Benny & Joon Review & Analysis

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Hi guys! I've got another post up on my blog. A few weeks ago, I went back and rewatched an old movie, Benny & Joon. This is the first time I've seen it since my Aspergers diagnosis. I was really surprised to find autism represented well, and particularly to find that the theme of the whole movie was that neurodiverse people aren't stupid, and we're capable of making our own choices.

I show how the movie does this in my review. I also pick apart another person's review, someone who didn't like Benny & Joon because she thought it was ableist. I instead found her review itself pretty patronizing and ableist. It's a pretty good breakdown of a disability ventriloquist, how allists and NTs put words in our mouths, and that doesn't make them allies.

http://www.lunalindsey.com/2015/02/benn ... on_25.html

Enjoy!

I don't believe I ever saw that movie all the way through, but I did enjoy your well-written and thought-provoking analysis of the characters. I'll have to make a point of watching the film in its entirety.

Joon was actually a schizophrenic. It says in the audio commentary and in the movie script. Jeremiah Chechik just didn't want to mention her condition in the movie because it's not what it was really about he said. Sam was a classic dyslexic as said in the commentary and you could see it in his writing when he is writing to his mother. I saw lot of similarities between them and autism.

Mary Stuart Masterson did research on schizophrenia for her part and they spent time with schizophrenics while Johnny Depp spent his time watching Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin movies. Of course directing traffic isn't autism, she is mentally ill. IMO she did it to get her brother's attention because he is always running her life but doing that just tells him she needs to be supervised at all times and not be left alone but that is what a mental illness is, they don't think rationally like us, especially when she lit a tissue on fire and was looking directly at him as if she did it to piss him off. Lot of us would know that doing these things would justify our brother to not want to leave us alone and to continue hiring "housekeepers" to watch us because he thinks we can't be left alone due to those things.

I thought the movie script was worse because it was like reading a movie parody and I was glad they changed the script because I liked it better when they did the movie and Joon didn't sound as crazy as she did in the script and as wild. They did change the characters too like in the movie script, Joon was in her late thirties and the older sister and Benny was younger and Dr. Garvey was a white male in his 50's with a mustache and he mentioned her condition to Benny and instead of them living in Spokane, they live in Seattle. The house also burnt own in the script when Joon lit her picture on fire. I have read the rumor lot of times about his house burning down in the movie so thus the reason why the jack in the box looks so different, darker color. I heard another rumor they had that scene in the movie and it was cut. Plus Sam came off as an idiot in the script but in the movie he didn't. It's been years since I have last read it so my description bout Sam and Joon may not be accurate.

Could the director and the actors have made a mistake with Joon's condition and Sam's I don't know. Could it have been coincidental with Sam?

I don't think Benny was abusive, he was just over protective and then he realized. I think the word abuse is tossed around too easily. By that logic I could say my aide abused me just because she was over protective and somewhat underestimated me and then she started to give me space when my mom told her I needed to make mistakes and learn from them or how else will I learn. But I could imagine how frustrated Joon must have been having a over protective brother because that is something I could relate to.

Hi League_Girl. Thanks for your comments.

As I point out, autism wasn't as well known in 1993, and especially not high functioning autism. Anyone with adult autism severe enough to be accurately diagnosed back then would have been institutionalized. Someone with high functioning autism, like Joon, was likely to be misdiagnosed with something else. Schizophrenia was a common blanket-diagnosis for anything that didn't quite fit anything else. ("Neurotic" was another blanket term.) The writer, director, and actors themselves would have made the same confused mishmash of things, since they had the same limited access to information.

While a couple of times, Joon acts more schizophrenic, I think most of her behaviors seem more in line with autism. She usually seems to have a grasp on reality, which is one of the big separations between autism and schizophrenia.

Given their lack of information, I'm usually surprised at how accurately autism is portrayed in older films. People criticize Rain Man, but I thought Dustin Hoffman did a good job of noticing the little ways we act and think, and capturing them, even without blogs and places like WrongPlanet to go study. I figure they got a lot of it through observation.. Artists try to capture human nature, and we often do that without the help of traits lists created by researchers.

Regardless of whether she's autistic or schizophrenic, I found much to relate to in both her personality and her situation, as I think most of us can.

There's a specific reason why I call Benny's behavior abuse – he gets physical. He is physically violent towards both Joon and Sam. (He grabs Joon by the arms, and he pushes Sam up against a wall.) He is verbally abusive in at least two scenes: When he's telling Joon she needs to go to the group home, I think he crosses the line in the things he says to her. And especially when he pushes Sam against the wall near the end. He tells Sam that people laugh at him because he's an idiot, a moron. That's just pure anger. It's mean. It does nothing but hurt. It's verbal abuse.

Benny's reaction is understandable given the pressures he's under, but it's abuse, plain and simple. It's understandable but not excusable, so it needs to be called what it is. (And technically, by law, laying a hand on anyone else without consent is assault.. So there's that, too.) We make a mistake when we think abusers don't sometimes have good motives. They often do. In fact, many abusers, even of children, firmly believe they are acting in the best interests of the child.

Thanks, League_Girl!

Luna