Rain Man (the movie)

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Last night, after reading things from people here about how they would perform some pretty nasty operations on anyone who talked about Rain Man, I watched it for the first time.

Dustin Hoffman's acting was amazing - he seems to have studied hundreds of autistic people and in true Hollywood style has created a being who contains pretty much the worst or quirkiest features of all of them.

It was an interesting film but I suppose the question I want to ask is: exactly what type of autistic person was Dustin Hoffman trying to be?

He showed a lot of LFA traits as well as HFA traits - even purely AS traits.

Was he just a complete Hollywood mash-up of stereotypes or are there people out there who really seem to have all of those qualities?

I wouldn't emphasize ALL so much. Every ASD person is different.

The film "Rain Man" is based on the real life person, Kim Peek who is an autistic savant. There are not many autistic individuals like Kim... and Dustin Hoffman spent a great deal of time with Kim so he could accurately portray him as best as he could for
the film.

Rain Man himself was good - Dustin Huffman was supposed to play a classic autistic who was a savant (after a very specific person), and he did well. The problem was that people took this interpretation of a particular person and turned it into a generalization.

Ok, it's starting to make a bit more sense now... he was trying to portray a specific individual...

It would have been better if they had some sort of disclaimer/statement up front in the title sequence.

the film 'rain man' was inspired by the real life person Kim Peek, who is not autistic. he has some significant and interesting brain abnormalities. he calls it 'brain injury' but i think it's more of a congenital defect, not too sure. he's missing his corpus callosum and has some other weird stuff going on. he's a savant because of some amazing talents his specially-wired brain has given him, but that's not the same as autism and spreading disinformation like that has really hurt the autistic community. for so long after that movie came out autism = rain man. there are not any autistic individuals like Kim, unless they also happen to have comorbid brain structure disorders.

the writer wanted a story featuring Peek, but the screenplay that eventually came out of it involved autism, and the 'rain man' character was exactly a hollywood mash-up of stereotypes, only originally based on Peek. dustin hoffman (great actor, but i much preferred him as ratso rizzo or ben braddock) did work with Peek to get a lot of his mannerisms for the part.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_q ... rch=Search

Rain Man is supposed to be a HFA. In my opinion he seemed like a severly autistic stereotype rather than a HFA. Einstein was a HFA and look how much he achieved...

I agree. maybe this is why some people are skeptical when some of you all tell them you are HFA or have AS? When my boyfriend first told me about AS, my mind immediately went to Rain man and thought, "no way." Damn Hollywood.

"HFA" according to what was known at the time, when many people who were "higher" on the spectrum were not even thought to be on it.

I don't think he's a stereotype. Rather, I think his character has been adopted as the standard "stereotype" and because this movie was seen by so many people who didn't know what autism was, he then becomes the model for what they think it is.

In daily life, the Rainman character was abysmally low-functioning. This movie had the unfortunate result of triggering the image of this character every time it was mentioned that somebody's child was autistic, as in "Oh, he's like Rainman?"