The Accoun­tant is anoth­er exam­ple of Hollywood’s autism problem

In a year when Ben Affleck stepped into the Bat-suit for the first time, it’s in decid­ed­ly more mod­est attire that he deliv­ers his most prob­lem­at­ic per­for­mance. In The Accoun­tant, Affleck plays a num­ber crunch­er who mix­es math­e­mat­i­cal genius with dead­ly assas­sin skills, but what makes this dif­fer­ent to your typ­i­cal Hol­ly­wood thriller is that his char­ac­ter is autis­tic. Dis­ap­point­ing­ly, how­ev­er, the film rehash­es the famil­iar trope of the autis­tic savant, whose con­di­tion comes hand-in-hand with unbe­liev­able abil­i­ties. How did main­stream cin­e­ma become so one-dimen­sion­al in its per­cep­tion of such a com­plex condition?

The pop­u­lar stereo­type of peo­ple on the autism spec­trum stems from the Oscar-win­ning 1988 film Rain Man. At the time cel­e­brat­ed for bring­ing the con­di­tion into main­stream con­scious­ness, over time the film has done more harm than good. In onscreen por­tray­als at least, peo­ple on the autism spec­trum have been pre­sent­ed along a sim­i­lar pat­tern – social­ly iso­lat­ed but in pos­ses­sion of remark­able abil­i­ties that are, as one char­ac­ter in The Accoun­tant puts it, ​“noth­ing short of supernatural”.

In real­i­ty, a rel­a­tive­ly small pro­por­tion of peo­ple with autism dis­play these savant-like qual­i­ties. But you wouldn’t know this from watch­ing main­stream cin­e­ma. Char­ac­ters like Bruce Willis’ robot­ic co-star in Mer­cury Ris­ing per­pet­u­ate this stereo­type, where social­ly lim­it­ing behav­iour belies extra­or­di­nary men­tal apti­tude. For a film like The Accoun­tant, this gives a short­cut expla­na­tion to Chris’ abil­i­ties, being able to sur­round him­self with A Beau­ti­ful Mind-like win­dow equa­tions and take out bad­dies with guns. It is also, sad­ly, a sign that the Rain Man stereo­type of autism still persists.

But are things get­ting bet­ter? Cer­tain­ly small­er bud­get films from the past few years have gone some way to chal­lenge pre­con­cep­tions. The 2009 ani­ma­tion Mary and Max fea­tures a fun­ny and touch­ing por­tray­al of a man liv­ing with Asperg­er syn­drome (voiced by the late Phillip Sey­mour Hoff­man), show­ing life from his per­spec­tive. In the same year, Asperger’s was also explored in Adam, about a man with the con­di­tion (Hugh Dan­cy) nav­i­gat­ing a new rela­tion­ship. While some­what clum­sy in its exe­cu­tion, it did show some­one on the autism spec­trum at the cen­tre of the sto­ry, rather than help­ing a lead char­ac­ter achieve some real­i­sa­tion. It also bucked the trend of dis­abled char­ac­ters being deemed inca­pable of rela­tion­ships or love.

Yet these films remain the excep­tions to the rule (Mary and Max had very lim­it­ed the­atri­cal release in the UK and US, while Adam was a rel­a­tive­ly mod­est suc­cess). There are signs of pos­si­ble pro­gres­sion in the near future though. The upcom­ing doc­u­men­tary Life, Ani­mat­ed delves into the jour­ney and expe­ri­ences of Owen Suskind, a man in his twen­ties with autism who finds a key to inde­pen­dence via Disney’s ani­mat­ed clas­sics. It’s an uplift­ing film, but also a real­is­tic one, tak­ing in the chal­lenges of Owen’s con­di­tion but also pre­sent­ing Autism as a dif­fer­ent world­view, some­thing to be helped rather than over­come. Owen doesn’t solve com­plex equa­tions, nor is he an assas­sin, but his path to secur­ing an inde­pen­dent life is no less impressive.

There’s also the long-ges­tat­ing film adap­ta­tion of Mark Haddon’s acclaimed nov­el ​‘The Curi­ous Inci­dent of The Dog at Night-Time’. Already a record-break­ing play in the­atres the world over, it is telling that this intri­cate sto­ry (nar­rat­ed from the per­spec­tive of a boy who ​“finds peo­ple con­fus­ing”) has yet to find its way to the big screen. For now, it seems that the ​‘Awk­ward Super­hu­man’ stereo­type cre­at­ed near­ly 30 years ago remains autism’s most frus­trat­ing­ly per­sis­tent image.

Find out more about autism at autism​.org​.uk