Changes in Perspectives of High-Functioning Autism through
                                             Rain Man
                                                       by Joshua Solomon


     A man and his brother walk down the terminal in an airport.  They engage in a heated argument over whether they should board an airplane for Los Angeles.  The older brother complains about taking an airplane and fears for his life, telling his brother about the crashes that every airline has had.  The younger brother becomes annoyed and tells him that every airline has crashed at one point or another.  To this, the older brother exclaims, “Qantas never crashed.”  Upset at his obstinacy and refusing to fly to Australia just to travel to Los Angeles, the younger brother attempts to pull the older.  He responds in the only way he knows—by screaming.  Not wishing to undergo his painful screams, the younger brother stops and reassures his brother that they will drive to Los Angeles instead.

     This scene may sound weird to neurologically-typical (NT), or “normal”, people, but it does demonstrate the coping strategies of people with autism, as exhibited through this scene from Rain Man.  Charlie Babbitt, a neurologically typical adult, does not understand how his brother, Raymond Babbitt, who is a high-functioning autistic, functions in his little world that he has created.  Manifestations of autism such as this indicate to people how an autistic was seen as “like a wolf” (Pollak 258) in older definitions.  Recently, though, people are beginning to understand that the problem is organic, or biologically based, as opposed to the psychogenic, or psychologically based, hypothesis of the past.  With the release of Rain Man came the increased understanding of autistics and a willingness to find out what autistics are thinking, thus improving the treatment and awareness so that they can live more normal lives than their counterparts in the past.
 

Etiology and History of Diagnosis
     Autism has undergone significant definition changes in the past.  The term was first used in 1912 by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler from the Greek word for self—autos—in his description of patients with “schizophrenic thinking divorced from both logic and reality” (Rorvik 249).  However, an established set of guidelines for diagnosis would not be established until 1943, when Leo Kanner, a German émigré to the United States, wrote “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Content”, a landmark essay in which he “described eleven children who, from infancy, had seemed to cut off from their parents…[and] existed in their own, often impenetrable world” (Pollak 250).  The common features that he noticed in those eleven children were

    “(1) a social impairment characterized by an aloofness and lack of reciprocity; (2) a failure to communicate manifested by muteness, echolalia
    [a condition of repeating others rather than responding to them], or an inability to get intonations right; and (3) repetitious, stereotyped behavior,
    like rocking and twiddling in small children and the preoccupation with, say, railroad schedules in older ones” (Pollak 250).  Though Kanner
    suspected a neurological fault, he could not find proof and suggested initially that autism might have been psychogenic.  His initial findings convinced
    him that nearly all of the parents of autistic children were highly intelligent, self-absorbed in their careers, and emotionally aloof, suggesting that
    they kept their children “neatly in a refrigerator that did not defrost” (qtd. in Pollak 250).

Though he would state later in In Defense of Mothers: How to Bring Up Children in Spite of the More Zealous Psychologists that he never took such a hard line, others at the time took this statement as truth and sought to prove it.
     One of the most notable of these was Bruno Bettelheim, a concentration camp survivor who ran the Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago.  In a grant application to the Ford Foundation to secure funding, he stated that he sought to find out “what their [the autistic students’] parents had done ‘wrong’ in raising them” (Pollak 251) and to determine if “proper training based on human relationships can reverse the autistic process” (Pollak 252).  These were based upon his assumptions that autism was caused by mothers who were characterized by their “towering rage” against everyone in their families, “humiliation run rampant” against the children that would become autistic (Pollak 254), or their coldness.  This caused parents to lose hope in themselves and practically beg for their children to be accepted into Bettelheim’s school rather than look for viable options themselves (Pollak 280).
     And yet, the humiliation did not stop there, as Bettelheim extended it toward the autistic children themselves.  One such example was an analogy to animals, in which he stated that some of the children, “upon seeing an animal in the neighborhood, responded ‘as though they had found a dear, long-lost friend’” (qtd. in Pollak 258).  Additionally, he compared them to “wolf children” in that these “‘psychotic’ children have acute sensations of smell and touch, that ‘autistic’ children rely little on sight, and that ‘schizophrenic’ [sometimes used in this time as interchangeable with autistic] children often behave as if they were insensitive to heat and cold” (Pollak 258).  This is similar to the reason why Ray was sent to Wallbrook, the institution in which he lives, as Sanford, Charlie and Ray’s father, was afraid that Ray would “hurt Charlie Babbitt” (Rain Man) with hot bath water by confusing hot and cold water or by simply exploring his surroundings.  He not just blamed the parents, but humiliated the children, in an effort that Sander Gilman, in Disease and Representation, says was done to “localize [the fear of how autism is caused] and…to domesticate it” in the form of “the Other” (1).  Hence, Bettelheim not only referred to parents of autistics as “the Other” in an attempt to anthropomorphize autism (Gilman 2), but also the autistics themselves!
     Hope seemed to be lost until 1964, when Bernard Rimland published his landmark treatise Infantile Autism: the Syndrome and Its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior.  He argued that the psychogenic theory is an inadequate, pernicious hypothesis made on faulty analysis by debunking each point made by its proponents and submitting points for an organic basis, including the assumptions that “parents who do fit the description of the supposedly pathogenic parent almost invariably have normal, non-autistic children” (51) and that “autism can occur or be closely simulated in children with known organic brain damage” (52).  Though the mainstream press ignored Rimland’s book, it had an underground following that Rimland organized in 1965 as the National Society for Autistic Children, now known as the Autism Society of America.  In contrast, Bettelheim’s book The Empty Fortress gained national exposure from The New York Times Magazine while causing the ire of many parents for its “cascade of blame” (Pollak 272).  At the first annual meeting of the Autism Society of America, Kanner gave hope to those in attendance by “acquitting” the parents and debunking Bettelheim’s treatise as “The Empty Book” (qtd. in Pollak 282).  Today, it is understood as a neurological impairment with a variety of suggestions for causation, such as increased serotonin levels in the blood and alterations in brain tissue, especially in such areas as the hippocampus and the amygdala.  High-functioning autistics, such as Ray and myself, often have the ability to speak and sometimes exhibit a savantism, or high degree of knowledge in one particular area.

     Ray’s World
     Nevertheless, the world of the autistic was still impenetrable, hard to understand from the outside world, so there was still a gulf between treatment and success.  This made the production of Rain Man in 1988 even more important, as it showed us, for the first time, an insight into the world of the autistic and reactions to him, with technical assistance from Rimland.  Ray was institutionalized when Charlie was two years old, as Sanford was worried that Ray, might turn into an animal and hurt Charlie.  Thus Charlie never knew Ray until he met him after their father’s death.  This outwardly displays the isolating effect of autism not just on the patient, but also on the siblings mentally and physically.  Having never understood what life is for people other than himself, Charlie gives an account of “the Other” when his father threatened him when he was younger by saying that the “Rain Man”, someone whom Charlie understood to be some type of monster, would come after him (Rain Man).  Additionally, he also cares only for himself, fabricating false reports in his job as a hot-rod salesman just to make more money for himself at the expense of everyone else.
     As we learn about Ray, we learn about how he copes in his miniature world that he has created.  Unlike Bettelheim’s description of the “wolf child”, Ray seems to cope in an extremely rational manner, having been sheltered from the extremes of life by Wallbrook.  For instance, this coping involves his repetition of Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First” skit whenever he becomes nervous and out of place.  Charlie, who is increasingly incensed by his repetition, reacts in an NT way—by telling Ray to stop acting “like an idiot” and screaming, “If you understand that it’s funny, you might get better” (Rain Man).  He, like most NT people, does not understand the “emotional deficit” (qtd. in Schneider 25) that autistics innately have and that they must be helped to an understanding rather than just being left to their own devices.  This would plague Charlie’s understanding of his brother in that Ray has a different perception of coping than Charlie does, inevitably leading to conflict, such as in the airport scene or when Ray walks out of the car to look at a crash, to which Charlie yells to himself, “This guy is a f—king fruitcake” (Rain Man).
     Additionally, Ray’s life consists of routine, which is also an overly rational method of thinking, contrasting once again Bettelheim’s assertion of the irrational “wolf child”.  Living with practically the same schedule for at least 25 years, Ray, like many autistics, does not comprehend the meaning of change.  Part of Wallbrook’s sheltering included the accommodating of Ray’s schedule and specifications.  Most important of these obsessions is his with the show The People’s Court, which he watches religiously every day.  When taken out of their routine abruptly, they sometimes cope violently.  For example, while on the road in the middle of farm country, Ray exclaims “Eight minutes ‘til Wapner” (Rain Man).  As time draws nearer, he becomes more disturbed and nearly throws a tantrum, with his brother egging him on about failing to be able to watch “legal history being made” (Rain Man).  Gilman explains Charlie’s derision as a “need” for Ray “ to be different” so that he can “create out of the stuff of [Ray’s] reality myths that make [him] different” (Gilman 13), and Charlie was thus able to deride “the Other”, which he could “localize...and...domesticate” (Gilman 1), not his brother.
     Nevertheless, Charlie gradually begins to differentiate “the Other” from his brother in seeing the deep personal connections that he has for him.  In a slip of the tongue, Charlie calls Ray “Rain Man”.  At that point, he sees his fallacies in viewing Ray as “the Other” with his exclamation, “You?  You’re the Rain Man?” (Rain Man)  All of a sudden, “the Other” does not seem as strange as it used to, having taken a familiar form.  The origins of this fear may have come from the father’s fear that Ray would “hurt Charlie Babbitt” (Rain Man).  This was seen especially when Ray screams, “Hot water burn baby!” (Rain Man) when Charlie turns on the hot water in the bath.  Perhaps these fears that originated in Ray’s childhood manifest themselves years later as a rationale for placing every stereotype imaginable upon Ray.
     Close to the end of the movie, these stereotypes are abated as we see how society can learn to understand autistic people through associating with them.  At home in Los Angeles, Charlie realizes how much he has connected with his brother and finds ways of helping him adjust, including working with him, such as in demonstrating the humor of Abbott and Costello, rather than against him.  Also, he helps Ray to see some humor in some other obsessions.  Earlier in the movie, Charlie grabs Ray’s neck for obsessing over the location of the syrup, demanding that he “stop acting like a f—king idiot” (Rain Man).  In Los Angeles, though, Charlie easily points to the syrup, to which Ray responds, “Charlie Babbitt made a joke” (Rain Man) and mildly laughs.  It is in this way that he can help Ray to “get better” and understand life in the NT world.
Reflections from the Real World
     With the release of Rain Man came the increased understanding of the autistic and a willingness to find out what the autistic is thinking, hopefully to help them “get better.”  One such example of an autistic who relates to Ray in some ways is Edgar Schneider, an adult with Asperger’s syndrome, which he calls the highest functioning form on the autism spectrum.  In the time before Rain Man, he was misdiagnosed after a nervous breakdown as a schizophrenic, causing him to feel the social stigmas placed upon him by this label.  However, he was correctly diagnosed in 1995 after he read an article by Oliver Sacks on autistics who displayed signs of savantism.  Like Ray, he suffers from an “emotional deficit” that causes him to be devoid of what he calls “agape” (Schneider 83), or love from the heart.  He often has difficulty connecting with others through this emotion in what he calls “one of Mother Nature’s sick jokes” (Schneider 25) of leaving the survival emotions.  These emotions, which are the innate emotions seen in animals, are what must have prompted Bettelheim to call his patients “wolf children”, as these instincts that are normally kept in check by social emotions.
     His routine, though not as extensive as Ray’s, due to Schneider’s higher functioning level, still involves some forms of obsession, including his obsession of music.  He obsesses over many details in learning the pieces he sings for the Florida Philharmonic Chorus and sympathizing with what many consider antagonists in many operas, again an instance of differences in emotion with respect to the NT community.  Nevertheless, Schneider has made moves to integrate with the wider community.
     In addition to integration, he also attempts to dispel commonly held myths about autistics, especially with regards to schizophrenia.  Such myths he abrogates are the coldness myth, in which he explains that the autistic person “has no emotions to show” (Schneider 97), while the schizophrenic is afraid of revealing his or her feelings due to a fear of perceived weakness.  In addition, he also differentiates between the two disorders in terms of activities, in which the “autistic person is self-sufficient” and the schizophrenic “sees group activities as requiring some degree of emotional bonding” (Schneider 96).  Using these, Schneider is trying to establish a definition of autism based on organic disease and is differentiating it from psychogenic disorders to persuade the reader that the autistic’s problems cannot be blamed on personality, allowing society to understand autistics through the content of their character rather than their diagnosis or earlier perception as “wolf children”.
     Though there are some success stories such as Schneider, other high-functioning autistics are often lower functioning than he is.  I have had the unique opportunity to work with some over the summer at the Coalition for Independent Living Options’s teen camp.  Though I believe most of the autistics at the camp were low-functioning, I did meet this one girl (a rarity in autism, as the gender ratio is four males to one female), Darlene, who seemed to be high-functioning.  On the first day, I noticed she was wearing headphones.  I asked her to what music she was listening.  In the rocking motion common to many autistics, she told me, in the frankest manner, that she was listening to John Mellencamp.  She seemed very interested in the music, rocking to it and sometimes softly blurting out the lyrics.  It seemed to be the one thing keeping her aware of her surroundings was the set of headphones.  To me, this is not an instance of Bettelheim’s “wolf child”, but rather of an attempt to cope with the stresses of her isolation.  In addition, on reflection, she seemed to withdraw into that constantly rather than playing with the other teens in the camp.  If only I had understood this earlier in the summer, I would have helped her to socialize with others, thus helping her out of her obsessive isolation, which I know is extremely painful, having experienced it many times over unconsciously as a mechanism to cope with the world’s problems.  Thus, in that instance, as in every instance I encounter with people with disabilities, I did not see her as an incarnation of “the Other”, but rather as herself, a human being who has her own quirks, just like everyone else in the world does, and especially like Ray is.
   Criticisms of Representation
     Although Rain Man has helped to raise awareness of autism and make it more human, some critics interpret the movie as being a little damaging for the autistic community.  In an article from the Journal of Popular Film and Television, Claude J. Smith, Jr., describes the main stereotypes of the disabled individual that are represented in films such as Rain Man and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape as geared toward showing how “an institution is a safer location than the street for both the patient and the public despite the loss of individual freedom” (3), especially when comparing the “good folk” of the mental institutions (5) to the “dominating” (4), abusive parents.  Additionally, Smith points to Charlie’s own “emotional autism” of avarice, which is “miraculously cured” when he realizes Ray “belongs in a restricted environment” (3).
     Smith does neglect some points in his analysis, though.  If Sanford was so uncaring toward his children, why did he send Ray to Wallbrook?  In Sanford’s mind, this was a way of protecting both Charlie from Ray and Ray from himself.  What father would not find a way to give his children the most safety possible?  It is true that there might have been a small chance that Ray could have developed more “normally” in the NT world, but Sanford decided that this was not worth the potential risk to Charlie’s life, especially with regards to his worries of Ray turning on “hot [bath] water”, thereby burning a young Charlie (Rain Man).  Hence, in my opinion, Sanford institutionalized Ray out of love for both of his children rather than for selfish, dominating interests.  That is hardly the action of a “refrigerator parent”.  This does reinforce the stereotype of the “wolf child” to a small degree, but it does realistically show how autistic children were treated in the 1960s and does not sugarcoat it.
     Moreover, Smith seems to say that Charlie cured himself by classifying Ray as “the Other”.  If this were true, then he would not have grown as emotionally attached as he did to Ray toward the end of the film.  However, Smith does make a good point in noting how Ray is seen as a “miraculous healer” (3) toward those means.  Perhaps the disabled force us to reexamine our personalities and adjust to them.  In this case, Charlie would be healing himself by being forced to change his behavioral paradigms rather than through reinforcing them.
     Criticism has not only come from the NT community, but from some autistics as well.  Melissa Bee, who runs an autism/Asperger’s syndrome support site, discusses how Ray was characterized as easily manipulated (2).  It is true that Charlie does originally kidnap Ray in order to ransom for what he believes is a fair share of his father’s estate and that he uses Ray to gamble in Las Vegas.  Nevertheless, Charlie undergoes a metamorphosis through the trip, coming to terms with his brother’s personality before they even reach Las Vegas, in the motel where Ray says he would “never hurt Charlie Babbitt” (Rain Man).  In many ways, this metamorphosis parallels the history of autism from the image of a “fruitcake” (Rain Man) or a “wolf child” who was stereotyped as neglected by a “refrigerator mother” to a human being who can find help in an intimate.
     Bee does note that Ray has become “a model for non-understanding people to base their knowledge of autism on” (2).  To a degree, she is right in her assessment.  Having watched Animaniacs when I was younger, I had wondered if I had heard one of the character’s quotes of “Definitely, definitely” before, or even if it applied to me.  Though the character had a good heart, I often saw it as an idiot.  Perhaps this shameful image of the autistic has influenced a generation of insensitive children, but I have not seen that yet, thankfully.
     On the other hand, I did once watch an episode of The Critic in which Jon Lovitz’s character reviews a parody of three Tom Cruise films.  Having seen this on a recording for the first time a few weeks ago, I was shocked at the Rain Man parody, in which Ray (the character in the spoof) seems to irritate his brother and gets drunk.  Needless to say, I was not happy.  The pop-culture representations of autism through spoofs of Rain Man are what Bee must have thought of.  On this note, it is immoral to spoof a disability if it is put in a negative light.
     Nevertheless, Bee also underestimates how much awareness the film has made about autism.  On the e-mail list “University Students with Autism”, I met an autistics’ advocate from Tuscon, AZ, Jerry Newport.  When I learned of his influence in the community, I did some research on him.  It seems that he discovered his autism through Rain Man.  In the scene where a psychiatrist in a small town asked Ray a complex multiplication problem, Jerry answered it much faster than Ray did on screen (Rowe 1).  It was at that point that he began to understand why, despite his B.A. in math from the University of Michigan, he could only find work as a cab driver, stating, “You don’t hire people who don’t pay attention to you” (Rowe 2).  Just as Charlie is forced to rethink his behavioral paradigms so that he could respond to Ray better, the public has been forced to rethink its paradigms with respect to autism, with even some people in the public wondering if they are autistic themselves, thus creating a deeper connection with Ray.
Conclusion
     Autism is still one of those disorders that intrigue us, as we still do not have any consensus on what causes it.  This initially caused us to place autistics and their parents in the realm of “the Other”.  The release of Rain Man, coupled with the advances made in identifying the elusive causes, have allowed us to abrogate the old myths and understand the humanity of such autistics as Ray, Schneider, Darlene, and Newport rather than their different from the NT mainstream.  We have come a long way since the era of “refrigerator mothers” in our understanding of autism as a neurological disorder rather than a psychogenic one.  Rain Man has helped us to see the humanity, not the wildness, of autistics.  We now see autism as an illness, not as a monstrosity.
     As we watch Charlie watch Ray board the train for Wallbrook in a simple manner, it has to make us wonder how simple this disorder really is and if treatment could entail simple, effective solutions in the future.  With the emphasis on treating the problem rather than disregarding it completely or cascading blame, I am confident that we will one day find such solutions with the focus on a biological cause and a treatment based on that.
 
         Works Cited
Bee, Melissa. “Autism on Film.” Home page. July 2000. 3 December 2001 <http://hunnybee.com/autism/autism-movies.html>
Gilman, Sander. Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS.  Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Kanner, Leo. “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact.” Classic Readings in Autism. Ed. Anne M. Donnellan. New York: Teachers College Press, 1985.
    11-50.
Pollak, Richard. The Creation of Dr. B. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
Rain Man. Dir. Barry Levinson. Prod. Mark Johnson. Metro Goldwyn Mayer, 1988.
Rimland, Bernard. Infantile Autism: the Syndrome and Its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior. New York: Meredith Publishing Company, 1964.
Rowe, Peter. “Delving into the Mystery of Autism.” San Diego Union-Tribune 16 October 2001. 9 December 2001
    <http://www.uniontrib.com/news/metro/rowe/20011016-9999_1c16rowe.html>
Schneider, Edgar. Discovering My Autism: Apologia Pro Vita Sua (with Apologies to Cardinal Newman). Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Jessica Kingsley
    Publishers Ltd., 1999.
Smith, Claude J., Jr. “Finding a Warm Place for Someone We Know: the Cultural Appeal of Recent Mental Patient and Asylum Films.” Journal of Popular Film
    and Television 27.1 (2001). 9 December 2001 <http://web1.infotrac.galegroup.com>