Rain Man’s 30th anniversary

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Rain Man was the best thing that ever happened to autism,” says psychiatrist Dr Darold Treffert. “No gigantic public education or PR effort could have produced the sensational awareness that Rain Man brought to the national and international radar screen.” Treffert, an expert on autism and savant syndrome, worked on Rain Man as a script consultant, which may explain his view on a film that has become divisive in terms of its impact and influence on perceptions of autism.

When the Oscar-winning screenwriter Barry Morrow had the idea for Rain Man, he had barely heard of the condition. “The word ‘autism’ never appeared in my original screenplay,” he says. “Looking back, Rain Man was never a story about autism. It was a tale of two estranged brothers, their journey and then their fragile redemption.”

The film’s journey to the screen was arduous, shedding three directors (Martin Brest, Steven Spielberg and Sidney Pollack) before landing on Barry Levinson. Raymond was played by Dustin Hoffman, then 50 and a character actor at the peak of his powers, alongside the Top Gun hotshot Tom Cruise, 25, as Charlie. In his youth, Hoffman had worked at the New York Psychiatric Institute; for Rain Man he spent a year intensively researching autistic and savant individuals including Temple Grandin, Joseph Sullivan, who had incredible skills with numbers, and savant twins George and Charles.

Morrow recalls a meeting between Peek and Hoffman, and Peek “walking around the room, espousing all these facts … hitting his head and flapping his hands”, with Hoffman walking closely behind, “mirroring him, almost like he’s trying this character on like a coat”. The fit was not quite right, and Hoffman created what Treffert calls a “composite savant”, adding autism to the character. Subsequently, Rain Man led many people to assume that everyone with autism possessed incredible savant abilities. In fact, Treffert points out, “only one out of 10 people with autism are savants”, and those with skills akin to Raymond’s are “exceedingly rare”.

Rain Man was filmed during the writers’ strike of 1988, and Hoffman estimates 90% of his dialogue came from Princeton football star Kevin Guthrie and his autistic brother Peter, from whom he drew many of Raymond’s mannerisms. Kevin had made a video of his brother’s bedroom for Hoffman, which contains dialogue instantly recognisable from the scene when Charlie invades Raymond’s room at Wallbrook.

Released in December 1988, Rain Man was quickly became a global phenomenon: it was the US’s highest grossing movie of the year and won four Oscars, including best actor for Hoffman, who thanked the individuals that inspired Raymond in his speech. In terms of medical research and funding, “the floodgates opened,” says Morrow. In the years following, rates of prevalence for autism spectrum disorder (ASD), as it became known, rose dramatically – today in the US, one in 59 children have ASD. A 2010 study identified a global “changepoint” year for autism: 1988. Could the cause be what Neurotribes author Steve Silberman dubbed “The Rain Man effect”? Treffert agrees with Morrow that “maybe the change in prevalence ... is more than coincidence”, but points to other factors such as changes in diagnostic criteria, early infant screening and a rise in congenital abnormalities overall.

The film, he believes, “should be regarded as a piece of history now”. When I put this question to Bonnello’s Facebook community, views were mixed. Although some enjoyed Rain Man, many found it “dated” and “inaccurate”. One individual on the spectrum called it “the Apu of autism ... despite not being malicious in its portrayal, it’s still a poor representation and a stereotype.”

Morrow, however, takes exception to the word “stereotype”. “Rain Man was, as far as I know, the first film to portray a lead character with either autism or savant syndrome,” he says. “Perhaps it’s become a stereotype in the eyes of some, but it didn’t start there.” Bonnello says the dilemma is that “no representation of autism is ever going to satisfy everyone, because it’s such a wide spectrum and the people within it are so enormously different to each other, including in how their autism affects them.” Yet the analogy with the Simpsons’ Apu controversy is interesting. Today, there is growing criticism of non-disabled actors “cripping up” – but even back in 1988, the New Yorker critic Pauline Kael slated Hoffman’s depiction of Raymond, asking “why the movie people didn’t just have an autistic person play the part”.

Ali Vaux, who is “a late diagnosed autistic who happens actually to be a savant”, says she feels unwelcome in the autism community “largely because of the stigma with this movie”. However, she says: “I’m not certain the people who are so vocally repulsed by Rain Man remember what it was like in 1988. To even suggest that Raymond was a human with basic dignity was a really big deal.” Kevin Guthrie agrees: “That he was someone you could love, you could root for ... that you could be disappointed that he was going back [to Wallbrook], that was something that you didn’t have for autistic people at that time.” Raymond’s return to the institution is considered problematic today, but the “happy ever after” originally envisaged by Morrow would have been “too Hollywood”, says Guthrie. Morrow feels the revised ending was the right one. “It sat there in people’s subconscious like that little grain of sand that irritates, the oyster that creates the pearl.”

Rain Man’s legacy for autism, it seems, is complex; a mixture of incredibly positive impact and enduring misinterpretation. “One for bad, two for good,” says Raymond, as he boards the train back to Wallbrook. “Bet two for good,” says Charlie.

It probably paved the way for autism, without the director or even the film, autism may have been represented in a whole different way, although savant syndrome could have been represented better as a separate diagnosis, instead of grouping them in the same room, he could have been a lone adult with a specialist carer who would have been available when needed. But who knows, things were different back then, less people were diagnosed and less support from government to address these things. Worst case scenario could have been that people saw they belonged in a care home or institution and probably felt that if anyone passed as someone they'd seen on Rain Man in real life, they'd get admitted to a similar place.

The people who produced Rain Man wanted a movie people wanted to see. They wanted to make money.

A depiction of a man with Savant Syndrome is fascinating. Some mundane adult (like me) would be boring.

In summation, Rain Man articulates a powerful message about the importance of understanding autism and how doing so can transform perspective of a neurotypical individual and make them more empathetic in the process. This is portrayed very movingly in the relationship between Charlie and Raymond, whose actors exhibit superb chemistry together. At the same time, however, the film’s portrayal of autism reflects perceptions among the public and the medical establishment that were commonly held at the time of Rain Man’s release, and thus it inaccurately characterizes some of the traits associated with autism as well as Raymond’s particular range on the spectrum. In addition, through its depiction of an autistic main character whose severe symptoms require specialized institutional care, Rain Man fails to provide a more multifaceted representation of how different individuals on the spectrum can succeed independently in the outside world. When watching this film, it would do well for contemporary viewers to keep in mind the significant strides that have been made in professional and popular understanding of autism in the subsequent three decades, which they can thus appreciate in comparing present-day knowledge of autism’s diverse nature with the perceptions featured in Rain Man.

After Rain Man was released on 16 December 1988, the whole world knew what “autistic savant” meant. Despite spending years in development hell, and test screenings fostering tepid and confused responses, Rain Man was a runaway success. It swept the Oscars, winning best picture, best original screenplay, best director and best actor for Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal of Raymond Babbitt.

Rain Man’s influence on how autism is thought of culturally is incalculable. But an influence, however benign or well-intentioned, can become suffocating if allowed to flourish for too long. What was once liberating can become irritating and constricting: so 30 years after the film’s release, was it a blessing or a curse for the autistic community?

Before Rain Man, there was no popular conception of what autism looked like, among the public or on-screen. At that point autism was an abstraction, understood only by dedicated parents or specialised clinicians. In Rain Man, this widespread ignorance is exemplified by the moment when Charlie Babbitt (played by Tom Cruise) attempts to consult a psychiatrist about Raymond, his brother. A nurse asks, “He’s artistic?” Charlie replies, “No, he’s autistic.”

Autistic people’s only advocates were their parents, and even this situation was far from a given. Autistic people were often institutionalised. Groups of parents fighting for their children’s rights and freedoms had been working in the dark for decades. Then, suddenly, everyone around them knew the word that had previously been theirs and theirs alone – autism. Suddenly everyone knew Raymond Babbitt, and Babbitt quickly became a cultural shorthand for autism.

Rain Man remains Hollywood’s only runaway success with an autistic character. In the 30 years since its release, no film or TV show involving an autistic character has matched the commercial and critical success of Rain Man, and this has allowed it to attain a unique kind of cultural staying power,

Rather than being viewed as a single iteration of autism, Raymond Babbitt became autism.

The film has become such a shorthand, that I and every autistic person I know immediately has to caveat the statement “I’m autistic” with “I’m not Rain Man”. Autistic people are frequently met with the same question that a doctor asks Raymond in the film: “Does he have any special abilities?” Rain Man was also the birthplace of what has now become a common trope of autistic portrayals in film and TV: autistic savants. The most recent incarnation of this is Shaun Murphy, played by Freddie Highmore, in The Good Doctor. The idea that all autistic people are geniuses, or that they all have savant abilities such as extraordinary memory, is a myth, a myth that is largely alive and kicking today due to Rain Man. Yet the cultural stereotype of Raymond Babbitt, the autistic savant, persists.

But Rain Man’s ubiquity and its influence is hardly the film’s fault. The blame lies with the wider industry. Rain Man should have been a cultural beginning for autistic characters on screen. Instead it became a singular event, an end point.

As a beginning for autism on screen, Rain Man deserves applause. It gave autistic people a visibility that had previously been denied them. In one fell swoop Rain Man achieved almost overnight the kind of representation that parent advocacy groups had been working towards for decades. But as the dominant depiction of autism on screen, it also deserves derision. The autistic community is more than Raymond Babbitt. While this wasn’t apparent in 1988, it is clear now, and yet, 30 years on, Rain Man’s enormous influence on autistic characters on screen shows no sign of abating. Rain Man continues to affect autistic lives, whether we like it or not.

Rain Man was not actually the first major motion picture to depict autism though. That honor probably goes to "Run Wild, Run Free", and British movie released 21 years earlier than Rain Man.