How Aspies Are Potrayed On Tele

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How do you know the person is an aspie?

Eh, all stereotypes are exagerrated. Personally I wouldn't get offended. I can laugh at myself. I consider myself a geek and a nerd but still laugh at the way geeks and nerds are potrayed by the media. I consider myself a "half-goth" and still laugh at the way goths are potrayed in the media. Are these stereotypes false? Sure. Will people get the wrong impression? Sure. But people will anyway, even from meeting a real-live aspie. How else would these false stereotypes start in the first place? People are judgemental no matter what, so what's the point in getting aggrevated about it? I figure, if you don't fit the stereotype or the stereotype is false, then it's obviously just not you. So what?

I call myself a Nerd and I laugh at the way that the Media portrays Nerds. Especially in the Austin Powers Movies. I've had the TV on YTV once, and they were showing a preview of the show, Reccess. They've showed a group of Popular Kids, than Jocks and the last thing that they've showed was Nerds sporting Horn-Rimmed Glasses. I couldn't stop laughing, because I'm one of those Horn-Rimmed Nerds and I thought it was cute and funny, at the same time.

Most of y'all (you all) are giving British TV programs as an example. The only American program that I can see where there is a possible Aspie is on this show called "Saved by the Bell". There is this guy named Screech, who is odd and quirky. He hangs with the popular group of kids. It seems like he tries so hard to be friends with these other kids even though they sometimes treat him badly and dog him. Screech is friends with this guy named Zack who is the epitome of uber NT. Zack is a slick con artist who is full of himself. Screech has a crush on this girl name Lisa and she always spurns his advances. Screech always asks Lisa when they can get together and Lisa will always say "When hell freezes over" or something along those lines.

This is Hollywood. They can't get anything right.

Paraphrasing from Boondocks "The Passion of the Christ was supposed to be all historically accurate, and they still have a White Jesus."

I'd like to see a movie with a bunch of geeks/aspies (close enough) being portrayed as deep, complex, and interesting characters. And in a positive light. Or at least as something more than just complete failures that you're supposed to hate.

There used to be a short lived show on NBC called "Freaks and Geeks". The show featured a bunch of odd and quirky teenagers. But it ended up being cancelled after a couple of episodes. The show didn't attrack much of a following. I guess the viewing audience only wants to watch the "beautiful people".

Try the film "The Caine Mutiny" (1954) some time, I think it's worth it: after a couple months of learning more about Asperger's, I had a chance to see this movie again a couple weeks ago, and now I'm convinced that Humphry Bogart's character Captain Queeg is aspie, though the other officers were describing him as "paranoid."

My impression started with this thing that the captain would do with these two steel ball-bearings he usually kept in his pocket: when he would get frustrated while speaking he'd take them out and roll them together with one hand. When I saw that, I said to myself "hey, wait a minute... he's stimming!"

Soon, I realised he was showing trouble with multi-tasking (such as a scene where he gives an order to turn the ship around, and then gets distracted with ordering a sailor to tuck his shirt tail in, while the ship runs over a tow line, and had trouble transitioning back away from repremanding the sailor to steering the ship.) And then his junior officers got together and gave a list of some of the captain's other "strange behaviours", which, along with the way Mr. Bogart played the character, included a failure to make eye contact, a flat, un-emotional voice and stereo-typed speech tics ("I kid you not!"), sticking strictly to official routines and regulations, a lack of emotional connection with the rest of the crew, some weird run-on speeches and strange obsessions, difficulty recognizing different sailors and remembering their names, a very black-and-white way of looking at things... more than once I ended up thinking to myself "hey, he's acting exactly like I would in his place!" And keep an eye open for an aspie-meltdown or two. In the end, the Captain's "symptoms" easily looked to me far more like Asperger's than "paranoia" (though certainly it was Asperger's with a bit of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder added in....)

I identified completely with the captain (even though, for nearly the entire movie up to the end, the Captain is subjectively portrayed as a kind of villain through the other officers' points of view... I felt terrible for him while the "heroes" of the film plotted behind his back, made up cruel little songs about him, and tried to make things miserable for him... but give the movie a chance and watch up to the end, when we're finally given a fair, objective point of view....)




Anyway, the movie's a classic, the acting is top-notch, and Humphry Bogart (no surprise) has probably done the best job ever of portraying an aspie character (even though I doubt anyone who worked on the film, or the guy who wrote the story the film was based on, had ever even heard of Asperger's.) I can't recommend it enough (and I guess I really ought to read the original book some time, too, to see just how much of the aspie-like portrayal was in the original story, and how much the director and Bogart contributed....)

In the movie X-Men: The Last Stand, I empathised with Magneto. Although I never was in a concentration camp, I can empathise with the anger he must have felt.

But I might be digressing.

Onto something a little more embarrassing, I guess I also empathise with Seven of Nine from Star Trek: Voyager - though technically human, she was the most alien of the characters, I kinda feel a bit like that. Although her condition was because of the Borg assimilating her, I could empathise with her to a degree. Can't say I've seen enough TOS to know much of Spock, though.

I saw an episode of "Becker" in which the two nurses kept takling and joking about how "Asperger's" sounds like "Ass-Burgers"

it had nothing to do with the plot though

I think that the reason why they exaggerate things is because Hollywood or whoever is making the TV show or movie wants to emphasize to the audience that they have a disorder. I don't like the way that they portray autistics in some shows; I think that when some people hear the word "autistic", they think of the movie Rainman. Some people who aren't as educated about autism think that all people with autism have an extreme social disorder and have all these really savant skills (like extreme memory and math skills for example), but the reality is is that autism is layed out on a spectrum. Another reality is that only 10% of the entire autistic population are autistic savants, or have savant skills (like on Rainman).

This holby city thing is nothing compared to how we were portrayed on Dr. Phil. There was an episode where they had a guy with Asperger's on and he was really irritable and nasty, and they never once mentioned that we're not all like that.

There was an episode of "Penn & Teller's Bullsh*t" that bothered me, not because of the way an autistic or aspie was portrayed, but by the way a real one was treated. Ordinarily, I'm alright with those guys, even when they're trying to tear up something I disagree with them about.

But for their show on "The Best", they decided to illustrate how the quest to buy "The Best", electronics in this particular case, is fueled by BS... by just turning the camera on while a guy who was clearly autistic rambled, in a monotone voice for what seemed like half the show, about his favorite palm pilots and PDA's, and Penn and Teller made fun of the way he talked, looked, and acted... and wouldn't let up. I felt terrible for the poor guy, and even had flashbacks to some of my worst days in school while watching (which might have coloured my reaction a bit, maybe that made the TV show seem more cruel than it really was? I couldn't bring myself to see it again to make sure.)

Hey, they could easily have made a better argument without resorting to anything like that. Instead, it just came off as un-necessarily nasty and cruel, for no real good reason at all. It didn't prove any useful point, and it wasn't even fun to watch (I would hope that even the sort of people who had fun doing that in grade school were embarrassed and disgusted with themselves while watching it.)

By all means, make merciless fun of the con-artists, cult leaders, and even the ordinary clueless crackpots who fall for it all and who should know better. I love seeing dishonest parasites getting caught red-handed, and maybe public humiliation will cause their willing victims to actually think about what they are doing.

But that poor autistic guy isn't hurting anyone, nobody is really hurting him (he just had a strange hobby, collecting Palm Pilots), and he's not really in much of a condition to defend himself from anyone. So why drag him out in public and cut him to pieces, call him names, and make fun of the way he talks and dresses like a couple of nasty, insecure little school bullies? NOT cool!

Hey, why not make fun of blind people because they can't see, or take a cripple's crutches away and laugh when he falls over, or pull the wings off of flies or something?



But, like I said: it's especially frustrating and disappointing, because normally I don't have any problems with those guys, it seemed way out of character for them, and I can't figure out how I'd been judging them so wrong all this time.

Has anyone seen the show Numb3rs?? The main guy in that is a mathmatical genius and has quite a few AS like traits - not surprising really. He's quite weird, does thinks like not leave the house for weeks, had meltdowns and lives with his dad though he's about 25. But he also is very cool!! ! he goes on and on about mathematical formula and uses it to show hows he sees the world. He's not meant to be AS of course, he's supposed to be part of the 1% of NT's who are savants i guess....still great portrayel and deffinantly worth a look.

There's a minor character in the beginning of WarGames that has some aspie traits. I don't think he's really portrayed negatively, but then again, I see nothing negative about being an uber-dork At one point in the conversation, someone says to him (paraphrasing a little-don't remember the exact quote) "Remember when you asked me to tell you when you were acting rudely and insensitively? You are now." And that's sort of when the lightbulb went off in my brain.