I recently watched the Oscar-winning film The Imitation Game and found myself comparing it to Odds Against Tomorrow, particularly the two main characters, Mitchell Zukor and Alan Turing.

For those of you not familiar with the movie, it depicts the story of Alan Turing’s time working for the British government during WWII. He was an amazing mathematician and was given the task to break “Enigma,” the German translator that accounted for all the communication on that side of the war zone. Alan’s intelligence comes with common characteristics of not completely understanding social skills, living in one’s own world, etc. While watching the film, I felt like I was seeing Mitchell Zukor on the screen.

The two characters are both obsessed with problems; they both live for finding and fantasizing about all sorts of problems and isolate themselves from others because of this character trait. The correlation between their intelligence and social skills is interesting to think about. What does an IQ number really tell about a person? Can one be either smart or social, not both? What effect does this obsession with problems and disaster have on a person’s social skills?

I think that both stories addresses the last question with the development of the main characters. Mitchell has this obsession with disaster including the odds that an event will occur, the impact of the event, etc. Alan is obsessed with problems – almost any type. His Commander mentions the Enigma and that it “isn’t difficult, it’s impossible.” Alan responds with, “Good. Let me try and we’ll know for sure, won’t we?” Alan eventually does solve the Enigma.

Both the characters seem to be hiding something behind their odd obsessions. In Mitchell’s case, he has an underlying fear of death, which really leads to a fear of living. An example of this is his first apartment. His parents were the driving force in his search for a new apartment, which lets the readers believe that he wouldn’t have moved without that push. Another example, which shows his unwillingness to experience new things, is the Korean food phase. While it is impulsive and unlike him to try a new food, he only ever tries that new food for weeks. He switches restaurants, but still eats the same exact dish, prepared the same exact way. This very specific routine shows that he is scared of change.

In Alan’s case, he uses problems to avoid dealing with his internal issues and he uses his intelligence as an excuse to be rude and arrogant to people. Also, once he solves the problem that he’s working on, he searches for or creates a new one. For example, when he and his team decoded the Enigma, he couldn’t celebrate because he seemed to find something missing from the equation. He came to the conclusion that the Germans would know that the Enigma is solved and that Alan’s hard work would have gone to waste, so he wouldn’t allow his team to tell anyone where the next attacks would be, despite one of his teammates having a family member on the ship that the Germans were planning to attack. It seems as though Alan uses problems to avoid living, just like Mitchell does.

I was able to make new observations about both characters because of my reading and watching the stories at the same time. The correlations between the characters despite the major differences between both plots – the fact that one is set in the future, one is set in the past – shows that this type of character can exist in any environment.