naturalplastic wrote:
Dial1194 wrote:
It wasn't the worst possible starting point for portrayal of such characters. The main problem was that in the interim, until fairly recently, there simply wasn't anything else that got such wide mainstream recognition. A stake was put in the ground, but the territory never got explored.
Good point.
And that's part of why the movie IS both credited AND blamed for having a big effect on the public view of autism. It was the only game in town for decades. And that wasn't the movie's own fault.
Yep. And that's similar to what's being experienced now with a flood of autistic and almost-autistic characters in media, particularly TV shows. The depictions are crude, simplistic, and often one-note... but you have to start
somewhere before you can build on it and get more nuanced, complex variations - often based on feedback from the cruder versions. It's a little rough in the beginning, but it'll get better given time. And the alternative was to never have any such depictions, and leave Rain Man to be the first, last, and only well-known example forever.
No-one's going to paint like Da Vinci on their first attempt. But if you want master-quality work in the future, at some point you've got to let the apprentices step up and start slinging paint.
25 Oct 2019, 10:44 am
