Yep. We’re doing this again. And I’ll be honest, the decision to make this into my second official boycott is a fairly recent one. Even with all the controversy this film has garnered over the past couple months, I was still willing to at least let the film stand on its own terms and not just the marketing or the… interesting takes of the writer/director on social media. I mean, I went to bat for Cuties last year on the basis of its own garbage marketing; for all I know, this could be another example of a good film cast under a poor light.
But the more I thought about it, and the more I really took in everything that was leading up to this release… I just couldn’t do it. Even if I went for the cheapest theatrical session I could find, I still don’t feel right gambling my money on the prospect of this being decent. And since I made a big point of reviewing more films than ever in 2020, I figure it’d be worth getting into those signs so I can try and make a decent case for why this is going to be a major exception to my usual ‘watch anything I can get my hands on’ methodology.
Let’s get something out of the way first, though: I don’t have anything against Sia personally. Nor do I have anything against Maddie Ziegler. For many years, I had a lot of fondness for Sia’s music, between her being a fellow Aussie and her album Some People Have Real Problems being as fire as it is (seriously, I have actually used Soon We’ll Be Found to help me get through meltdowns in the past). However, having known her approach to pop music from even before she broke out into the American mainstream, I can’t say I’m particularly surprised by what she’s done here. For as emotionally affecting as her work frequently is, she’s a lot more focused on mood than making her audience think. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, bear in mind; it’s just a stylistic choice. As a result, the initial worries about the over-sentimentality of the film itself (not to mention the emotionally-driven responses she’s given on Twitter, and that’s by her own admission) certainly ring true of someone of her emotional wavelengths trying to do justice to a social topic. But really, that’s not why I’m not watching it.
What about the casting? After all, that’s where the bulk of
the controversy appears to be in the eyes of the public. Well, while I have
made frequent mention in the past that I’m not as immediately-rejective of
non-autistics playing autistic characters as some others are, I still have to
admit that her casting is definitely a problem with this whole thing from the
offset. Sia’s responses to questions about why she didn’t end up casting
an autistic actor in the title role range from the worrying (saying that she ‘tried’ to cast an autistic, but that they found working on the set too stressful… as if that isn’t a reflection of Sia’s inability to accommodate) to the hostile
(telling an autistic actor on Twitter “maybe you’re just a bad actor”) to the
frankly bewildering (admitting that not only is it ableist to cast Maddie in the role, it’s nepotism that got her the role in the first place and she wasn’t really planning on doing it without Maddie).
But again, the casting isn’t the big issue in my eyes; more a symptom of bigger problems. For me, the decision to cast (or not cast) an autistic actor is kind of a multiplying factor: Something that can make an already-solid production that much better, and something that can make an already-compromised production that much worse. And from what I, and many others, have seen so far, the casting is just the tip of the iceberg.
Sia claims to have done her homework and researched autism
so that her film would hit the right notes, but just looking at the backlash, I
find that hard to believe. If she really did the adequate legwork to
make a film that would have passed the bar for autistic representation, she
would’ve known that the online autistic community would react in exactly
this fashion to what she’s been saying and doing. She would’ve known that her stance saying “special abilities” rather than “disabled” wouldn’t have
flown, she would’ve known that using functional labels to describe her main
character, her critics, and her intended audience wasn’t a good idea, and she
wouldn’t have made such a shitshow of a response that even Autism Speaks (a highly disliked organisation among autism advocates) would be stepping back and denouncing her despite her support of their cause. When you're getting me to agree with the chuckleheads that made I Am Autism, something has gone monstrously wrong.
Coming from someone who claims to have good intentions about depicting autism (although long-time readers will know just how seriously I take someone having ‘good intentions’ these days), I kinda can’t believe how shitty her statements are. Seeing her freely admit that she made this film specifically for “low-functioning” people on the spectrum and their caregivers, and that “people functioning at Music’s level can’t get on Twitter and tell me I did a good job either”, reeks of ‘there’s nothing wrong with my movie; there’s something wrong with you’. Classy. Also, ‘low-functioning’ (read: non-verbal) autistics do use social media; again, if she actually did the amount of research she claims, she would know this. [Here’s a video from a non-verbal autistic explaining just that, because this is a perspective that can’t afford to be lost in the midst of everything else]
And that specific mention of Music’s level of functioning is important too since, based on a real person or no, that’s Sia’s decision to depict the character in that light. She set out to make “Rain Man the musical, but with girls”, so this ‘acting’ is built on a biased foundation. So for everyone who has been spreading the “It’s called acting” meme and making spurious comparisons between occupations/fictional characters and people who live with a real-life condition in response to this, understand that the casting is only part of the problem. That, and acting in the professional sense is a bit more complicated than just ‘playing someone you aren’t in real-life’. [Professional actor and YouTuber PhilosophyTube explains it in this video; it’s a bit lengthy but worth checking out]
And yet, all of that isn’t even what ultimately got me to avoid this thing. No, that came with a quote from Maddie Ziegler herself about her preparation for the role by studying documentaries about autism and “watched YouTube videos by parents who recorded their child’s episodes”. I… may not even have the patience to explain how not okay this is, both as preparation for acting as an autistic character and as a thing that even exists online to begin with. That’s essentially taking the worst extreme of the condition (something uploaded for public viewing by adults who likely didn’t care to ask for or weren’t even able to get consent to do so from the subjects) and using it as a blueprint. Exploitation as a bedrock for performance… bloody hell, Maddie, I meant what I said about not having anything against you personally, but this is a big yikes.
The mere idea of that kind of practice being used as background for a major motion picture production turns my stomach. And the fact that this is all being done in the name of being sympathetic to those who have the condition makes it that much worse. At least with films like The Fanatic and The Night Clerk, they weren’t setting out to make a big statement about the condition being highlighted; just using it as a means to a dramatic end for the stories the filmmakers wanted to tell. But when you kick up pretences of having ‘good intentions’, of wanting to do justice to the autistic experience, and yet show such flagrant disregard for what those living that experience have to say, you’re going to be held by the standards of actually wanting to help because those are the terms you yourself have set.
I can’t, in good faith, support this. I can’t justify the decision to personally hand over money to something like this, which is ultimately only the latest example of someone denigrating the autistic community for fun and profit (All In A Row, Autism Uncensored, To Siri With Love, Vaxxed and the depressing existence of its sequel, people who think MMS is a good idea, Rain Man and Sheldon Cooper continuing to be the only pop culture metric real-life autistics are compared to; the list goes on and on). Maybe, maybe, if this lands on a streaming service where I don’t have to pay extra to watch it, I might give this a look further down the line… but looking back on everything I’ve just put down on paper, even that doesn’t look likely.
This very kind of controversy is part of the reason why I’ve been trying to stay away from the thornier parts of autism discussion: Because it is fucking exhausting having to return to this exact same point, time and time again, and seeing the precedent so ingrained in the abled consensus that pointing out why this isn’t a good thing is met with cold shrugs, makes me feel like I’m beating my head against a brick wall. If only I was actually doing that; maybe then, I’d qualify as ‘low-functioning’ enough to be heard by these people.
Of course, same rules apply here as they did with Shazam!: Just because I personally can’t bear to sit through this thing doesn’t mean I’m going to start grandstanding about those who do. Being able to make your own choices about the media you consume is paramount, and if you’ve seen this film already and like it, more power to you. I only ask that you look over what I’ve said with some consideration about what this film means for someone like me, as an autistic adult, and hopefully understand that all of this isn't coming from nowhere.
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