Christian Wolff’s origin story in the film personifies the most common ways parents react upon receiving the diagnosis that their child is autistic. Jason Davis’ Neurologist, the head of the fictional Harbor Neuroscience Institute, represents parental understanding and love, and the embrace of the condition; Wolff’s father, a military psychological operations officer, represents the opposite approach. “The world is not a sensory-friendly place, and that’s where he needs to live,” he opines early in the movie; accordingly, he raises both his sons with tough love, training them by paying monks to beat the shit out of them, evangelizing familial loyalty above all things, and teaching them to look out for and take care of each other by forcing them to confront Christian’s bullies.
Wolff grows up to be a mercenary who travels the world, taking out targets he deems morally unfit to walk the earth in exchange for substantial payment; when he’s not doing that, he seeks comfort and release by self-administering occupational therapy using a range of controlled-chaos stims—Abstract Expressionist paintings, black metal, strobe lights and Schrader-style self-flagellation with a wooden roller. The premise and its execution are both sometimes laughable, but you can see the movie’s heart in its depiction of the fictional Harbor Institute, a dream of a safe space offering home, purpose and community to kids the public school system might once have shuttled off to Special Ed to be forgotten.
In the decades since Rain Man, culture has tried, and occasionally succeeded, in representing autism onscreen with a measure of sensitivity. We’ve seen versions of Hoffman’s Rain Man performance (further) spoofed, along with similarly abhorrent depictions like W. Earl Brown’s earmuffed Warren Jensen in 1998’s Something About Mary (directed by the Farrelly Brothers, who’ve since been hailed for casting a range of actual people with disabilities in their films.) We’ve seen obvious depictions, like Claire Danes’ standard-issue 2010 biopic Temple Grandin, but also works like Adam Eliot’s heartbreaking, beautiful 2009 stop-motion film Mary and Max, about the unlikely pen pal friendship between a loner Australian girl and an obese Jewish New Yorker with Asperger’s Syndrome (now considered part of the autism spectrum, rather than a separate condition unto itself.)
Also in 2009, Dan Harmon’s NBC sitcom Community introduced Abed Nadir, a half-Palestinian half-Polish college student whose affect suggested he was on the autism spectrum, although he was never canonically diagnosed. The show’s creator, Dan Harmon, has said he realized he was on the spectrum while researching the character; Community’s portrayal of Abed (and Danny Pudi’s performance in the role) was powerful and progressive at the time, because Abed’s autism was simply an aspect of his personality that the show’s surrogate-family study group accepted and embraced.
Community set the stage for the current boom in depictions of autism on TV: On HBO’s hit The Pitt, Taylor Dearden’s Dr. King has an autistic sister and displays some symptoms of autism spectrum disorder herself; her familiarity with the condition becomes an asset when she knows to dim the lights in order to calm an autistic patient, a scene that’s one of many highlights of the show’s first season (and follows in a tradition of doctors on the spectrum). Amazon’s Reacher, whose third season wrapped up in March, features Alan Ritchson as a hulking former army cop who’s obsessed with vinyl and can’t connect to anyone or stick in any one place for any length of time, qualities that have led fans to speculate the character may land somewhere on the autism spectrum. And Netflix’s Love on the Spectrum has been a mainstay on the app’s top 10 as well as TikTok’s FYP since its third season was released at the beginning of April, turning its cast into celebrity advocates publicly pushing back against RFK Jr.’s idiocy and suggesting the future of neurodivergence on screen should be in the hands of the neurodivergent. It’s indicative of a dawning Everyone’s kind of autistic LOL sentiment that prevails online, where being “on the spectrum” has become a catch-all term for a broad range of quirky and/or semi-anti-social behaviors—which is annoying, but also constitutes progress.
