The death of Rain Man
Recently Kim Peek died at the age of 58. The famous film Rain Man was based on his life story. I’d like to make some comments about Kim and the film.
Kim Peek and Rain Main were important because they brought Autism to a wider audience. Dustin Hoffman’s brilliant portrayal of a an Autistic savant really brought home to people that Autistic people were different not just disabled. And the way Tom Cruise played his brother coming to terms with his long lost brother, learning to understand him and changing the way he had to relate to someone with Autism was very moving.
However, all this created a problem to me: the phenomenon of the Autistic celebrity. Kim Peek was a ‘mega savant’ with remarkable powers of memory, the two hemispheres of his brain weren’t connected as far as I know; he could read the left and right pages of a book simultaneously, memorizing all the words. It’s only a tiny minority of people on the spectrum who have anything like such abilities, and then only a few of these achieve fame and fortune.
The rest of us have mediocre or no special abilities and have to soldier on, excluded from society, usually living on welfare and hidden away. The only time we get to hear about Autism in the media is mostly in stories about these savants or others who’ve somehow managed to use their Autism to achieve great things. Good luck to them, but this leaves the problems of the vast majority on the Autistic spectrum ignored. Especially those of us with Aspergers who only need a little support to get into employment and thus achieve some kind of social status. But for the most part this is a long way off.
For more information please read the Autismconnect article.
