Sia’s Upcoming Film “Music” Misses the Mark on Representing Autism
Once again, neurotypicals don’t trust us to tell our own stories.
On November 19, pop singer/songwriter Sia released the trailer for her directorial debut, a musical drama called Music. The plot follows a young woman who suddenly finds herself the only caretaker of her autistic half-sister, the film’s titular character. Music is played by Maddie Ziegler, who has performed in many of Sia’s music videos and is notably not autistic.
I’m disappointed, but I can’t honestly say I’m surprised.
I first learned about this when I noticed that Autism Speaks was trending on Twitter. While I knew that nothing good could come of Autism Speaks (more on them later), what really caught my eye was the pure vitriol Sia was dishing out in response to the backlash that she truly deserved.
For example, one user tweeted that they, along with many other autistic actors, would have gladly taken the role. However, the production team appeared to make no effort to include any actually autistic people.
In response, Sia tweeted, “Maybe you’re just a bad actor.”
She continued to pen angry replies to people who were rightfully upset. She claimed that her reason for not casting a disabled actor was that “casting someone at her level of functioning was cruel, not kind, so I made the executive decision that we would do our best to lovingly represent the community.” She also said that she tried working with a nonverbal autistic girl who found the experience “unpleasant and stressful,” which was why she ended up casting Maddie.
Let’s examine the issue of not casting autistic actors to play autistic characters.
Of course, I understand that portraying a person you’re not is the whole point of acting. When I watch The Social Network, for instance, I know that Jesse Eisenberg is not actually Mark Zuckerberg and that he’s just playing a version of him on screen. But there’s a huge difference between an allistic (non-autistic) person playing an allistic character and an allistic person playing a character with autism.
In a brilliant 2018 essay, autistic author Katherine May examines this problem in great detail, explaining that “[r]ecent research, engaging with autistic people as partners rather than simply observing them, suggests that we have badly misunderstood the interior life of autism… these cold, naive characters are nothing more than literary tropes.”
One of the first popular examples of this trope is Dustin Hoffman’s character in 1988’s Rain Man. He portrayed an adult with autism who was also an incredible savant. While this film certainly helped to propel discussions about autism into the mainstream, not all of those discussions had positive outcomes. For example, many people began to assume that only men could have autism. Or that autistic people may not have stellar social skills, but they excelled in areas like math or chemistry.
It led to scenes like this one from the pilot episode of Bob’s Burgers, in which eleven-year-old Tina is made fun of for not being able to count the number of toothpicks on the ground. Her younger sister, Louise, says Tina is “the worst kind of autistic,” presumably because she’s not a savant. As much as I adore Bob’s Burgers, this scene has always rubbed me the wrong way. It seems to assert that autistic people are only “good” if they have some kind of skill that neurotypicals can use, like how the protagonist of Rain Man took advantage of his brother’s ability to count cards.
In any case, media like these define the stereotypes of how allistic people view autistics. We are either bumbling idiots who can’t take care of ourselves, or we are secret geniuses who just so happen to never talk or make eye contact.
However, that’s simply not the truth. It’s called the autism spectrum because literally, every single one of us is different. As the famous saying goes, “If you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism.”
As a result of these generalized portrayals of autistics in media, allistic actors have internalized these stereotypes and often play autistic characters as a sort of cruel caricature. It doesn’t matter how talented of an actor they are; they are so often unable to capture the nuances of living as an autistic person.
That’s why accurate representation cannot exist unless we start choosing autistic actors for these roles.
Sia claimed that the autistic actress she worked with was stressed out by the experience and that working with someone “at her level of functioning” was “cruel.” But the thing is, it doesn’t have to be.
Perhaps that actress was dealing with sensory overload. Many autistics become easily overwhelmed by intense stimuli like bright lights and loud noises, both of which might be common on a film set.
However, if you truly want to create a movie with a positive message toward the autistic community, maybe treat autistic people with actual respect. Dim the lights or speak in a softer tone if you can. Let the autistic actor spend some time alone when they get overstimulated.
It’s not impossible. After all, plenty of famous and beloved actors have “come out” as autistic, including Dan Aykroyd, Daryl Hannah, and Sir Anthony Hopkins. In fact, Aykroyd has said that without his special interests in ghosts and law enforcement, the film Ghostbusters might not have ever existed.
Autistic actors have the potential to enrich a character and bring something special to the role. They bring a level of accuracy and precision that allistics could never hope to achieve.
Plus, autistics are human beings. We deserve to have our lives portrayed as realistically as anyone else’s.
That’s why this instance of casting yet another allistic actor to play an autistic character hurts. Not for the first time, I won’t get to see a person like me portraying what my life is actually like on screen.
As if all of that wasn’t awful enough, Autism Speaks also worked on Music. Although Sia claimed that Autism Speaks didn’t come on board until the movie was finished, it’s still not a good sign in terms of accurate and thoughtful representation of autistic people.
Now, I am far from the first person to bring up how truly awful Autism Speaks is. To sum up, they essentially don’t view people with autism as human beings. They claim that if your child is born with autism, it will strain your finances, your marriage, your friendships, and pretty much every aspect of your life.
Perhaps the worst example of this is a notorious clip from a documentary that the two founders of Autism Speaks, Bob and Suzanne Wright, debuted in 2006. In it, Alison Singer, the executive vice president of Autism Speaks at the time, talked about how she was tempted to drive off a bridge with her autistic daughter in the car. The only thing that kept her from doing it was the thought of her other, allistic daughter growing up without a mother.
In her eyes, committing murder-suicide is better than living with an autistic child.
She had the nerve to say all of this while her autistic daughter was in the room. This little girl heard her mother say that she’d contemplated ending both of their lives.
This is the kind of thinking that Autism Speaks perpetuates. That autism is this life-ruining force that needs to be “cured.” That people with autism cannot advocate for themselves. That it’s better for a child to be dead than to be autistic.
While Autism Speaks may not have had much direct influence on Music, the fact that they were allowed to get involved at all shows that no one who actually cared about autistic people worked on the film.
To quote Katherine May again, “I’m not arguing that neurotypical writers should never create autistic characters (that would lead to even greater invisibility than we have at the moment). I’m suggesting that it’s time those characters reflected reality, based on careful research, and contact with real, autistic people.”
I believe that writing autistic characters is just like writing any other marginalized characters, whether that’s a person of color, a person in the LGBTQ+ community, an immigrant, a disabled person, etc. Basically, if the character has a different identity than you, then you have to do your research in order to portray them accurately. Otherwise, you run the risk of relying on outdated and possibly offensive stereotypes.
This includes adapting these characters onto the screen. While maybe not as obviously offensive as blackface, having an allistic actor play an autistic character follows the same principle. They’re essentially going off of what they think autistic people are like rather than what they actually are like, further spreading these stereotypes to a broad audience.
There are plenty of capable autistic actors who could have been cast in Music. Or any role, for that matter. However, allistics don’t seem to trust autistics to be able to portray the realities of our lives.
But we are human beings. And, like any other human being, we deserve to be able to tell our own stories.
