Neurodivergent Diversity: How It Came To Be

Although the film is critically praised across the board and succeeded in bringing light to Autism, it created a stereotype that many will feed into whenever encountering someone who is autistic. For example, the idea that every single autistic person is incredibly smart yet has the social cues of a child. It’s offensive due to it not being true with how wide the spectrum is, one autistic person can draw a map from pitch-perfect memory, but the other struggles to pronounce a single street name. It is also very dehumanizing to be talked down to and yet be expected to know the sum of 3,780 x 2,349.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t things that are accurate in Rain Man when depicting Autism. The way Raymond stims and bobbles his body is very on point to how most autistic are, including myself. Another thing that I find relatable is Raymond’s insistence on sticking with his routine. There’s a routine that I and plenty of autistic people like to stick to and whenever it is disrupted it causes us a level of distress whether it is just general annoyance or attitude.

Rain Man is a film that has good intentions in bringing attention to Autism yet hasn’t aged the best with its depiction. On the other hand, it made people aware of it and made people delve to learn more about the topic. It allowed more creators to get the chance to represent us, especially given the modern understanding of it that we have today. Rain Man may be inaccurate at times and aging mildly, yet I think we can appreciate the film for what it did to the medium of representation of neurodivergence.

Work Cited
Knights, Karl. “Rain Man made autistic people visible. But it also entrenched a myth | Karl Knights.” The Guardian, 17 December 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/17/rain-man-myth-autistic-people-dustin-hoffman-savant. Accessed 18 January 2024.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply