So, the movie.
Jan. 29th, 2010 01:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyLet me just say, first, that the movie is probably part of why I'm not at the moment angry about being overlooked. Because I could tell by one or two of the other questions to Mr. "He's On First" and how they were worded, and by the movie itself, that I would have had to deal with a lot of the "Well, let me just spend five minutes telling you - politely! - why everything you just said was wrong" sort of questions. And those just aren't any fun.
I'm gonna cut this for spoilers.
So, the movie is about the penpal - sorry, penfriend - relationship between a young girl in Australia as she grows up and an aspie man in NYC.
First things first, the movie could've used a USA-picker. It has people driving in NYC on the wrong side of the street, steering wheels and all! It has the aspie (Max) ending up with a job where he "ticks off" boxes... in the US, of course, we check boxes. These are small details (well, mostly), but it would have been so easy to fix them. In fact, given how much we hear about American hegemony and all that, I can't help but think that Australians ought to be more familiar with US culture than Americans with Australian culture!
Now, the second thing is this is a pretty depressing movie. In the course of the movie, the girl's grandfather dies, she gets bullied a lot, her father dies, her drunk thief of a mother kills herself over her father's death, her husband (this is when she's grown) runs off to be with another man (his OWN penfriend) in New Zealand, and she herself falls into drunkenness, depression, and despair when the exploitative book she writes about her (ONLY) friend's aspieness (presumably without his knowledge or consent) causes him to cut off contact with her and break his keyboard. And she gets pooped on by a bird. Then, when he forgives her (and the box miraculously arrives just before she hangs herself) she recovers from her alcoholism amazingly quickly (good, because she doesn't know it yet but she's about to become a single mother wearing the world's least ergonomic sling!) and goes to visit him, arriving only hours after his death from either natural causes or a heart attack brought on by too many cans of condensed milk... a food that she had introduced him to years before.
Meanwhile, Max is being tried for manslaughter after an air conditioner falls out of his wall and kills a mime, he's being locked up in the psych ward and given electroshock treatments for pretending to be a robot while he picks up litter, his imaginary friend jumps out a window, he's being mauled by an overly kissy woman at his Overeater's Anonymous meetings (they don't help), he's running through a string of unfortunate jobs, his goldfish keep dying in tragic ways, every letter from Mary sends him to his stool to rock, and of course Mary betrays him. She doesn't listen, either - he wrote her a whole letter about not wanting to be cured, but what's the first line in her book about? That's right! (Which of the two of them lacks social skills?) (But he forgives her.) Oh, and then he dies.
So, all in all it's not really a very fun movie.
But what about its portrayal of Asperger's?
Well, apparently Max is based upon the creator's own aspie penfriend, who does know about this movie and may have seen it. He wasn't there, as far as I know, although he was invited. I sympathize - sometimes it's hard to go new places filled with people you don't know.
And I will say that nothing in that movie, aside from its many portrayals of strange deaths, was completely unfamiliar to me. I've rocked when upset, and unwanted texts and emails and letters (assuming I ever even read them) can keep me upset for a while. (Although really, I'm more likely to pace. When I was younger I mostly hid under blankets or in closets.)
However, Max was definitely portrayed comically as... well, a bit of a loser. People watching this video are going to see this guy who has been hospitalized more times than he can count, who has an incredibly unhealthy lifestyle, who's scared of any change, who doesn't understand any feelings, can't cry, and can't interpret facial expressions without a book, even the most blatant ones. They'll see that he "can't even" get a "good" job, and that he has no friends whatsoever, and they'll listen to him say he doesn't want to be cured... and they won't believe him. Just like Mary. And they'll think they're right not to listen to that, because clearly, in this unfunny movie, he's just not very happy, right?
That it might be possible to get help for some issues without talking about cures for the whole, that won't come up. It wasn't mentioned at all. That autism might help him in some ways even as it hinders him in others, or that it might be a neutral in some areas - different not being wrong - won't occur, because it's not really shown other than that his job as a corn taste tester is "perfect". That the "aspies for freedom" t-shirt isn't something the filmmaker made up off the top of his head, that there's a community of people talking about this sort of stuff and living this, and not being all alone, all the time? That sometimes (oftentimes) autistics find that their "lack of social skills" isn't such a lack when surrounded by other autistics (where, I'm told, it's NTs who feel the loss)? Not mentioned. (Where did Max even get that shirt if he doesn't have a computer?)
What's really funny is Mary. Here we have a friendless girl who doesn't know what to say to make the bullies leave her alone, who watches a TV show and makes the characters as her friends, who doesn't even notice the fairly blatant signs that her husband is a. an ass and b. gay, who doesn't know her mother is stealing.... The truth is that Mary struck me as a pretty realistic portrayal of another kind of aspie. (The problem with movies like this is that people start thinking that All Autistics Are Like That. This isn't really the movie's fault, it's their fault, but even an incredibly accurate portrayal of ONE autistic is going to find itself portraying the polar opposite of at least two others.) This, too, is never conceived of. Did the filmmaker consider that? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. There's a lot of "stealth aspies" in the media... characters who strike people as on the spectrum, but who may not have been written with that in mind. It may be that they're based upon real people, or... I don't know. Mary's definitely one of them, whether she was intended to be or not.
But if it's never mentioned, the only people who will catch that are people who already know about the subject. And what's the point in that?
One more comment - the movie had a running narration of how Max and Mary thought. Especially when it came to Max's thoughts, I found it a bit didactic. "Max had trouble understanding people. He especially didn't understand flirting...." It really started to grate on me after a while, though in it did accurately (if somewhat exaggeratedly for most autistics, I think - I doubt there are many aspies who really don't know what it means when somebody covers you with kisses in an elevator!) sum up some of the social skills issues that are a big part of autism. However, some issues that I would consider more central - sensory issues beyond just "not liking smells", for example - never came up. Neither did a lot of peripherals which are, nonetheless, common to many autistics, such as faceblindness. Max is comically clumsy, though, and this is specifically stated.
So, you know, I kinda dreaded having to answer things like "If it's really as hard as it is for Max, why don't you want a cure?" where I'd have to first reiterate that some autistics do want a cure, and even if I don't agree with them in principle I can't argue with their desires. In my quest to be honest, I'd eat up a lot of time.
I'm gonna cut this for spoilers.
So, the movie is about the penpal - sorry, penfriend - relationship between a young girl in Australia as she grows up and an aspie man in NYC.
First things first, the movie could've used a USA-picker. It has people driving in NYC on the wrong side of the street, steering wheels and all! It has the aspie (Max) ending up with a job where he "ticks off" boxes... in the US, of course, we check boxes. These are small details (well, mostly), but it would have been so easy to fix them. In fact, given how much we hear about American hegemony and all that, I can't help but think that Australians ought to be more familiar with US culture than Americans with Australian culture!
Now, the second thing is this is a pretty depressing movie. In the course of the movie, the girl's grandfather dies, she gets bullied a lot, her father dies, her drunk thief of a mother kills herself over her father's death, her husband (this is when she's grown) runs off to be with another man (his OWN penfriend) in New Zealand, and she herself falls into drunkenness, depression, and despair when the exploitative book she writes about her (ONLY) friend's aspieness (presumably without his knowledge or consent) causes him to cut off contact with her and break his keyboard. And she gets pooped on by a bird. Then, when he forgives her (and the box miraculously arrives just before she hangs herself) she recovers from her alcoholism amazingly quickly (good, because she doesn't know it yet but she's about to become a single mother wearing the world's least ergonomic sling!) and goes to visit him, arriving only hours after his death from either natural causes or a heart attack brought on by too many cans of condensed milk... a food that she had introduced him to years before.
Meanwhile, Max is being tried for manslaughter after an air conditioner falls out of his wall and kills a mime, he's being locked up in the psych ward and given electroshock treatments for pretending to be a robot while he picks up litter, his imaginary friend jumps out a window, he's being mauled by an overly kissy woman at his Overeater's Anonymous meetings (they don't help), he's running through a string of unfortunate jobs, his goldfish keep dying in tragic ways, every letter from Mary sends him to his stool to rock, and of course Mary betrays him. She doesn't listen, either - he wrote her a whole letter about not wanting to be cured, but what's the first line in her book about? That's right! (Which of the two of them lacks social skills?) (But he forgives her.) Oh, and then he dies.
So, all in all it's not really a very fun movie.
But what about its portrayal of Asperger's?
Well, apparently Max is based upon the creator's own aspie penfriend, who does know about this movie and may have seen it. He wasn't there, as far as I know, although he was invited. I sympathize - sometimes it's hard to go new places filled with people you don't know.
And I will say that nothing in that movie, aside from its many portrayals of strange deaths, was completely unfamiliar to me. I've rocked when upset, and unwanted texts and emails and letters (assuming I ever even read them) can keep me upset for a while. (Although really, I'm more likely to pace. When I was younger I mostly hid under blankets or in closets.)
However, Max was definitely portrayed comically as... well, a bit of a loser. People watching this video are going to see this guy who has been hospitalized more times than he can count, who has an incredibly unhealthy lifestyle, who's scared of any change, who doesn't understand any feelings, can't cry, and can't interpret facial expressions without a book, even the most blatant ones. They'll see that he "can't even" get a "good" job, and that he has no friends whatsoever, and they'll listen to him say he doesn't want to be cured... and they won't believe him. Just like Mary. And they'll think they're right not to listen to that, because clearly, in this unfunny movie, he's just not very happy, right?
That it might be possible to get help for some issues without talking about cures for the whole, that won't come up. It wasn't mentioned at all. That autism might help him in some ways even as it hinders him in others, or that it might be a neutral in some areas - different not being wrong - won't occur, because it's not really shown other than that his job as a corn taste tester is "perfect". That the "aspies for freedom" t-shirt isn't something the filmmaker made up off the top of his head, that there's a community of people talking about this sort of stuff and living this, and not being all alone, all the time? That sometimes (oftentimes) autistics find that their "lack of social skills" isn't such a lack when surrounded by other autistics (where, I'm told, it's NTs who feel the loss)? Not mentioned. (Where did Max even get that shirt if he doesn't have a computer?)
What's really funny is Mary. Here we have a friendless girl who doesn't know what to say to make the bullies leave her alone, who watches a TV show and makes the characters as her friends, who doesn't even notice the fairly blatant signs that her husband is a. an ass and b. gay, who doesn't know her mother is stealing.... The truth is that Mary struck me as a pretty realistic portrayal of another kind of aspie. (The problem with movies like this is that people start thinking that All Autistics Are Like That. This isn't really the movie's fault, it's their fault, but even an incredibly accurate portrayal of ONE autistic is going to find itself portraying the polar opposite of at least two others.) This, too, is never conceived of. Did the filmmaker consider that? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. There's a lot of "stealth aspies" in the media... characters who strike people as on the spectrum, but who may not have been written with that in mind. It may be that they're based upon real people, or... I don't know. Mary's definitely one of them, whether she was intended to be or not.
But if it's never mentioned, the only people who will catch that are people who already know about the subject. And what's the point in that?
One more comment - the movie had a running narration of how Max and Mary thought. Especially when it came to Max's thoughts, I found it a bit didactic. "Max had trouble understanding people. He especially didn't understand flirting...." It really started to grate on me after a while, though in it did accurately (if somewhat exaggeratedly for most autistics, I think - I doubt there are many aspies who really don't know what it means when somebody covers you with kisses in an elevator!) sum up some of the social skills issues that are a big part of autism. However, some issues that I would consider more central - sensory issues beyond just "not liking smells", for example - never came up. Neither did a lot of peripherals which are, nonetheless, common to many autistics, such as faceblindness. Max is comically clumsy, though, and this is specifically stated.
So, you know, I kinda dreaded having to answer things like "If it's really as hard as it is for Max, why don't you want a cure?" where I'd have to first reiterate that some autistics do want a cure, and even if I don't agree with them in principle I can't argue with their desires. In my quest to be honest, I'd eat up a lot of time.
