Watching Myself On Screen, or The Current State of Autism in the Media

When I was young and was unaware of my autism diagnosis, I only knew about autism through a Baby-sitters Club book. The book, entitled Kristy and the Secret of Susan, was about one of the titular "baby-sitters" taking on a non-verbal autistic charge and I honestly don't remember much about it, except that the main character Kristy decides to leave her autistic charge Susan alone after unsuccessfully trying to force her to integrate with other kids. I didn't much care much for the book at the time despite being a big Baby-sitters Club fan, and I'm sure if I read it now I'd be appalled at how the characters were written and treated. Either way, I didn't have a reference point as to what autism was because I didn't really have that much exposure to it in media. I had characters that I liked and related to, but none that felt especially representative of me as an autistic girl.

I think it's safe to say that the days of autism being a non-entity in pop culture are coming to an end. Since diagnoses have risen in the last twenty years, movies and television have slowly come to recognize and insert autistic people as characters. Various television shows like Girl Meets World, Sesame Street, Parenthood, and Community have featured characters explicitly stated or implied to be on the autism spectrum. The 2016 crime thriller "The Accountant", starring Ben Affleck as an autistic accountant was a unexpected box office hit and is green-lighted for a sequel. And this August, Netflix will premiere a dramedy about an autistic teenager looking for love called "Atypical":

It looks as though we're getting to a place where there is real case for meaningful autism representation. So why do I feel that we could do better in portraying autism as a whole?

Neurotribes Made Me Emotional, And That's A Good Thing

I may be autistic, but I'll be the first to say there's a lot I don't know about autism. My recent forays into learning about autism and the wider autism community have shown me that there's a ton of things that explain a lot about myself (my quirky habits, my abhorrence of change, my ability to get emotionally overwhelmed) and how much I have yet to know about autism as a whole. The more I explore on the Internet, in books, and in relating to other autistic people, the more I get invested in the subject.

So when a friend told me she attended a TED Talk conference where one of the speakers talked about autism, I was beyond intrigued. For months I waited impatiently for the talk to make its way online and when it was finally uploaded, I found something incredibly unique - someone who looked into how autism was "discovered" and how it came to be perceived.

Watching this got me intrigued. There's plenty of accounts and blogs detailing about what it's like to be autistic,  what it's like to parent an autistic kid, and the many scientific studies into what autism actually is, but not really much of a history of autism. I probably mentioned here before how I'm a history aficionado so of course this quickly became a favorite video. And when I found out this presenter, science reporter Steve Silberman, was coming out with a book on autism's history, I pre-ordered it as fast as I could. In a world where autism is discussed in either cold clinical terms or overwhelming emotional rhetoric, this posed an alternative view I desperately wanted to see - an objective look at autism by examining its historical roots.

My Pop Culture Autistic Journey

I'm a self-described pop culture junkie. Ever since I was a child, I have been addicted to movies, television, theater, and music. I'd watch "The Wizard of Oz" and "Fantasia" ad nauseum, blast out the local pop music radio station in my room, glued myself to Nickelodeon's SNICK every Saturday night, and keep up with the latest musical theater - all encouraged by my parents and friends. I also read a lot of books, often over and over again, ever since I was three. (I learned how to read at that age as it was the primary method of teaching me to talk.)

It should be noted that this obsession with pop culture is not unusual for girls on the autistic spectrum. In fact, it's often labeled as a "special interest" for autistic girls. I have my doubts that's true across the board but it's definitely true for me.

With that in mind, I've been thinking about autism representation in the media. We don't really think of autism being very visible in media unless it's some parents talking about "the struggle" of raising an autistic kid, an autistic person "beating the odds" to excel at something, or some tragedy involving an autistic person. (I'll probably blog my feelings on all those things later.) But I recently came across a Flavorwire article about autistic and Aspergers representation on television and while most of the characters certainly displayed traits of ASD, very few were expressly indentified as autistic or Aspergers. And all of the shows the characters came from were within the last ten years or so. Waaaaaaaaay after my childhood years.