CHAPTER 4

AUTISTIC TECHNE

Thinking in Pictures and Starring in Film

There are a number of filmic portrayals of Autism Spectrum Disorders.1 As with literary renditions, these films run the gamut from researched biopics about real individuals’ lives to fictitious caricatures. There are even docudramas about others who assist those on the spectrum for either personal or occupational reasons. I focus here on three films that serve as points along this gamut, realizing that the film industry lags behind the progress that the disability studies movement has brought to all the arts. The technology involved in the first of these films, HBO’s Temple Grandin (2010), takes two forms. First is the squeeze machine that Grandin designed and built for herself; the other is Grandin’s graphic ability to picture spatial relations in instant two-dimensional renderings. In Gerardine Wurzburg’s Autism is a World (2005), Sue Rubin relies on the concrete techne of 3 spoons and running water to ground herself and interacts verbally with the world around her through Assistive Technology. Elaine Hall’s son, Neal, uses this same typing technique in the last of these films, Tricia Regan’s Autism: The Musical (2008), to communicate a need to be heard. He gives technology the power of translation in a language he does not speak.

HEIDEGGER’S NOTION OF TECHNE

Martin Heidegger’s notion of “techne” as applied to each of these films positions Assistive Technology as a contemporary extension of his interpretation of the Greek word, which once indicated a bringing forth or revealing of truth. As Heidegger suggests, “It is as revealing, and not as manufacturing, that techne is a bringing forth…. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth, happens.”2 Heidegger goes on to specify that “the revealing that rules modern technology is a challenging” (320). Technology in these three films about life on the autism spectrum reveals not only social prejudice about disability, but also challenges cultural norms that conceive of autism as a solely medical phenomenon. In the late 1980s, definitions of autism were still locked into a medical model approach to disability. While there are certainly factions of the medical industry who still subscribe to this particular approach, more humanistic avenues are quick to point out the ethical oversights in medicine that define impairments as individual rather than cultural constructs. One good example of this would be Scott Robertson’s

49 Chapter 4 observation that: “Very few studies of autism present it as a form of human diversity akin to other societal forms of diversity (e.g. ethnicity, nationality, gender, etc.)”3 Robertson’s alignment of autism with ethnicity, nationality and gender positions this disorder in highly non-scientific camps of identity theory. He manages to imagine neurodiversity as a new way of looking at disability cultures which provides a perspective that “…describes the neurology and personhood of autistic people through the lens of human diversity.”4 A 2011 audience for Barry Levinson’s Rain Man, for example, might or might not be convinced by this shift in disability perspectives when watching the 1988 film.

PORTRAYALS OF AUTISTIC BEHAVIOR

Rain Man remains a classic film representation of autistic experience and behavior that won four Academy awards for various categories, in addition to achieving considerable commercial success [$172 million gross (USA)].5 We recognize it as a product of its time: we have now moved beyond the stereotypical portrayal of autistic behavior and are more prepared for the biopic Temple Grandin about a real individual with autism, played by nondisabled actress, Claire Danes. Danes invited Grandin to her New York City apartment and spent six hours talking with her, watching her movements, approaching this character study from a Method Acting perspective.6 Method actors work in an Americanized version of Russian actor Konstantin Stanislavsky’s training. This approach teaches actors to come as close to their characters as possible in terms of environment, movement, speech patterns, inflection, physical and verbal responses to prompts. Whereas Dustin Hoffman played a fictional character and no doubt did his own version of Method preparation for Rain Man by studying real individuals on the spectrum, Danes took on the daunting task of impersonating a woman who is still alive. She quite literally took the spirit and embodiment of Temple Grandin into her own body in order to accurately portray this person.

Publicity photo of Claire Danes in Temple Grandin.

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