Such a huge amount of TV, and especially Movies, are geared towards a neurotypical audience.
As an autistic kid growing up, the only actor I ever cared about was Brent Spiner (Data, from Star Trek). I never watched the original series as a kid, but after watching it as an adult, Data was obviously carrying on a role started by Spock, another all-time great. Maybe they both count as rare role models for ASD folks?
My favorite movie is this non-movie called Gizmo! (1977). (It’s free on youtube among other places.) It’s mostly a collection of old black and white footage of weird inventions. It definitely has neurotypical folks in mind as part of the audience, giving them lots of weird things to laugh at, but I could watch or scroll through info about random unique contraptions for days.
Avatar. The tall Smurf one, not the blue arrow tattoo one.
Given the other comment ITT about constantine, I suppose I love it for similar reasons, thematically.
Someone at odds with society finally meets kindred spirits and is freed from society entirely, finally able to live the life she always deserved, bonding with her new family in a way others could only imagine.
We should all be so lucky.
I love Mad Max: Fury Road. All of the visual storytelling, the world building through costume and vehicle designs, the shot compositions, the colors, the movements, the pacing, the fight choreography, it’s all just chefs kiss. I love the whole post-apocalpyse genre a lot but the worldbuilding in Fury Road is so layered and complex yet subtle. I notice new things every time I watch it.
I could never really pick just one, but for the sake of discussion I will go with:
2005 Constantine with Keanu and Rachel Weisz.
The reason I am going with this is that its one of my all time favourites, but more importantly I had never thought to look at Constantine’s ability to see evil is like being divergent. His interaction with normies parallel those in the community although at a very different level and fictionalized.
John sees the world differently, reacts to it differently, prioritizes things differently, feels things differently, judges things differently. In the process he takes someone who has masked and rejected her differences and gets her to accept that she too is divergent.
I never connected these dots but I can see how the divergent part of me identified with this almost unconsciously.
No wonder I loved that movie!
Fisher King
I can’t think of any off the top of my head that are specifically about neurodiversity. It’s hard to find representation at all, let alone good representation. Most is inaccurate to the point of being harmful.
One movie I quite like is Thelma, a Norwegian spookythriller from 2017. Sort of like Carrie if you’re familiar with that book (and subsequent movie).
Thelma was great! I loved the atmosphere and trying to figure out the character’s emotions throughout the movie.
Yay! Glad you liked it! 😁
Going to check out Thelma :) Have you seen the Good Doctor? That show makes me angry.
Memoria by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. It stars Tilda Swinton as a Scottish orchid farmer visiting her sister in Colombia. She’s woken one night by a loud BANG, a sound that then follows her, happening randomly, anywhere, inexplicable and out of her control. She pursues the source of the sound, and I’ll stop my description there.
Right now, for me, this is the greatest most sublime, magical work of art ever created, for maybe too many reasons to state here, and at any rate it’s best experienced than interpreted (of course, there’s a lot going on in it that is worth discussing, but it is so welcoming to fresh experience that it feels kinda crude to list off reasons why the movie should be seen… maybe I’m being silly lol). However, I do wanna talk a little about how I feel this is such a uniquely neurodivergent movie. It deals with experience, intangible fleeting experiences that we live with, that follow us and direct us. No one else hears the sound Jessica hears, only her, and it affects her sense of the world, history, and self. I’ve never resonated with a character more – her quiet, dogged curiosities and intense frictional dissociation are so familiar to me – how it makes her body move, how she navigates conversations, how she ruminates (I’ve never seen a film depict rumination so vividly!!), how she folds in on herself, and where it takes her, or what…
Sorry if this is overly obtuse, I really want to preserve the transcendent mystery of this movie and I can’t recommend it enough for neurodivergent folks. I tend to see Jessica as having ADHD, but there’s a comfort for me in the film not belaboring the label, but just presenting what the world is like for us, and the purpose lying out there for those like us.
Honorable mentions:
- Goodbye, Dragon-Inn by Tsai Ming-Liang
- Computer Chess by Andrew Bujalski
- The Trial by Orson Welles
- Playtime by Jacques Tati
- Perfumed Nightmare by Kidlat Tahimik
