WSJ: Lifestyles of the Honest and Awkward

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- SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

Lifestyles of the Honest and Awkward

By CHRISTINE

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In a new movie, " Adam, " the title character, a quirky loner played by the

reliably adorable actor Hugh Dancy, turns his living room into an impromptu

planetarium to entertain his attractive but romantically wary neighbor,

Beth. Soon he is taking her to Central Park to witness raccoons frolicking

in the moonlight, and we are comfortably launched on that predictable

cinematic journey wherein the charming oddball woos the beautiful girl.

Predictable, that is, until a few scenes later, when Adam inappropriately

announces his own sexual arousal and then confesses to Beth that he suffers

from Asperger's Syndrome. Very quickly, our geek ceases to be the typical

hero-in-hiding and instead becomes the embodiment of a syndrome only

recently recognized by the American Psychiatric Association.

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Rose Byrne and Hugh Dancy in the new movie “Adam.”

[image: rosen]

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Asperger's is characterized, among other things, by awkwardness in social

situations and an inability to read others' body language and social cues.

And yet, in " Adam, " much of the leading man's appeal comes from his

refreshing, albeit sometimes brutal, honesty. For Beth, whose experience

with men has thus far been negative, the contrast between the awkward,

earnest Adam and her suave but dishonest ex-boyfriend turns Adam's supposed

deficiencies into strengths, at least for a time. Despite a compellingly

sympathetic portrayal by Mr. Dancy, the movie eventually adopts a heavily

didactic tone, launching Adam into the more banal role of the misfit who

teaches " normal " people something about life.

Whatever the deficiencies of the film, its release cements a new awareness

of Asperger's Syndrome in popular culture. This year the Sundance Film

Festival featured an animated movie, " and Max, " about an Australian

girl and her New York pen pal, who happens to have Asperger's, and HBO is

scheduled to release a film next year about Temple Grandin, the animal

behaviorist who has written about her experience of Asperger's. In recent

years, several memoirs, such as Robison's " Look Me in the Eye " and Tim

Page's " Parallel Play, " have explored life with Asperger's. " My pervasive

childhood memory is an excruciating awareness of my own strangeness, " Mr.

Page wrote in an essay in The New Yorker. His is an emotionally poignant

assessment of the condition: " After fifty-two years, I am left with the

melancholy sensation that my life has been spent in a perpetual state of

parallel play alongside, but distinctly apart from, the rest of humanity. "

Although the CBS television show " Big Bang Theory, " a situation comedy that

follows the travails of four brilliant, geeky young scientists, isn't

explicitly about Asperger's Syndrome, several of its characters act like

" Aspies, " as those diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome often refer to

themselves. Sheldon, a germaphobe who spends his leisure time playing

Klingon Boggle and who maintains a strict daily routine, is the most likely

(Aspie and not unlike his hero, Spock, from " Star Trek " ). The show follows

the men's efforts to navigate the treacherous world of normal social

interaction, pertly embodied by Penny, the bottle-blond waitress who lives

across the hall. She finds this passel of uber-nerds alternatively charming

and exasperating. The conceit of the show is that neither Sheldon nor his

friends see themselves as especially strange. On the contrary, in a

geek-heavy community of physicists, the show suggests, many brilliant people

hover on this end of the social spectrum. The comedy comes not from their

realization of this fact, but from their strenuous refusal to recognize it

and become " normal. "

This approach is less forgiving for women. Simon Baron-Cohen, who directs

the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, argues that

autism-spectrum disorders such as Asperger's are expressions of the " extreme

male brain. " Indeed, four times as many men as woman are diagnosed with the

condition.

The mother of one of the characters on " Big Bang Theory, " a brilliant

neuroscientist and Aspie-like woman played by Baranski, is, like

the empathy-challenged men, the source of many jokes. But whereas their

foibles are also ostensibly part of their charms, her lack of maternal

feeling casts her as unfeminine and thus far more freakish, like scientist

Harry Harlow's classic wire monkey experiment come to life.

Why are we seeing more portrayals of Asperger's Syndrome in popular culture?

Increased awareness and diagnosis of conditions along the autism spectrum is

one reason. But we are also in the early stages of a debate about whether

autism-spectrum conditions are disorders to be medicalized (and, presumably,

cured) or merely more extreme expressions of normal behavior that we should

treat with greater tolerance. Economist Tyler Cowen argues that this

awareness is also because our culture needs people with Aspie-like talents,

such as better memorization and calculation skills and a keen desire to

assemble and order information, even as it continues to stereotype them for

their social deficiencies. In a recent essay in the Chronicle of Higher

Education, Mr. Cowen chastised his academic colleagues for promoting

negative views of people with autism-spectrum conditions, particularly the

notion that these conditions should be treated as a disease that exacts high

social costs.

On the contrary, Mr. Cowen calls people along the autism spectrum the

" 'infovores' of modern society " and argues, " along many dimensions we as a

society are working hard to mimic their abilities at ordering and processing

information. " In a world awash in distracted people desperately (and

unsuccessfully) trying to multitask, Mr. Cowen says, Aspies' ability to

focus on detail is a profound advantage. This is particularly true in

academia, he argues, where " autism is often a competitive advantage rather

than a problem to be solved. "

Mr. Cowen's relentlessly optimistic view glosses over some of the serious

personal and professional challenges that people who have autism-spectrum

conditions face. Still, like the films and books that have emerged in recent

years, Mr. Cowen's call for us to embrace a more liberal notion of

achievement by recognizing in conditions like Asperger's a kind of

" neurodiversity " rather than merely a disorder is compelling.

Our interest in Asperger's and the challenges it poses to our notions of

normal behavior comes at a peculiar cultural moment. As traditional social

norms and old-fashioned rules of etiquette erode, we are all more likely to

face the challenge that regularly confronts people with Asperger's: What

rules apply in this social situation? In a world where people routinely post

in excruciating detail their sexual preferences on their Facebook pages, is

it really so shocking to have someone note his own sexual arousal in idle

conversation? Unlike Facebook oversharers, Aspies are not intentionally

flouting social conventions. Quite the opposite. In " Adam, " Mr. Dancy's

character must relentlessly practice in order to master the mundane social

interactions of a standard job interview. Tim Page notes that it was his

chance discovery of Post's etiquette book that revealed the rudiments

of social behavior that had previously eluded him.

Also, our interest in Asperger's comes at a time when we are

enthusiastically hunting for the genetic basis of what makes us biologically

different from each other—why some of us are more prone to certain physical

ailments and others are gifted in music, for example. And yet, our search

for the source of difference will, in many cases, end in an effort to

eradicate that very difference, particularly if it causes obesity,

depression or violent tendencies. Will a society that accepts Asperger's now

be as tolerant of it in a future where we might have the power to eliminate

it? Let's hope so. As these movies and books suggest, we are all searching

for the same ineffable thing: connection to another human being who accepts

our quirks, diagnosed or not, and loves us all the more for them.

—Ms. Rosen is senior editor of The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology &

Society.Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W13

Copyright 2009 Dow & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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Ari Ne'eman

President

The Autistic Self Advocacy Network

http://www.autisticadvocacy.org

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