The Neurotypical Girl Next Door

4 March 2010
Our home-programmed autism film festival continues. The other night, T and I watched “Adam,” which I’d seen already but T hadn’t, in which Hugh Dancy plays a guy with Asperger’s Syndrome, or “aspie” as he calls himself in the movie. Both T and I welled up a little at key points, but it didn’t provoke the full-on saline soaking we got from “Temple Grandin” a few nights before, mostly because it’s not that good a film. The script is too schematic, too jaggedly assembled, like it started off as someone’s personal passion project and then got rewritten three times too many after notes came back from Fox Searchlight.

Basically, the title character (Dancy) falls in love with a pretty neurotypical neighbour girl (Rose Byrne) named Beth after some meet-cute stuff, but things go wrong when he’s insufficiently supportive of her troubles when her shit of a father gets convicted for fraud. The plot point that Adam never lies is planted early on, apparently one of the defining characteristics of people with ASD because they’re so literal-minded. Then, in order to have some kind of drama-generating conflict for the third act, they have him freak out when he finds out she lied to him. Because it’s a little indie-movie with minor-but-not-totally-negligible stars, it’s allowed to have the main characters fail to sustain their relationship at the end, but they still Grow Because Of Their Experience. The dripping soundtrack, all little-known singer-songwriters plucking guitars and twittering semi-archly about hipster shit, is particularly off-putting for us.

Watching through the prism of parents of a kid with autism, T and I have interestingly divergent reactions. During the early scenes, where you see Adam coping with life alone after his father has died, eating the exact same food every day, going to work as an electronic engineer, having just the one friend (a kindly, salty-tongued older black man, of course), I think, here’s a portrait of someone with the condition who’s coping pretty well. T thinks exactly the opposite. He sees someone who’s lonely, adrift, not high functioning at all.

When it’s over, we talk about our fears for R’s future. Will E always have to look after her older brother? Will he ever have a job, get married, make friends? T says he can see an almost-worst-case scenario where R is living at 40 in a sheltered housing unit, being visited once a week by a social worker to make sure he’s not eating food past its sell-by date. If we make enough money to leave him cared for, then – whoopee – he could be living in a slightly larger, privately owned flat somewhere while a paid-for carer comes to see him three times a week to make sure he’s not eating food past its sell-by date.

I worry a lot about how R’s condition will affect E. At the moment, she totally worships her big brother. When he’s not around, because he’s still asleep in the morning, or out for the afternoon visiting his speech therapist, she wanders around the playroom looking for him, calling for him like a lost sheep. When she tries to give him things – her dummy, a book about tractors she thinks he’d like to read, her juice – he usually ignores her. Even the fact that he usually hits or knocks her over once a day doesn’t seem to put her off him. She loves him desperately and gets almost nothing back. I fret this will set some sort of pattern for life, with her ending up falling in love with emotionally unavailable shits, like I used to. Not that R’s a shit or anything – I just mean she could get stuck thinking love can only go one way.

T and other friends try to reassure me that sibling relationships don’t usually serve as models for the romantic attachments we make as adults, but I’m not convinced. Even if she copes really well with having R as a brother, I worry she’ll miss out on things and be, in some ways, like an only child. I vaguely consider having one more child, but that’s too close to the “heir and a spare” model. And anyway, research seems to suggest that the chances of having another autistic child increase as you get older, especially if it’s a boy. Even if we have another neurotypical kid, would E totally bond with the second child and leave R left out on his own, literally spinning his wheels in a corner?

On the upside, we’re starting to notice that she’s having a positive influence on him. He sees her trying new foods and has a go, even if he spits out the first mouthful. If he sees her having fun playing a game with us adults, he sometimes wants to join in too. He rolls his Matchbox car to her across the breakfast table, singsonging, “Roll the car to E!”, knowing she’ll roll it back to him. Okay, it’s not like they’re playing chess together, but it’s a start.