In this reported essay, acclaimed author Marie Myung-Ok Lee and her 23-year-old son Jason, who is autistic, explore the current landscape of autism representation on screen in movies and shows like Extraordinary Attorney Woo, The Good Doctor, Music, and more.
Growing up in the 1970s, I never met a person with an autism diagnosis. A Boomer friend recounted that when he was a med student, his whole hospital was called to observe when an autistic child was admitted — at the time, autism occurrences were rare, so this boy was a unique butterfly. In fact, I would not hear the word autism until the 1988 film Rain Man.
Rain Man, about a ne’er-do-well young hustler who basically uses his autistic brother as a human card counter in Las Vegas, left the impression that autism was mostly a useful savantism accompanied by odd but benign behavior. Soon after, Temple Grandin, PhD, (later the subject of a 2010 movie starring Claire Danes) became another public face of autism: the inventor of innovative livestock slaughtering methods, she had so much trouble socializing with humans she had to invent a machine to give her hugs. This condition still seemed rare and unique.
In 2000, I had a child who was later diagnosed with autism, and so did a lot of other people. Now, one in 36 children have autism (roughly 4% of all boys); if you don't have it in your immediate family, you know someone who does. And in the past year or so, you’ve likely seen TikToks by and about autistic people discussing what their lives and habits are like.
But what is autism? Julia Fox has discussed her autism and neurodivergency on TikTok. Historically, Emily Dickinson, Einstein, and J.S. Bach have been retroactively diagnosed as autistic geniuses. As autism diagnoses became more common, it expanded beyond savantism into something to be feared. In my pregnancy group I remember one mom saying she would kill herself if it turned out her kid had autism; a faction of parents skip childhood vaccines for potentially lethal conditions to ward off the evil eye of this "nightmare." However, autism rates have continued to climb.
Now, every year a massive wave of autistic children breaks on the shores of adulthood. Perhaps reflecting this demographic, there's been an explosion of representation onscreen. Far from it being a niche trend, stars like Kate Hudson and Sia have jumped on the neurodiversity bandwagon; their 2021 movie, Music, about an autistic teen, was pilloried on the internet for not having any autistic actors and for its overall portrayal of autism. But are any of these productions any good, and whom do they represent? (Notably, the vast majority of fictional productions center white autistic people — with a few exceptions — and few feature Black or Latinx children, mirroring a reality where those children are diagnosed at later ages than their white counterparts.) More autistic representation is good, but it’s worth questioning whose story gets told.
My son Jason is neither Rain Man, nor is he the person that experts have said has an IQ of 40 who should be put in a home for the severely disabled. For most of his life, Jason could not communicate verbally, but in the past year, he learned how to write by pointing to letters on a board, and this has unlocked language for him. Jason is a fairly typical guy, trapped, he reports, in a non-cooperative body that limits his ability to behave as he would like. Most people only see his external behaviors and therefore overlook his complex and rich internal life. Among other things, he has empathy, consideration, and a dry sense of humor. He hates the many stereotypes that the neurotypical world imposes on him and his fellow autistics.
So, Jason and I sat down to watch portrayals of autistic people onscreen — and his feedback surprised me. We watched shows and movies like Extraordinary Attorney Wu, As We See It, Heartbreak High, Girl Meets World, and Music, taking note of Jason’s immediate responses and our discussions afterward. The representation I thought Jason would easily object to the most, he liked the best. Depictions that made me cringe, that seemed violent or unfair to autistic people as a whole, were eye-opening for Jason — they served as a window into how neurotypical people often view people with autism. Some of the portrayals helped Jason understand what it’s like to care for a non-communicative autistic like him, and others felt as frustrating to him as they did to me. Ultimately, Jason’s input was a staunch reminder that autistic people can’t be accurately portrayed onscreen without the input of actually autistic people.
Of course, autistic people are not a monolith, and Jason’s views don’t speak for autistic people as a whole. But that underscores why it’s so important to include autistic people in portrayals of them. With that in mind, Jason and I turned on the television.
First, we settled in for Extraordinary Attorney Wu, the 2022 South Korean TV series that quickly became a global sensation. In the show, attorney Wu is at the top of her class in law school but rejected everywhere for employment because of her autism. She's then placed belatedly (this is part of the mystery) at a hyper prestigious law firm. The series, with the usual tropes of romance, overcoming hardship, and parental conflict, revolves around the character's autism. A fan of K-dramas, I had particularly high hopes but found I had to stop after watching just 15 minutes of the first episode. They showed Attorney Wu's childhood, where she had meltdowns, just like Jason. They showed her getting ready for work, including putting on noise cancelling headphones, just like Jason does. She does odd "stims" (repetitive, self-stimulatory movements) with her fingers, a lot like Jason does. But despite these commonalities, it alienated rather than resonated; I tried to imagine a show whose punch lines and drama revolved around someone with a visual or mobile disability and felt queasy.
Still, Jason and I pushed through. Each episode focused on a different legal case, ranging from grim — a disturbing plot of a noncommunicative autistic boy who may have murdered his neurotypical brother in a meltdown — to light and silly, like Wu's putative boyfriend needing to teach her how to kiss.
"I am really upset by the opening scene," Jason said (via spelling on the board) about the grim episode, the parents coming home to find the brother dead and the autistic brother in a meltdown, yelling "Die! Die!" "It was very disturbing to me. People will think autistics are dangerous people." Wu's boss assigns her to the case, denying it's just because she has autism, and it's awkward all around. Her colleagues wonder how she can run a case when she literally gets stuck in a revolving door. That too, stuck out to Jason: "I am hating how they make her so weird and spacey like she cannot understand what normal life is like. It is insulting to us autistics to be portrayed this way."
The "extraordinary" part is Wu having computer-level recall, and her obsession with whales helps her create innovative legal solutions. Did it make any difference to him that the original Korean title uses the word 이상한, which has a connotation of weird or even sinister?
"I hate that the title refers to her as weird,” Jason said, “but extraordinary has problems too since it suggests she is a savant and that is not what most autistics are." (Statistically, this is true.) About the details like the noise cancelling headphones and the stims: "It is a little bit helpful, but not enough to balance out the other horrible part of the show."
The noncommunicative autistic teen proves useless at his own murder trial because, as the lawyers ask him questions, at first he answers seemingly cogently, "Yes," but then it turns out the yes is just a stim, and it disintegrates until he's just yelling “why-why-why” and hitting himself in the head on the stand.
"I am so sad that he is [portrayed as] such a freak who cannot communicate and hits himself on the head like that,” Jason said. “It is painful to watch. I am really sorry that I must look that way to lots of people. I am really sad that autism is a source of such fear in Korea when we are only trying to communicate with others.” Simultaneously, he was glad to have the experience of watching as a family and having an open discussion about autism and how it presents on screen and in real life.
"I am really liking watching this with you since we can talk about it and share our ideas. It is really meaningful to me,” he said. This show was the first time Jason got to see someone else having an autistic meltdown on screen. "I agree it has been helpful to see how the outside world perceives autistic people. I liked how they showed how hard it is to communicate with an autistic person sometimes. We just say stuff and it really doesn't make sense and people have to guess what we mean. It is a real challenge to relate to an autistic person because their language [can be] so limited."
Jason’s reaction to As We See It was more straightforward. The show about a group of 20- something autistic roommates sounded promising and received much praise for casting it with autistic actors. The first episode introduces us to these young people, who seem to be living in a quasi-group home with a neurotypical person who helps them, almost like a life coach. One of the young men with sound sensitivities like Jason is practicing walking outside, the coach whispering encouragement into his headphones as he navigates triggers that are familiar to us: barking dogs. He ends up encountering a dog and, like Jason would, melting down. Intriguingly, given historical portrayals of autism as being a white male disorder, one roommate is an Asian American woman; her character is obsessed with having a boyfriend and tries to pick up a customer at work — while he's ordering a coffee from her and standing in line with his wife and baby.
"I hate this series so much. It has nothing to do with what autism is really like,” Jason said, struggling to see himself in the series. “I am not sure I can watch much more of it without barfing. It is about a bunch of kids who are quirky but who can drive and hold jobs and have friends. None of these things describe my life.”
Needless to say, we didn’t watch another episode.
Heartbreak High, Netflix's remake of a popular ‘90s Australian comedy series has also been highly praised in the neurodiverse community for including a queer autistic character, Quinni, played by Chloe Hayden, an autistic actress. Hayden also led the Twitter charge against Music for its non-autistic casting.
Still, Jason wasn't feeling it. First, "It was so gross and sexual." Second: "Quinni does not seem autistic to me. She is able to communicate just fine and has friends. I am not sure that she says much about what it is really like to be autistic. We have so many challenges versus what seems to come easily for her. It is mild and does not translate to the experience of the rest of us."
Of course, that is one experience autistic people can have. Many autistic people have friends, and they may see their experience in Quinni. But for Jason, he didn’t find his experience very relevant to this one. He made it three-fourths of the way through the first episode before stopping.
Girl Meets World isn’t about autism, but Jason did find something he could relate to: the stigma attached to an autism diagnosis. The show featured an episode with a regular character, Farkle, flipping out while waiting to hear whether he will be diagnosed with autism. To him and his friends, autism means he "may not be able to understand emotions or love."
They are relieved when the tests determine he's just, well, Farkle. This episode caused controversy for portraying autism as a tragedy. Jason, however, thought it was "realistic about the stigma that is attached to autism. It is very scary for a lot of people to think that something like autism exists and that it has no real cause or cure. I think we need to destigmatize autism and not make it sound so dangerous."
Given the tsunami of objection to the movie Music as autistic cosplay, and of the portrayal of a restraining hold, I thought I had an idea of how Jason would react. I was wrong.
Music is on a few levels a girl-buddy remake of Rain Man: Kate Hudson plays Kazu/Zu, a buzz-cut female hustler running illegal prescription drugs to the LA beautiful when the caretaker to her half sibling, Music, a teen with nonspeaking autism, dies. Zu rushes home for the inheritance (there is none) but gets roped into taking care of Music who, despite her disability, seems to have no structural support, school, or social worker. Zu, like Cruise's character in Rain Man, is immature and selfish and schemes to ditch her sister in a home, move to Costa Rica and live on the beach forever. But then she falls in love with the kind neighbor Ebo played by Leslie Odom Jr., an unofficial volunteer caretaker for Music. Eventually, via opening her heart to Music, Zu is folded into the loving embrace of a community that accepts her because they accept her sister <cue musical number>.
First off, I was surprised that one of the musical numbers (the movie would be 20 minutes long without them) featured flashing lights, suggesting a basic lack of understanding that epilepsy, often triggered by lights, is a common comorbidity in autism. This was followed by the scene of Music being restrained by Ebo, and I was secretly hoping we'd get to end it here.
Jason, surprisingly, announced he wanted to watch more.
"I know it seems strange that I would like it because they make the autistic character really weird but I like how it shows what a challenge it can be to deal with autistic people,” he said. “I am less interested in all the singing and dancing, which just seems silly to me."
The hold is particularly disturbing because Ebo lays his full body weight on a prone Music and pins her arms. Zoe Gross, Director of Advocacy at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, objected in a press release to a scene that portrays "restraints that have killed members of our community as necessary and loving acts.” Holds are also illegal in more than 30 U.S. states.
Jason was slightly more considered: "I can see why they have that in there, but it is not a useful way to interact with autistic people. We hate to be held down like that. It is too restraining for us and I wish they did something else." It did not stop him from wanting to watch it to the end.
It’s heartening to see autistics advocating for or against certain shows already can make themselves heard in conventional ways — speaking, writing, social media, networking — and shaping the essential conversation. On the other hand, this also reinforces representation of the hyper verbal, the “higher functioning,” to the silent detriment of the nonspeakers, the “low functioning.” I thought as a parent of an autistic, I “understood” autism; I found Music to be a staggeringly unrealistic fantasy, almost to the point of agreeing with the advocate who wrote “This film should never have been made, and it shouldn’t be shown.” Jason, meanwhile, looked to that one as a bridge to a more inclusive future:
"There needs to be more representation of nonspeaking autistics in these shows. I liked in Music that she was unable to communicate, and that she still had a rich inner life." He went on to muse, "I would love to see a show that looks at the funny side of autism. Things like how people unwittingly say stuff in front of me, like when my teachers were talking about this cute aide because they thought I couldn't understand.
"I am really hoping that there is some program out there that does a holistic job showing what it is like to have autism, the struggles to speak and to control your body. I am so tired of people with mild diagnoses hogging the spotlight from the rest of us."
Current depictions of autism are still often honing in on savantism and genius. If I didn't live in Jason's world and someone asked me to name famous real and fictional autistics, I'd say Rain Man, Temple Grandin, the kid in The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time — inherently empathetic portrayals of white people who have value to society because they are savants. So while Rain Man introduced many in the world to autism, the savant trope linked to it has had lasting damage and is not even accurate — only between one in 10 and in 200 autistics has any form of savantism. And, the cosmic joke is that Kim Peek, the real-life inspiration for Rain Man, was found posthumously not to have autism at all but a congenital brain abnormality called FG Syndrome, which made him a genuine “mega savant.”
Jason instinctively objects to any media — for example, The Good Doctor — that reinforces this trope that savant-y autistics are inherently more worthy than behavioral nonspeakers like him. “The savant trope has been incredibly damaging to autistics and trivialized the problems that we face.”
Maybe, as people like Jason are able to find nontraditional ways to break through into the cultural conversation, nonspeaking autistics will be able to round out portrayals, or create new ones of their own, by adding their own voices their own way.
There's a saying in the neurodiverse community, "if you know one person with autism...you know one person with autism." The common portrayals of autism do reflect some people’s experience, but for nonspeakers, society is largely allowed to freely project on them: They are sinister, uninterested in human contact, devoid of emotion, not "in there." That’s not Jason’s experience, and he deserves the same representation as everyone else.
“It is a basic issue of human rights that we be allowed to tell our own stories.”
Marie Myung-Ok Lee is a novelist and essayist and teaches fiction at Columbia University.
Jason Jacoby Lee is a student at Autism Sports Academy and lives in New York City with his parents. He is working on a memoir. His hobbies include skateboarding and reading.
