Emerging From Emergence

Emerging from Emergence:

Tracing Representations of Autism Spectrum Disorders Across Forty Years of Contemporary Film and Life Writing

Part One: Film

In “The Cultural Framing of Disability: Telethons as a Case Study,” Paul K. Longmore details how “telethons explained the social meaning of disability . . . in terms of medical and social pathology,” and how consequently individuals with disabilities were “presented as ‘the afflicted’ and ‘the less fortunate’” (505).

Part One: Film

Longmore foregrounds the role in telethons of “what the historian Robert Dawidoff has called ‘obsessive infantilization,’” through which children are “displayed as the representative type of disabled person” and through which “the disabled adults who appeared on the broadcasts [are often treated] as though they were children” (505).

Part One: Film

As a consequence of such obsessive infantilization, disability becomes, in Dawidoff’s words, “a culture-wide metaphor for the vulnerable, the pitiable, the weak, and thus [for something] unacceptable and panicking in an American culture in which identity is formed in constant fear of the loss of autonomy” (qtd. in Longmore 505).

Part One: Film

According to Longmore, “The model for this infantilized image was Tiny Tim in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Telethons borrowed and Americanized the traits of the Dickens character: the disabled person as perpetual child, sweet, cheerful, and brave; the disabled person as invalid, helpless, dependent, and fundamentally different from ‘normal’ people; the disabled person as object of charity, grateful but hopeless and doomed unless those who are healthy and normal ‘give’; . . .

Part One: Film

. . . the disabled person as vehicle of others’ redemption, existing not for himself or herself, not as a human being in her or his own right, but to provide the occasion for nondisabled people to renew their humanity; the disabled person as sentimental entertainment, a figure whose pathetic situation or heroic striving touches the hearts of readers and viewers” (505-06).

Part One: Film

In this first part of my talk, I will argue that one finds these traits—particularly the final two traits from this list (the disabled person as vehicle of others’ redemption and the disabled person as sentimental entertainment)—as not only still operative in but actually as consistently serving as the primary function of cinematic representations of autistic characters.

Part One: Film

In film after film, I suggest, characters with an autism spectrum disorder exist first and foremost not for their own sakes but instead to touch the hearts (and thereby to provide an occasion to renew the humanity) of one or more of the main neurotypical characters—and, ultimately, of neurotypical viewers as well.

Part One: Film

While one may certainly chart some very clear progress in the treatment of such characters, ultimately even the most recent representations continue to effectively reduce the autistic individual(s) to an auxiliary, if not subsidiary, role in the film (as a vehicle for the sentimental entertainment and/or redemption of the neurotypical).

The Films

Change of Habit (1969) The Boy Who Could Fly (1986) Rain Man (1988) Relative Fear (1994) Snow Cake (2006)

Change of Habit

The first of these films is the still relatively underappreciated Change of Habit (1969), Elvis Presley’s last Hollywood feature film. It casts Presley as Dr. John Carpenter, the head of a ghetto clinic who needs help to keep the practice running. Michelle Gallagher (Mary Tyler Moore), Irene Hawkins (Barbara McNair), and Barbara Bennett (Jane Elliot) seem just what the doctor ordered when they arrive to assist him with his workload.

Change of Habit

Unbeknownst to the good doctor, however, they are all undercover nuns on a mission from God—which is a problem, because John is immediately attracted to Michelle, and the handsome, unattached young doctor sees no reason not to put all his considerable personal charms behind an effort to win her over.

Change of Habit

Michelle in turn starts to fall for him, in large part because of their work together with a young girl named Amanda (Lorena Kirk). Amanda is brought in by her aunt, Miss Parker (Virginia Vincent), who tells them Amanda was born deaf.

Change of Habit

After a cheap laugh at the expense of the aunt and persons with autism spectrum disorders (when it is suggested to Miss Parker that Amanda is autistic, she replies, “Artistic? Nah, she don't even pick up a crayon”), we learn Amanda's mother is to blame for the child’s autism.

Change of Habit

According to Michelle, a psychiatric social worker with a degree in speech therapy, “Sometimes when a child’s rejected very early in life they will crawl inside themselves and shut out the whole world, as if they’re trying to punish the rest of us along with themselves.”

Change of Habit

This reflects what unfortunately was the predominant theory at the time as to what caused autism, the “refrigerator mother” theory. Despite some disagreement about how to proceed, John and Michelle eventually team up and work together during an agonizing session of “rage reduction” therapy.

Change of Habit

After having Amanda’s special doll taken away from her, the doctor engages in what perhaps is best described as a lengthy forced hug. As Amanda struggles and screams, he tells her, “You got to learn to start loving people. I'm gonna hold you until you get rid of all your hate. You get as mad as you can; then you can start to give love and take love.”

Change of Habit

Following a puzzling cut to the waiting room for a comic interlude (in which a patient enters, hears the screams, and decides to come back another time), Michelle begins to hold Amanda’s legs, and together the two colleagues offer a rotation of varying refrains, such as “Love you, Amanda,” “Get as mad as you can,” and “Is that the best you can do for somebody who loves you?”

Change of Habit

Finally, Amanda starts to repeat/echo the word Mad (the first time she has ever spoken!), which she follows up with Love, Love you, Big girl, and Home, all in the space of a sentimental but profoundly unrealistic minute. After Miss Parker tearfully departs with Amanda, Dr. Carpenter and Sister Michelle congratulate each other with a triumphant, “We did it!”

Change of Habit

This miracle breakthrough, which seems to promise that Amanda’s autism is on its way to being healed/cured, serves as a breakthrough moment in the featured love relationship as well. Shortly thereafter, following one of those ubiquitous touch football game ‘love tackles,’ they collect Amanda on their way to get ice cream. After the vendor mistakes the three for a happy family unit, they hop on a carousel for a ride.

Change of Habit

John tries to tease a smile from Amanda, and soon breaks into the Elvis number, “Have a Happy,” in which he croons about a special kind of magic that cannot do its work “unless you have a happy, warm smilin’ face.” Amanda is of course beaming before he gets to the end of the song, with its admonitions to “Start believin’ in believin’” and to “Let your address be Sunshine Place.”

Change of Habit

In the film’s final scene we are left hanging as to whether Sister Michelle will stick with the Carpenter of Galilee or marry the Carpenter of Graceland (though many would say that, as she watches the latter plow through a rock ‘n’ roll mass, it’s obvious she’s come around to the man she’s already confessed she is in love with in spite of her vows).

Change of Habit

Regardless, what is clear is that Amanda’s role in the film has been merely to advance the love story’s plot. Amanda’s plight as an autistic child touches the hearts of the two medical professionals, and allows both the brash doctor and the earnest nun to see a whole new dimension to the other during their time with her, ultimately promising them a sort of redemption in the form of their newly discovered love for one another.

Change of Habit

At work here is the very sort of operation Michael Bérubé detects in literary characters such as Tiny Tim or Boo Radley, in which “their disabilities . . . serve . . . as indexes of everyone else’s moral standing, offering the other characters opportunities to demonstrate whatsoever they might do to the least of their brothers” (569-70). Bérubé stresses that these sorts of disabled characters must be critiqued “for their failure to do justice to the actual lived experiences of people with disabilities” (570).

Change of Habit

Change of Habit participates in what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has described (in analyzing a 1949 March of Dimes poster) as an intertwining of “the ideology of cure and the mandate for normalcy,” the effect of which is to “crowd[] out any possible narrative of accommodating rather than eliminating disability” (525).

Change of Habit

Under precisely such an ideology of cure and a mandate for normalcy, the film’s dynamic duo merely eliminates (indeed, eliminates all too easily) Amanda’s disability rather than instead being forced to come to terms with how to begin to more realistically accommodate the lived experience of her autism.

Change of Habit

Indeed, there is no depiction of the lived experience of autism at all, as Amanda is only a minor character whose role in the film is to bring the main characters together, not to portray the realities of life for an autistic child.

The Boy Who Could Fly

Seventeen years later, another film depicting a character with autism actually offers a much more profound level of development for this character. In The Boy Who Could Fly (1986), Lucy Deakins stars as Milly Michaelson, a 14-year-old girl moving to a new town after the death of her father. Jay Underwood is her co-star, an autistic boy-next-door named Eric Gibb who likes to pretend he’s flying.


Significantly, this autistic character is not only one of the two leads, but actually serves as the main lead’s love interest. I cannot understate the monumental importance of this quantum leap in granting enough humanity to an autistic character to establish (in this case) him as worthy of the role of love interest.


Yet, while Eric’s character certainly is not a subsidiary one in terms of plot, this film nonetheless ultimately ends up assigning to his character an auxiliary function reminiscent of the sort allotted to Change of Habit’s Amanda, merely with an entirely new end.


Milly immediately is fascinated by her strange neighbor, and soon reports to her mom, Charlene Michaelson (Bonnie Bedelia), and her little brother Louis (Fred Savage) that Eric is autistic (again merely fodder for a trivializing line, here from Louis, “He’s got some marbles loose, or what?”—the mom even smirks at the crude translation).


Later on, when Milly asks Geneva (Mindy Cohn), a neighbor girl, if she thinks Eric is handsome, the reply is, “If he didn’t have the brains of a goldfish. You can't be in love with a retard.” Obviously we are meant to see such opinions as inappropriate responses, but one gets the sense that the writers also are aiming for a cheap laugh at the same time.


According to Milly, Eric has “never spoken a word in his life, and he doesn't like to be around people.” His parents died in a plane crash when he was five, and from the moment of their death he started pretending to fly, as if “he knew it was the only way to save them.”


She also reports that some state Institute wants to take Eric away from his guardian, Uncle Hugo Gibb (Fred Gwynne); indeed, shortly thereafter she watches as Eric is brought home in a straightjacket by uniformed men. Luckily, a sympathetic teacher from the local school, Mrs. Sherman (Colleen Dewhurst), has for the moment convinced the authorities to let him “be around normal people.”


It is not long before Mrs. Sherman notices Milly’s interest in Eric, and Eric’s unprecedented interest in Milly, so she asks Milly to spend time with him in exchange for extra credit, or as part of a science project. She tells Milly that “doctors can’t get a word out of him,” but “maybe a friend could.”


Milly does make a difference. At one point Eric reaches out to hold her hand; at another, he stops a hard ball from hitting her in the head by making a sudden and dramatic last-second grab. At the same time, he manages to help her as well. One night after a family fight at dinner, Eric brings the family back together by finding and playing home movies starring the recently deceased husband/father.


Watching these clips, tears begin rolling down his cheek, the first real show of emotion one has from his character. While it may not yet be fully apparent, this scene serves to foreshadow what ultimately will be Eric’s auxiliary role in renewing the humanity of those whose lives he will touch.


Not long after, Milly falls off a high wall when she is with Eric, hitting her head on the way down. In the hospital, she dreams that Eric flies up to her room and takes her with him into the clouds to look down on fireworks, and they kiss. She nevertheless comes out the experience insisting to the hospital psychiatrist (Louise Fletcher) that Eric had saved her life by flying down to catch her as she fell.


When she gets out of the hospital she learns that Eric has been institutionalized in the meantime, but after he catches a glimpse of the family trying to visit him, he escapes back home. When the uniformed men arrive on the scene, Milly leads him across town and eventually up to the roof of the school in an attempt to get away from them. As the men close in, he turns to her and speaks his first word: “Milly.”


After this overly sentimental breakthrough moment, which has in no way been prepared for by the plot, she asks him if he can really fly; he nods, and so together they leap off the edge hand-in-hand. At this potentially devastatingly tragic moment, the film reveals itself to be in fact a fantasy production.


He can fly, and as long as she holds his hand she can too. A mob scene from the school carnival coincidentally taking place at the time follows the flying pair home (a plot device that not only provides a crowd but also allows Eric to perform another ubiquitous stock gag, the flying basketball dunk).


Dropping her off at her window, Eric speaks again: “Goodbye, Milly. I love you.” He kisses her, and then flies away, presumably because now that his exceptional power has been revealed, he no longer will be able to live a ‘normal’ life but rather will all the more be treated as an object for medical and/or scientific inquiry.


Yet the lives of every single person who cared about Eric on some level are transformed in the wake of seeing with their own eyes that a boy could fly (even the until-then completely hopeless drunk, Uncle Hugo). Mrs. Sherman’s theory on how Eric learned to fly is the apparent moral of the story: “Maybe if you wish hard enough and love long enough, anything is possible.”


But the final word belongs to Milly: “He made us believe in ourselves again. Now, when I feel like giving up, not trying, all I have to do is think of him and what he taught me.” “We're all special,” she continues in her voiceover. “We're all a little like Eric. Maybe we can't pull up into the clouds, but somewhere, deep inside, we can all fly.”


Ultimately, then, even more so than in Change of Habit, one surmises the final role of the autistic character is as a vehicle of others’ redemption and as a heroic striver touching the hearts of the other characters and viewers alike. What is missing, seventeen years later, is the ideology of the cure.


Instead, The Boy Who Could Fly offers a different narrative, one “in which disability is rendered as exceptionality and thereby redeemed—as,” (for example) Bérubé observes, “when Dumbo finds that the source of his shame is actually the source of his power” (569). Here, significantly, Eric experiences his own redemption as well, without some ultimate mandate for normalcy, instead of merely redeeming others.


Also significantly, here the love relationship involves the autistic character rather than merely enabling the love relationship of two nondisabled characters (two characters in fact responsible for the disabled character’s cure).


At the same time, however, this is by no means a “possible narrative of accommodating rather than eliminating disability” (Garland-Thomson 525). This is, after all, a fantasy film; it does not aim to realistically envision how Milly and Eric might continue to be friends, even lovers.


Because he is ‘special,’ not normal, Eric ultimately cannot live in (perhaps does not even belong to) this world, the ‘real world’ so many narratives construct as by nature antithetical to the ‘other world’ to which individuals with disabilities are thought to belong.


As Bérubé asserts, “in the rendering of disability as exceptionality, the disability itself effectively disappears” (569). In the end, one is left with an elephant and a boy who can fly, not an elephant with big ears and a boy with autism.

Rain Man

“This narrative ‘redemption’ of disability is,” applying Bérubé’s argument about Dumbo to The Boy Who Could Fly, “. . . slightly different from the Rain Man logic by which it turns out to be a good idea to bring your autistic brother to Las Vegas to count cards: for when you leave Las Vegas, your brother is still autistic” (569).

Rain Man

Rain Man (1988), appearing only two years after The Boy Who Could Fly, also casts its autistic character in one of the film’s starring roles, and its more realistic (even if also ultimately more comic) portrayal of an individual with autism is deservedly noteworthy.

Rain Man

Certainly it is hard to argue with the film’s success—nominated for eight Oscars, it took home four: Best Actor in a Leading Role, Best Director, Best Picture, and Best Writing, Original Screenplay. It is, in many respects, truly a wonderful film.

Rain Man

At the same time, however, the film nonetheless ultimately serves to reinforce a number of the same old problematic assumptions about autistic individuals. Rain Man’s credits list its autistic character, Raymond Babbitt (Dustin Hoffman), as the leading role. The screenplay itself, however, in many ways suggests the actual leading role belongs to his brother, Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise).

Rain Man

Obviously, Rain Man is not just Raymond’s story, just as it is not just Charlie’s story either (although when the film opens it is only Charlie’s story at first, and it closes focusing on him as well). Above all, it is a shared story; they are co-stars, like Milly and Eric. Yet while both leads gain a brother, it is Charlie who clearly is the most dynamic of the two characters.

Rain Man

When one first meets Charlie he is a self-centered jerk who treats his girlfriend Susanna (Valeria Golino) incredibly thoughtlessly—indeed, he seems to rarely if ever make the effort even to hold a real conversation with her—and who displays no emotion whatsoever when he learns his estranged father has died.

Rain Man

One learns that neither father nor son has forgiven the other for an incident where 16-year-old Charlie ‘borrowed’ his father’s prized (and, therefore, off limits) car, for which his father allowed him to be arrested and to spend two days in jail. At the reading of the will, Charlie learns, much to his embittered chagrin, that although he has been left the car, his father’s 3-million-dollar estate has been left in trust to someone else.

Rain Man

When not long after he discovers that this person is Raymond, an older brother he never knew he had, his main concern is with how to manipulate the situation to gets what he feels is coming to him (and what he needs to save his business peddling luxury cars). So, he tracks down Raymond at his institutional care facility (Walbrook) and in effect kidnaps him while he is in the process of trying to figure out how to get the money.

Rain Man

Thus, Charlie’s initial treatment of Raymond is as offensive as his treatment of virtually everyone else he encounters. If anything, he only is increasingly frustrated by Raymond’s atypical behavior, which strikes him as defective (“Stop acting like an idiot!”; “Stop acting like a fuckin’ retard!”; This guy’s a fuckin’ fruitcake!”).

Rain Man

Susanna leaves him over it, and as everything seems to be crumbling all around him, Charlie is about to lose it himself over Raymond’s obsessions with K-Mart and Wapner or his fears of flying and the rain. Charlie simply doesn’t get Raymond’s disability—in fact, on some level, he doesn’t actually believe in it at all.

Rain Man

Thus, he tells Raymond, “You hear me; I know you hear me. You don’t fool me with his shit,” and, “This autism is a bunch of shit. You can’t tell me you’re not in there somewhere.”

Rain Man

It is not evident Charlie ever moves beyond this pathological understanding of autism (as a disorder that somehow, ironically, has kidnapped and is hiding the real Raymond behind its abnormalities) to a place where he can fully accept Raymond as he is.

Rain Man

He does, however, clearly experience a turning point when he discovers the imaginary friend named Rain Man (the memory of whom still seems to move him profoundly with some of the very few feelings of love and comfort he associates with his childhood) was in fact Raymond.

Rain Man

In the process, he learns Raymond initially was institutionalized as a consequence of his potential for endangering baby Charlie. Significantly, right after this moment he reaches out for the first time to Susanna, calling her to say he hopes their relationship is not over.

Rain Man

Granted Charlie has plenty of selfish motivation in exploiting Raymond’s savant abilities with numbers and memory to strike it rich in Vegas. Still, he has begun to interact with Raymond differently, in a way that seems increasingly to acknowledge Raymond’s humanity and his own fraternal feelings.

Rain Man

The scene where Charlie gives Raymond a dance lesson obviously is one of the more important moments along these lines; Charlie wants to hug Ray, and although the latter is upset rather than comforted by this gesture, one understands their relationship has reached a whole new level.

Rain Man

Thus, during the film’s climax, Charlie expresses to Dr. Bruner (Jerry Molen), the head of Walbrook, his desire to care for Raymond for the rest of his life. Shortly before the official meeting to decide Raymond’s fate, Charlie turns down the money he originally had demanded of Bruner in exchange for the safe return of Raymond, telling him, “It’s not about money anymore.”

Rain Man

Instead, it is about family. Charlie clearly regrets not knowing he had a brother all these years, noting how nice it was to get to know him during the week they have spent together. Thus, in the final showdown, he claims Raymond has come further with him during that time than during all his years at Walbrook.

Rain Man

When Bruner matter-of-factly explains Raymond is not capable of having a relationship with him, Charlie angrily snaps that this is only Bruner’s opinion. He insists, “I made a connection,” and he initially adamantly rejects the suggestion Raymond is not capable of functioning in a community by retorting, “He’s capable of a lot more than you know.”

Rain Man

By the end of the movie, Charlie is a completely transformed being. Ultimately, then, Raymond’s most prominent role in the screenplay is to serve as an index of Charlie’s moral standing, redeeming his own obsessions with self and money, and thereby reuniting him not only with Susanna but more importantly with his own humanity.

Rain Man

This is not to say Raymond’s character is static. Indeed, would this be a Hollywood feature film without suggesting otherwise? Surely it would be too depressing, too painful, if Charlie’s new-found affection for his brother was not reciprocated. Accordingly, this accomplished film ultimately falls back on the same sort of sentimental entertainment as its predecessors.

Rain Man

For example, after Charlie has been forced to agree with Bruner that Raymond needs to return to Walbrook, in a quiet moment alone together Charlie tells him, “I like having you for my brother,” and Raymond responds by initiating the touching gesture of gently resting their heads upon the other.

Rain Man When one recalls that Vern (Michael D. Roberts),

Raymond’s personal attendant at Walbrook, early on informs Charlie and Susanna that Raymond “doesn’t touch people,” that people are “not his first priority,” and that he wouldn’t even notice if someone bid him goodbye, then surely the fact Raymond does acknowledge Charlie’s goodbye at the Amtrak station in the final scene only reinforces that Charlie and Raymond have indeed made a connection.

Rain Man Yet one’s glimpse of the lived experience of

autism in this film almost exclusively derives from the ‘on-the-road’ adventures of Charlie and Raymond, which (while both highly educational and highly entertaining) represent only a very limited slice of autistic life—and, further, constitute a slice of autistic life ultimately employed to show Raymond in fact is not capable of functioning in any sort of real-world community.

Rain Man

This results in some very troubling implications about what the rest of an autistic life might, or should, look like. Much of one’s response to Raymond (the humor and the pity) trades off of the fact that he has been removed from the comfortable routine(s) of his home environment at Walbrook.

Rain Man

So, in the end, the film would have it that Raymond cannot really live outside the walls of an institutionalized setting with its professional help, at least for any extended period of time—even though he is quite ‘high functioning’ according to the small town doctor (Kim Robillard) Charlie takes him to while on the road.

Rain Man

The time Raymond spends with Charlie is heartwarming (if also, at times, heartbreaking), to be sure, but ultimately one is supposed to agree with the writers that he is better off at Walbrook—even though one feels at least implicitly invited to become suspicious of the medical establishment and its conventional wisdom as a result of Charlie’s defensive, if not actually antagonistic, positioning vis-à-vis Dr. Bruner.

Rain Man

In the end, Raymond embodies all five traits Longmore associates with the problematic telethon construction of individuals with disabilities: he is, in many respects, something of a “perpetual child”; he is “helpless, dependent, and fundamentally different from [the] ‘normal’ people” who unlike Raymond may live in a real-world community;

Rain Man

he is an “object of charity,” both in terms of his care at Walbrook and in terms of the emotional response his character aims to engender; he is a “vehicle of others’ redemption” serving “to provide the occasion for nondisabled people to renew their humanity”; and he is figure who “touches the hearts” of viewers as yet another instance of “sentimental entertainment.”

Relative Fear

All this being said, one need only compare Rain Man to its main successors in the 1990s, (films such as Relative Fear [1994], Silent Fall [1994], and Mercury Rising [1998]), to see how relatively progressive it in fact was. All of these films represent a significant step backward in the representation of autistic characters.

Relative Fear

These thriller films typically employ an autistic child whose pathetic situation touches the hearts of viewers. They also employ that child as the vehicle of others’ redemption, allowing a nondisabled main character to renew his/her humanity. Some even exploit the otherness of autism to suggest some sort of evil lurking behind their difference.

Relative Fear

Most substantially, however, all of these films reduce their autistic characters to a cheap plot trick—each child holds the key to the mystery behind murders the nondisabled character(s) must solve, but the child is unable to relate that information to the main character because of their disability.

Relative Fear Relative Fear opens with the juxtaposed scenes of

two mothers, Linda Pratman (Darlanne Fluegel) and Connie Madison (Denise Crosby), giving birth at the same time in adjoining rooms. Connie is a murderer who has been brought over under armed guard from a federal institute for the criminally insane, but her baby somehow ends up being switched with Linda’s before being brought to her. The scene ends with Connie’s baby scratching Linda on the face and drawing blood during their first night alone together in the hospital.

Relative Fear

Fast forward four years, and we find Adam Pratman (the switched son, played by Matthew Dupuis) being taken out of preschool by his teacher after the other kids have smeared him all over with paint (apparently not the first time). Adam is a very talented artist, but hasn’t spoken at all yet, not even ‘Mama’ or ‘Dada’.

Relative Fear

Initially, then, Adam’s character serves as something of a figure of sentimental entertainment, evoking our pity for him and our sympathy for his parents’ distress over his disability. Later that night, however, viewers find him watching the National Murder Network on TV and drawing a picture of bloody hands.

Relative Fear

Shortly thereafter, Chubby, the beloved dog of Adam’s maternal grandfather, Earl Ladelle (M. Emmet Walsh), disappears. Earl is openly hostile to Adam—he calls him “dumb as a stump”—and so the audience is encouraged to believe Adam is responsible.

Relative Fear

Then, a few days afterwards a boy who takes piano lessons from Linda (and who also picked on Adam in an earlier scene, forcing his mouth full of dirt) secretly takes Adam across the road to show him a gun. At the sound of gunshots, Adam’s father Peter (Martin Neufeld), rushes to the scene only to find the boy shot and Adam holding the gun.

Relative Fear

This precipitates one of only two explicit referencings of Adam’s autism: Detective Atwater (James Brolin) asks to talk with Adam about what exactly happened, but Linda tells him that that simply is not possible, that Adam is autistic and can’t speak (about which Atwater observes to himself as he walks away, “Isn’t that convenient?”).

Relative Fear

At this point, the viewers’ pity and sympathy for Adam is meant to be replaced by mistrust and suspicion. The audience then watches as Earl and his wife Margaret (Linda Sorenson) both die in short succession—and in each instance we are treated to a shot of Adam staring intently at the dead body with what can only strike one as a preternatural calmness and composure.

Relative Fear

Adam’s eerie silence now seems to betoken his pathological evil nature. This is powerfully reinforced as the audience is made privy to Linda’s own growing fears that something is horribly wrong with Adam.

Relative Fear

When she awakes to find him once again watching the National Murder Network (which she had programmed as a blocked channel) during the middle of the very night of Margaret’s death, she loses it with him: first asking him, “What is wrong with you?” then ordering him, “Don’t disobey me again!” and finally shaking him and screaming at him, “Wake up, Adam! Wake up!!”

Relative Fear

Peter intervenes, but is unable to help her chase away her feelings of desperation. She tearfully explains to Peter, but in front of Adam, “I feel so, so disconnected from him; I’m his mother, but sometimes I think he’s not even mine.”

Relative Fear

When she learns about Connie’s simultaneous delivery of a boy that night, Linda decides to go to see her at the institute. After Connie tries to choke Linda to death during their private interview, the director agrees to provide Linda with information about the fate of Connie’s son in return for her agreeing not to mention the choking incident.

Relative Fear She thus is able to meet her real son for the first

time at the orphanage he has grown up in (for, while very amiable and quite smart, he has never been adopted because no one has wanted him after learning who his parents were), and this visit confirms for her (and us) that her maternal instinct was right all along—the evil disabled boy with whom she has been living is not her son, has not sprung from her womb, but instead is the monstrous offspring of serial killers.

Relative Fear

She now may see herself as completely absolved of any and all blame for what Adam has become; he no longer need contaminate her sense of herself as a mother, for Adam’s evil is revealed to be fully Other to her still integral Self.

Relative Fear

At the very moment Linda is with Henry (her real son), Detective Atwater is paying a visit to the Pratman house because he has grown increasingly suspicious of Adam’s potential involvement in all of the “accidents.” With Peter outside obliviously working on a car, Atwater enters unnoticed to question Adam.

Relative Fear

Adam runs and hides, and while Atwater climbs up into the attic looking for him, we see someone putting marbles on the stairs below. Atwater, of course, slips and falls on them, as Adam watches from below. We cut to follow Clive (Adam’s tutor, played by Bruce Dinsmore) as he arrives at the front door to find Peter bending suspiciously over the body, now with a bloody screwdriver sticking in it.

Relative Fear

Clive calls the police and Peter is arrested for Atwater’s murder, but we know it is the evil autistic boy who has madness in his veins and violence in his heart who in fact is responsible. Linda, returning just as the police are driving Peter away, is understandably distraught and disturbed.

Relative Fear

Alone with Adam back inside the house, she discovers that a drawing pad of Adam’s contains graphic images of each death scene (including the first victim, Earl’s dog Chubby). She is horrified, closes him in his room, and goes outside to dig up Chubby where according to the drawing he is buried. Her worst fears are confirmed.

Relative Fear

But, just as many viewers undoubtedly are urging her to get out and get out now, Adam suddenly is there, thrusting something at her. She starts, but it’s just a packet of Earl’s photos from the day the boy was shot, and—SURPRISE—she beholds images of Clive the tutor, not Adam, shooting the boy.

Relative Fear

The now no longer automaton-like little boy-killer even tries to comfort her, and she hugs him to her, saying, “Oh baby, it wasn’t you!” Clive, however, arrives (of course) before she can call the police and discovers she now knows he was the perpetrator of that crime.

Relative Fear

He reveals all to her: he actually is Garrett Madison, Connie’s partner in crime and Adam’s father. He had been presumed dead in a fire that took place during the attempted capture of the couple, but he has been shadowing his boy all this time, living in the attic and using the dumbwaiter to get in and out via the basement.

Relative Fear Linda tries to get Adam to run outside, but he

heads upstairs instead, so she flees with him to the attic and tries to barricade them from Clive/Garrett. He breaks in, gleefully invoking The Shining with a, “Honey, I’m home!” As Clive/Garrett begins to strangle Linda, Adam picks up his father’s gun from underneath the pillow where it is hidden, yells out “Mommy!” (his first words, which momentarily freeze both adults), and shoots Clive/Garrett (who falls to his death).

Relative Fear The film then ends with a brief scene in which

Adam and Henry, now brothers, are seen out front of the house together. Henry is trying to get Adam to play a game with sticks, brandishing one himself and proclaiming himself King Arthur with Excalibur. Adam is busy digging in the ground with his own stick, seemingly completely oblivious to Henry’s presence. Suddenly, though, he turns with something resembling a smile, points his stick at Henry, and says, “Bang! You’re dead.”

Relative Fear

Now obviously by film’s end one realizes Adam is not evil, and one may even have learned something about the problem of so readily associating the otherness of disability with dangerous defectiveness. I would suggest, however, this ultimately is not enough to outweigh the fact that for most of the movie Adam’s autism serves to intensify the threat he represents, to Linda and to the viewers.

Relative Fear Indeed, it does not change the fact that autism is

most fundamentally represented as a form of sheer otherness, an otherness the other characters (and the viewers) can barely begin to comprehend. Even in a film like Mercury Rising, where one knows from the outset that the autistic child is not responsible for the murder of his parents (and thus that one need not associate disability with evil), autism is rendered as an unknowable, unreachable otherness.

Relative Fear In Mercury Rising a demoted rogue FBI agent, Art

Jeffries (Bruce Willis), stumbles onto a cover-up involving the National Security Agency while investigating a missing child report. Jeffries eventually discovers that a 9-year-old autistic boy Simon Lynch (Miko Hughes) has been targeted by a high-level NSA official, Nicholas Kudrow (Alec Baldwin), for cracking a test placed in a puzzle magazine of a new unbreakable code he is preparing to launch.

Relative Fear Jeffries sees it as his chance to redeem himself

where the debacle for which he was demoted is concerned—to redeem himself not in the eyes of his boss, but in his own eyes, for he had been unable to save the life of a teenage anti-government conspirator whose group he had infiltrated as an undercover agent. Simon is his own version of an unbreakable code he needs to crack if he is figure out who is targeting the boy, and thereby saving his own life (literally, but also figuratively) in the process.

Relative Fear As Stuart Murray has asserted, “What we might

term the ‘narrative appeal’ of autism in cultural texts is that it easily signifies possibly the most radical form of personal otherness. Indeed, it is the personification of difference and otherness: a person, just like you or me (so the argument runs) [I would add, precisely because, unlike in the case of most physical disabilities, he looks just like you and me], [but] who is in fact nothing like you or me, but rather subject to a condition that supposedly defies logic and understanding” (25).

Relative Fear

“At the most extreme level of its representation then,” Murray argues, “autism enables, because of what is seen to be its inherently unknown and ambiguous nature, the discussion of any number of issues that circulate in the popular understanding of the human condition. It is, we are led to believe, the alien within the human, . . . the ultimate enigma” (25-26).

Snow Cake The autistic thrillers of the 90s (with their largely one-

dimensional autistic children whose primary purpose is merely to drive their action/mystery/suspense/thrilller plotlines) make one yearn for the more fully developed treatments of autistic characters in the 80s. Still, as noted earlier, neither The Boy Who Could Fly nor Rain Man itself is far from an ideal film in terms of its overall representation of its autistic character. Indeed, when one compares them instead with the even more recent Snow Cake (2006), one sees how they were as much a product of their time as they also may have been ahead of their time.

Snow Cake Snow Cake, like the two 80s dramas, offers

viewers an extended, in-depth portrait of an autistic character who is one of the two leads. For this film, however, it is hard to go down Longmore’s list of telethon traits, checking off each one—in large part because here the autistic character is depicted as being able to live independently in a community setting rather than being relegated to life in an institution or in the clouds.

Snow Cake The plot is set in motion when Alex Hughes (Alan

Rickman), visiting Canada from England, picks up a hitchhiker, Vivienne Freeman (Emily Hampshire). Vivienne dies when they are blindsided by a semi, and so Alex seeks out her mother to offer his condolences. Alex immediately discovers that Linda Freeman (Sigourney Weaver), the autistic character, in no way fits the bill of the typical grieving mother—and nor does she fit the bill of the typical disabled person.

Snow Cake In the first place, it is hard to see Linda as a

perpetual child when she has a grown child of her own. It also is hard to see her as helpless and dependent when she not only lives independently but also holds down a job. It is certainly true she has depended on Vivienne for some daily living tasks (such as taking out the dreaded garbage) and for some therapeutic help (such as bouncing her on the trampoline), but then again Vivienne had only moved in with her relatively recently (having been raised by Linda’s parents).

Snow Cake It is nearly impossible to see her as an object of

charity, for she rejects out of hand all such offers from her neighbors—in particular, Florence (Julie Stewart), whose attempt to insist she stay with Linda after Vivienne’s death is summarily dismissed, and Diane (Selina Cadell), whose “bereavement cookie” is so unceremoniously disposed of.

Snow Cake Finally, it is hard to see her as sentimental

entertainment, for she is neither pathetic nor heroic, and it is hard to see her as touching the hearts of viewers (during most scenes, anyway) when she not only does not want or need the pity or affirmation of others but also when she does not always strike one as an especially nice person. When Alex accuses her of being “unreasonable” and she corrects him with, “I’m autistic,” his response is, “Same thing.”

Snow Cake Linda is portrayed as fundamentally

different from the ‘normal’ people around her, however. The film makes no pretenses about the fact that, while she is able to live on her own in a community out in the ‘real world,’ she is nevertheless unable to coexist comfortably with others in this world.

Snow Cake She decidedly is not, as she suggests

neurotypicals are, obsessed with having friends. As she tells Alex during their initial exchange, “I don’t do social.” Later on she even tells him she does not like “normal people,” only “useful people” (whom she clarifies are people who like what she likes doing).

Snow Cake Indeed, she invites Alex to stay in part

because he brought her some presents Vivienne had bought for her but more so because she needs somebody to take out the garbage for her and because it offers the easiest way to convince Florence she is not needed.

Snow Cake From her nearly paralyzing anxiety about

her rug—be it Alex’s dripping clothes that first night or, later, vomit from Vivienne’s dog Marilyn (Charlie)—to her terrified discomfort with the guests from the funeral who return to her home after the service, Linda certainly has more than her share of issues.

Snow Cake Perhaps the question, though, is whether or

not this is in fact a bad thing—for she is in fact different from her neighbors, and the lives of the ‘normal’ characters are for the most part (with her parents as perhaps the only real exceptions) hardly represented as somehow preferable to her own.

Snow Cake Whether the insecure, borderline paranoid

jealousy of Clyde (James Allodi), a local law enforcement officer, or the variant forms of insularity represented by Alex and Maggie (Carrie-Anne Moss), another of Linda’s neighbors and Alex’s love interest—the neurotypical characters all have plenty of their own issues, and their own unattractive sides as a result.

Snow Cake It is Maggie who hits on the fundamental

difference between their distinctive insularities when she observes, about Linda, that it “must be weird not needing anyone to plug into.” Maggie the divorcee warns Alex from the start of their brief relationship that she is a selfish person, not the sort who wants or needs to “plug into” just one other person, and indeed she gently discourages, if only passively, his suggestion that he might try settling down in the area.

Snow Cake Alex too is selfish; that is what Linda accuses him

of when she provokes him to call her unreasonable. Alex seems to stick around until after the funeral not primarily because he genuinely cares for Linda (although by the time he leaves, he does), but rather out of a lack of direction and, more selfishly, out of guilt (toward Linda) and sexual desire (toward Maggie).

Snow Cake The one great weakness to Snow Cake, however,

is that yet again the autistic character ultimately seems present primarily to serve as the vehicle of others’ redemption, providing the occasion for a nondisabled lead to renew his humanity. Weaver may be Rickman’s co-star, but this story, while also about Linda, is first and foremost Alex’s story.

Snow Cake Alex is only passing through the area in the

first place because he is on his way to visit the mother of the dead son he never met, a son he had only found out about a few years ago but who died in a car accident on his way to their attempt at a first meeting, so Vivienne’s death is even more emotionally devastating to him one initially understands.

Snow Cake What is more, Alex is just recently out of

prison, for having the killed the man responsible for his son’s death. Alex needs healing; he is very much a closed off, repressed personality owing to all he has been through.

Snow Cake Maggie and Linda both play their own roles in

getting Alex back on the road (literally, to his initial destination, but also metaphorically, to his eventual recovery). His time with Linda is crucial to his healing process in that, as he tells her right before he leaves, “You’re the only person I’ve never had to explain or justify myself to” (for even Maggie did want him to explain himself to her).

Snow Cake Above all, though, it is Linda’s unique vision that

ultimately inspires him to believe he is ready to move on. As he drives out of town to meet his future, donning sunglasses as the Super Furry Animals start to sing in the credits with “Hello sunshine / Come into my life,” it is Linda’s poetic backstory for her word dazlious (which she had coined for the game of comic book Scrabble they had played together) that is (re)playing in Alex’s ears.

Conclusion In conclusion, Hollywood still has a long way to

go when it comes to representing characters with autism spectrum disorders. There is a vital need for more films like Mozart and the Whale (2005), a fictional screenplay by Rain Man’s Ron Bass based on the lives of Mary and Jerry Newport, a relatively famous married couple within the autism community who both have Asperger’s Syndrome.

Conclusion This film does an excellent job avoiding the

exploitative representations of individuals with autism, if only because all of its main characters are on the autism spectrum. It is incredibly refreshing to watch a film that is not at all about what autistics have to offer neurotypicals (which, potentially, allows one unconsciously to construe their purpose in life as variously to engender compassion, inspiration, etc. in others) but rather what they have to offer themselves.

Conclusion Even here, though, the film allows one to

see the love story as particularly touching and/or inspiring because it involves two disabled individuals (which, potentially, positions the viewer in the same relation to the autistic character/s as one typically finds the nondisabled lead being positioned).

Conclusion What would be most refreshing of all would

be if someday films might contain characters who happen to be autistic, just as a character might happen to be left-handed, but whose disability does not define his/her role in the plot or his/her relationships to the other characters and to the viewers.

Date post:	18-Nov-2014
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Emerging From Emergence

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