The representation of autism in cinema
Cinema and television, as the main means of communication and mass entertainment that appeared in the 20th century, cannot fail to reflect today's society and become a living testimony to the social transformations that have occurred over time. When we watch a film or a series we cannot ignore the ideology and the political and social context that saw them born. The case of autism and neurodivergences constitutes a paradigmatic example of what we have just said, perfectly observable through its treatment throughout the history of cinema, from its origins to the present day.
Presented explicitly, autism first appears in a 1969 film, Change of Habit , the last of the thirty-three films that Elvis Presley starred in while trying to make a name for himself in Hollywood as an actor, in parallel with his musical career. Change of Habit offers a vision of the subject typical of those years, which shows us a non-verbal autistic girl named Amanda, withdrawn in herself as a reaction to her mother's early rejection. Today, this approach may seem absurd and misogynistic, but it faithfully reflects the main theories existing at the time about the causes of autism , since both the psychiatrist who formulated the concept, Leo Kanner, and his successor, Bruno Bettelheim, attributed its cause to a lack of affection from mothers towards their children. Needless to say, this theory became obsolete shortly after, but during the decades in which it remained in force it caused a lot of harm to numerous families.
The subject went unnoticed in cinema until the 1980s, with the release of The Boy Who Could Fly / Beyond Reality. (Nick Castle, 1986) and, above all, Rain man (Barry Levinson, 1988). In the first, it is approached from a magical, almost fairy tale point of view, starring Eric, a non-verbal autistic boy who seems obsessed with flying and, as the plot develops, it is even hinted that he possesses the ability to fly. In the end, everything resolves into a kind of metaphor for how imagination can help us escape a suffocating reality.
Approaching autism through the screen
Between genius and disability
As for Rain Man , it is presented as a film, apparently, much more realistic on the subject. It tells the story of the young and privileged luxury car salesman Charles Babbit (Tom Cruise), who, when his father dies, hopes to solve his financial problems thanks to the inheritance. In a twist of events, his fortune ends up in the hands of a psychiatric institution that takes care of his autistic brother, Raymond Babbit (Dustin Hoffman), whose existence he did not know about. He has incredible mathematical, memorizing and graphic abilities, but is unable to alter his routines, understand the functioning of society or communicate adequately with other people. With the feeling of having been scammed, Charles takes Raymond on a road trip during which he will instrumentalize his brother's abilities to earn a significant sum of money and solve his financial problems. At the end of the film, he comes to appreciate him as a person and decides to continue to contact him. Rain Man was responsible for implanting in the social imagination the image of the autistic person as a person completely disconnected from reality and without any possibility of fending for themselves, but endowed with exceptional abilities , especially in the visual field and mathematical calculation.
This contrast between genius and disability became an attractive element, exploited by screenwriters around the world, and the figure of the autistic person became popular in all kinds of films, from thrillers like Silent Fall ( Bruce Beresford, 1994), through psychological horror films like Cube (Vincenzo Natali, 1997), action films like Mercury Rising (Harold Becker, 1998) and dramas like Molly (John Duigan, 1999) or the French film Les Diables (Christophe Ruggia, 2002). At this stage, the autistic person appears as a secondary character, a mere narrative tool at the service of the plot, either based on their psychic abilities, by virtue of which they can decipher a code or solve a riddle, or as someone in possession of certain hidden knowledge, which they are unable to communicate due to their disabilities. When it acquires a certain prominence, as in the case of the aforementioned dramas, it accumulates a lot of clichés , such as that of autistic children without empathy, or serves as a pretext to propose plots focused on the "cure" of autistic people.
Rain Man was responsible for implanting in the social imagination the image of the autistic person as a person disconnected from reality and without any possibility of fending for themselves, but endowed with exceptional abilities.
With the publication of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) in 1994, the theories of the British psychiatrist Lorna Wing were made known, who in 1979 developed the concept of the autism spectrum with Judith Gould and disseminated the theories of the psychiatrist Hans Asperger on the diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome, which she included in her theory. The diagnosis, which is now considered obsolete, included those autistic people with fewer support needs, who had no problems developing language and enjoyed normal or above-average intellectual abilities, but with the same problems inherent to the rest of the spectrum, such as difficulties in the area of social communication and intellectual and behavioral flexibility.
Approaching autism through reading
The first commercial film in which I remember the term appearing and proposing protagonists who seek complicity and identification with the viewer is the dramatic comedy Mozart and the whale / Bojos d'amor (Petter Naess, 2005). Asperger's syndrome gave cinema the opportunity to present more examples of autistic people, since it allowed the creation of less reclusive characters, who could connect with the viewer through their search for a normal life. In this film, Donald (Josh Harnett), a mathematician with Asperger's syndrome who works as a taxi driver and runs a therapy group for autistic people, meets Isabel (Radha Mitchell), a bohemian woman with the same diagnosis, but with a strong artistic temperament. They are opposite characters in many ways: he is introverted and she is extroverted, he is good at mathematics and she at the arts, but they share the same desire not to want to be alone. Although Mozart and the Whale often resorts to stereotypes such as autistic people with high mathematical abilities, it is also a rather surprising film for its time , as it goes beyond the clinical approach and offers a narrative about personal acceptance and how dealing with people of the same condition can help find happiness. The main couple is complicated and unstable, but they manage to carry their relationship forward thanks to communication and a certain flexibility regarding the needs of the other person. The progress is important, considering where we came from. There were those who at the time accused Mozart and the Whale of being a romantic film instead of focusing on autism. Perhaps precisely for this reason it is now seen with less embarrassment than many films that opted to make an explicit discourse on the subject. On the other hand, it shows us an extroverted autistic woman, with character, and sexually active, which breaks a lot with previous representations.
Eccentric detectives with high abilities
A trend that emerged in the 2000s was that of eccentric detectives with high intellectual abilities and complex mental problems. We find examples in detective series such as Criminal Minds , Bones , The Mentalist , Sherlock , Elementary , Hannibal , the first season of True Detective , Monk , the Spanish Los misterios de Laura , etc.
Personally, I believe that the publishing and film phenomenon embodied by the Millennium saga definitively marked that trend. The co-protagonist of Stig Larsson's books is Lisbeth Salander, a Swedish detective, hacker, bisexual, punk and with autistic traits, who fights against social injustices, gender violence and sexual abuse covered up by the system. She has remarkable intelligence, as well as a photographic memory, but has serious problems interacting with others, either due to traits inherent to her character, or due to the traumas brought on by the abuses inflicted on her by a series of "fatherly" figures who have made her life bitter. Lisbeth is a tireless fighter against a corrupt system, an undiagnosed autistic woman who has been systematically underestimated and despised by a society that does not tolerate difference or her rebellion against injustice. The novels were adapted into a Swedish television series, Millennium (Niels Arden Oplev and Daniel Alfredson, 2007), later remade into three feature films that were released internationally to considerable success. Later, the first of the three had an American remake , The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher, 2011).
There is a space for autistic people in film and television, both in front of and behind the cameras, but to claim it we must stop hiding and claim who we are.
More real characters
The next step in the representation of autism in audiovisual media consisted of leaving aside extraordinary abilities and focusing on the creation of characters more rooted in reality , although previously one could already find, even if only anecdotally, some fairly good examples of plausible representations of autism in films such as the Canadian drama Snow Cake (Marc Evans, 2006) or the very sad Australian animated film Mary and Max (Adam Elliot, 2009).
The series Bron / Broen (Hans Rosenfeldt, 2011-2018), which leaves aside extraordinary detectives and brings to the screen more human representations of autism, can be considered as the link that would unite the fashion of eccentric detectives with the more realistic approach to the spectrum. The main protagonist of this series, Saga Noren, is a very competent but fallible detective, without any superpowers. In this line we also find films as different as Temple Grandin (Mick Jackson, 2010), X+Y (Morgan Matthews, 2014), Jane Wants a Boyfriend (William Sullivan, 2015), Please Stand by (Ben Lewin, 2017), Teströl és lélekröl (Ildikó Enyedi, 2017), Ezra (Tony Goldwin, 2023) and Goyo (Marcos Carnevale, 2024).
It is also worth noting the progressive incorporation of autistic actors, and especially actresses, who play characters with these characteristics. Interestingly, the phenomenon is especially visible in youth series such as the Australian Heartbreak High (Hannah Carroll Chapman, Ben Gannon and Michael Jenkins, 2022 and ongoing), which includes the autistic actress and activist Chloe Hayden, and especially the British A Kind of Spark (Matt Holt and Marek Losey 2023 and ongoing), where most of the protagonists are autistic. Beyond youth series, we also find autistic actresses and actors playing main characters in the American comedy As we see it (Jason Katims, 2022), the English Dinosaur (Niamh McKeown, 2024) and the police drama Patience (Marteen Moerkerke, 2025).
Moving towards the normalization of autism
Based on the examples given so far, it may seem that the representation of the autistic condition in audiovisual media has improved, but, as is often the case, the reality is more complex, since in recent years some of the most ridiculous and clichéd representations of the autistic condition in the history of cinema have also been produced. Without going any further, Predator (Shane Black, 2018), the worst installment of the science fiction saga of the same name, is based on a hilarious premise: a member of the relentless race of alien hunters tries to capture an autistic child with high abilities to incorporate characteristics of his genome into their species, since in the context of the film, autistic people constitute the next step in human evolution(!). For its part, The Fanatic (Fred Durst, 2019) is about a very dangerous autistic cinephile, who tries to destroy the life of his favorite actor, and Music (Sia, 2021) presents us with an absolutely dehumanized autistic "magical girl", who imagines the world as if it were a musical and embodies more clichés about the autistic condition in the same character than Rain man.
Films and series continue to be made in which directors and screenwriters not only fail to document the subject, but also exclude the participation of autistic people.
As can be seen, little by little it seems that cinema and series are trying to develop more complex autistic characters, leaving aside the clichés, but, despite everything, progress is not total or uniform. In any case, we can observe that while in the Anglo-Saxon film world there is a growing awareness of the issue, in the rest of the world the advances described are nowhere to be seen. Very often films and series continue to be made in which directors and screenwriters not only do not document the subject, but also exclude the participation of autistic people who could significantly contribute to the quality of the production. A typical marketing strategy consists of trying to convince the audience that whenever a disability or a peculiar condition is represented in a film, it is done with an inclusive vocation, but reality shows that in many cases there has been hardly the slightest interest in offering the viewer an accurate vision of the characters in question .
The future of the cinematic representation of autism can only improve significantly if the condition is normalized as another characteristic of people and the value of the work of autistic people within society in general and the audiovisual industry in particular is recognized . Actors such as Anthony Hopkins and Dan Aykroyd have autism diagnoses, as well as horror and superhero film director David F. Sandberg.
It is quite possible that, as playwright David Mamet wrote in his book Bambi vs. Godzilla: Purpose, Practice, and Nature of the Film Industry (2008), many of the most important directors in the history of cinema were undiagnosed autistic. There is a space for autistic people in film and television , both in front of and behind the camera, but to claim it we must stop hiding and reclaim who we are.
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