Queen Elizabeth pardoned Turing. But mathematics and related sciences may have benefited from Turing in ways we will never know if he had lived longer.
In ‘Kill the Messenger”, the story is similar to Turing’s but in completely different circumstances. This time it is not a mathematician but an American journalist, Gary Webb. Webb took investigative journalism to heights that scared the American media so deeply that the American media landscape literally couldn’t believe that the most powerful American agency, the CIA, could be so wicked and dangerous. It meant that Webb ether had to be a silly journalist or a deranged man. He was neither.
In a series of newspaper articles, titled “Dark Alliance,” Webb exposed a dark alliance between the CIA and the right-wing guerrillas that were fighting to overthrow the Sandinista Government in Nicaragua after President Ronald Reagan endorsed the rebels’ insurgency.
Congress banned financial assistance to the guerrillas so President Reagan turned a blind eye to the horrible conspiracy of the CIA. The guerrillas brought in crack cocaine, sold it in African-American districts in Los Angeles, bought weapons with the money, shipped the stuff back to Nicaragua in private planes.
All the top newspapers in the US belittled Webb. Some newspapers and the CIA literally humiliated Webb. Gary Webb lost his job, couldn’t find work and became a journalistic disgrace, His wife and family left him and in 2004, like Turing in 1954, Webb took his life. In 1998, a Senate panel chaired by then Senator, John Kerry, found that the CIA was complicit in the illegal activities of the Nicaraguan rebels.
But that didn’t end in the rehabilitation of Gary Webb. By 1998, the entire world was preoccupied with the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky thing and people didn’t care to know about Dark Alliance.  Today, investigative journalism owes a debt to Gary Webb. Webb’s son helped to publish his father findings. That work and Nick Schou’s book, Kill the Messenger, have eventually vindicated Gary Webb. But it came too late. A brilliant, journalistic life was gone forever.
Sadly, Kill the Messenger is not up for an Oscar Award this year but The Imitation Game is. Why? It is possible that America is still afraid to face what Webb discovered and the film, like Webb, is best left untouched? The Imitation Game and Kill the Messenger are about zeitgeists and the prevailing values they contain that long after become obsolete but truths survive. What both films teach us is that humans must at all time search for truths than become willing victims of the moods of changing times.

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