While the films, The Theory of Everything and The Imitation Game, each tell an important and inspiring story about Stephen Hawking and Alan Turing respectively, I found neither to be as great alone as they were together. Juxtaposed as a single experience — which happened because I saw them less than a day apart, brought a certain poignancy into view. Let me explain.

Seeing Hawking and Turing as “one film” highlights qualities in each character that might otherwise be lost. Let me compare and contrast the two lives in these films.

Some of the obvious similarities:

• both films are stories or “biopics” about men

• both were born in England

• both were mathematical geniuses and original thinkers

• both attended school, at one point in their lives, at Cambridge 

• both devoted their lives to decoding a particular mystery

• both have first names that are two syllables long ending with the letter “n” and last names with two syllables ending in “ing”

• both lives overlapped (Turing was 30 when Hawking was born)

• both Hawking’s ideas on time, black holes, singularity, and more, and Turing’s ideas on computing (digital) machines, artificial intelligence, mathematical biology, and more have benefitted the world.

• both had to overcome significant challenges, one from the inside out (his body’s dis-ease), and the other from the outside in (his society’s dis-ease).

Some of the obvious differences:

• Hawking is heterosexual, marries, bears children, divorces, remarries; Turing is homosexual, wants a relationship but is criminalized for his sexual orientation

• Turing decodes Enigma, the German’s machine for encrypted communication; Hawking decodes the Universe, the Singularity’s form of encrypted communication. 

• Turing uses math and logic to solve a practical problem while Hawking uses math and logic to solve a theoretical one.

• Hawking’s physical changes are muscular and genetically determined; Turing’s physical changes are hormonal and legally determined.

• Hawking is honored in his lifetime; Turing is disgraced in his. 

Reflections:

Everyone, including Hawking, benefits from Turing’s contributions. For without digital computing machines, the war would have lasted 2-4 more years and the Allies could have lost. Without Turing, Hawking himself might not have a speech generating device (SGD) with which to communicate. In fact, it was Turing who designed a portable secure voice communications machine after the war.

But Turing also benefits from Hawking. For Hawking’s speculation that time reverses in a black hole allows us to look back from today into the black hole of Turing’s fate. It is worth mentioning that one of the thousands of people who signed the petition for Alan Turing to be posthumously pardoned in 2013 was Stephen Hawking.

There is something inter-spiritual about the way the differences and similarities of these two lives unite through the screen, strengthening each other. Interestingly, Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays Turing in The Imitation Game, also played Hawking in a 2004 television program while Eddie Redmayne’s performance as Hawking in The Theory of Everything is so believable it may yield him an Oscar. I almost want to say that “the” movie I saw was a blend of the two.

When Hawking says, “While there’s life, there is hope”, he receives a standing ovation from the audience to whom he gives a lecture in the film. The next day, at the theater where I saw the Turing film, the audience stood up after the credits and gave a live ovation. But let’s “hope” it’s the real “lives” of Hawking and Turing -not the movie ones- that receive our honor.

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