Why is cinema still failing autistic women? | Little White Lies

Why is cin­e­ma still fail­ing autis­tic women?

03 Apr 2025

Words by Amy Davidson

Colourful image of three young women, one with braids in a bright yellow outfit, one with blonde hair in a red jumper, and one with dark hair in a jacket, all smiling.
Colourful image of three young women, one with braids in a bright yellow outfit, one with blonde hair in a red jumper, and one with dark hair in a jacket, all smiling.
From era­sure to fetishi­sa­tion, it’s still rare to see the nuances and lived expe­ri­ences of autis­tic peo­ple – espe­cial­ly women – on the big screen.

Out­rage often stokes antic­i­pa­tion. A par­tic­u­lar­ly gory kill scene, an uncon­ven­tion­al orgasm, or a minor diplo­mat­ic cri­sis can all add to a film’s sub­ver­sive image, ulti­mate­ly mak­ing them a cul­tur­al­ly impor­tant piece of work that also draws peo­ple to cin­e­mas. For Sia’s Music it pre­cip­i­tat­ed dis­as­ter. In 2021, when the singer turned direc­tor and cast her neu­rotyp­i­cal muse Mad­die Ziegler to play a non-ver­bal autis­tic child oppo­site a buzz cut-sport­ing, drug-deal­ing Kate Hud­son, it cre­at­ed a back­lash that end­ed in total com­mer­cial and cul­ture fail­ure. It was a hideous­ly offen­sive and ham-fist­ed Franken­stein per­for­mance pre­sum­ably off an Oscar-bait­ing tick­list Sia must have been check­ing off when she made Music. The film also, bleak­ly, hap­pens to be one of the few – and the most high pro­file – attempts at a female explic­it autis­tic pro­tag­o­nist in cinema.

To be clear, the land­scape for autis­tic men is hard­ly over­flow­ing with rep­re­sen­ta­tion either. Hol­ly­wood has giv­en us char­ac­ters like Dustin Hoffman’s Ray­mond in Rain Man, an autis­tic savant’ who entered col­lec­tive pub­lic mem­o­ry as the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of autism. It’s just that it’s also the most myth­i­cal – autis­tic peo­ple as emo­tion­al clams whose per­son­al­i­ty is men­tal arith­metic and all of whom pos­sess spe­cial abil­i­ties. Then there was the likes of Leonar­do di Caprio’s Arnie in What’s Eat­ing Gilbert Grape, whose unnamed severe learn­ing dis­abil­i­ty has become con­flat­ed with autism. Most recent­ly, Ben Affleck has picked up the baton in The Accoun­tant whose super­hero’ autism is salved by the fact he has a gun and gets to kill hit­men, just like your normie action heroes.

It’s these kinds of rep­re­sen­ta­tions that blocked me, like many autis­tic women, from receiv­ing an autism diag­no­sis until lat­er in life. I was mor­ti­fied when, talk­ing to a psy­chol­o­gist who looked sus­pi­cious­ly like his own ver­sion of a stereo­type (white guy + beard + fur­rowed brow), I described my inabil­i­ty to con­nect to peo­ple like nor­mal’ humans and how I couldn’t give less of a shit about engag­ing in small talk and actu­al­ly lacked the capac­i­ty that most peo­ple seemed to innate­ly have. Have you ever been test­ed for autism?” he asked off the cuff. I was mor­ti­fied. It wouldn’t be until 10 years lat­er when I received my diag­no­sis that I dis­cov­ered he had a point after all.

I didn’t like trains, I had friends, and I was rub­bish at maths. All the rep­re­sen­ta­tions of autism I had seen were white men with no com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills and mys­ti­cal abil­i­ties in STEM. On TV it was some­how even worse. Autis­tic peo­ple were either seen on pro­grammes like Chan­nel 4’s The Undate­ables that wavered between encour­ag­ing the audi­ence to laugh at these weird crea­tures and their quirky” behav­iour, or to weep at how they had emo­tions – just like the rest of us! Or, there was the news, where somebody’s autism diag­no­sis usu­al­ly fol­lowed their con­vic­tion for a bru­tal mur­der as a sug­ges­tion that the two were some­how related.

For many autis­tic women (includ­ing myself) the char­ac­ters we fell in love with were tro­jan horse autis­tics – man­ic pix­ie dream girls snuck into mid-000s films with traits that would only start to click as a crossover with many female neu­ro­di­ver­gent traits decades lat­er. There was Clemen­tine in Eter­nal Sun­shine of the Spot­less Mind with her spe­cial inter­est’ of dress­ing up pota­toes, mask­ing (“I apply my per­son­al­i­ty in a paste”), infor­ma­tion dump­ing, and fail­ure to recog­nise social cues. Or Gar­den States Sam with her hyper empa­thy, direct per­son­al ques­tions, intense love of The Shins, and strug­gle with emo­tion­al reg­u­la­tion. The fact that ulti­mate­ly these women were glo­ri­fied plot devices to mas­sage the male protagonist’s jour­ney towards self-real­i­sa­tion was the toll that had to be paid to make these quirky’ char­ac­ters accept­able or palat­able to wider demo­graph­ics. But in the absence of well-round­ed female autis­tic pro­tag­o­nists, either implic­it or labelled, many of us clung to those depic­tions – grate­ful for a crumb of rep­re­sen­ta­tion. You just had to make sure you were hot, white, alright with being a bit mad, and for­get about any auton­o­my or desires of your own.

There have been lim­it­ed attempts at big screen female autis­tic rep­re­sen­ta­tion. Sigour­ney Weaver played a woman with autism in 2006’s Snow Cake which did an okay job while still lean­ing heav­i­ly towards a tick list of male autism traits. Autism in women tends to be couched in the added com­pli­ca­tion of gen­er­a­tions of misog­y­ny urg­ing women to be affa­ble, polite and socia­ble. It’s for that rea­son many autis­tic women are high-mask­ing, hav­ing learnt to adapt to what is expect­ed of them to sur­vive in these sit­u­a­tions. Our spe­cial inter­ests are often more con­ven­tion­al as well-mean­ing we can, have, and do walk among you with­out rais­ing suspicion.

An elderly man stands near a snow-covered fence, while a young woman crouches in the snow in the foreground. Bare, leafless branches are visible above them against a grey sky.

The added pres­sure placed on autis­tic women to fit in means autis­tic melt­downs – an invol­un­tary response to over­whelm or over­stim­u­la­tion that is often mis­con­strued as a tantrum’ and can include shout­ing, cry­ing, kick­ing and punch­ing – can be com­mon. Equal­ly, autis­tic shut­down, a response to sen­so­ry, emo­tion­al or infor­ma­tion­al over­whelm, that can man­i­fest as dis­as­so­ci­a­tion, numb­ness, fatigue, or mutism, is a response that many autis­tic women share. But movies where the female pro­tag­o­nist sud­den­ly los­es her abil­i­ty to mask a few hours into a friend’s birth­day, goes non-ver­bal, and has to French exit are notably absent. Or where a plan she’s been prepar­ing for in her head for the past week sud­den­ly changes, and the leak­ing audio from someone’s head­phones com­pounds with lots of oth­er micro over­stim­u­la­tions and she has to yell and kick things.

Mean­while Alex­ithymia, the dif­fi­cul­ty in iden­ti­fy­ing and reg­is­ter­ing emo­tions, is a com­mon autis­tic trait neglect­ed by film­mak­ers. The exhaust­ing phe­nom­e­non of search­ing for a feel­ing, reg­is­ter­ing the cor­rect facial expres­sion and response e.g. joy, grief, excite­ment, and putting it on like a cos­tume when in real­i­ty it will take weeks lat­er to actu­al­ly reg­is­ter it, is sel­dom explored on screen. If it is, it’s usu­al­ly reserved for the grief-strick­en man our man­ic pix­ie dream girl is des­tined to save, because every­one knows women are the emo­tion­al ones. The clos­est main­stream attempt at some­thing like alex­ithymia is per­haps unin­ten­tion­al­ly Disney’s Inside Out and its anthro­po­mor­phised feelings.

Dako­ta Fanning’s depic­tion of an autis­tic woman, Wendy, in 2017’s Please Stand By at least attempt­ed to bal­ance the naivety and social dif­fi­cul­ties of autism with melt­downs and a spe­cial inter­est in Star Trek that didn’t veer into the super­nat­ur­al. In one scene Wendy unques­tion­ing­ly leaves her bag with a seem­ing­ly kind stranger to go and fill up her water bot­tle only for them to rob her, remind­ing me of a child­hood inci­dent where a hel­ter-skel­ter oper­a­tor told me to put my Tweety Bird purse behind me on the slide because it would fol­low me down’. I nev­er saw that purse or the leaf col­lec­tion and 50p it stored again. Still, Fanning’s more nuanced per­for­mance is over­shad­owed by the film’s over­all schmaltzy grasp at an indie com­ing-of-age flick that sees Toni Col­lette wan­der­ing around with a kazoo as her car­er Scot­tie, and melt­downs met with phys­i­cal restraint.

The sit­u­a­tion could sure­ly be helped by more autis­tic women behind the cam­era. There have been incre­men­tal gains here in recent years, with exper­i­men­tal films like 2024’s The Stim­ming Pool, cre­at­ed by a group of autis­tic artists includ­ing women and toy­ing with the idea of an autis­tic cam­era as well as pro­tag­o­nists. Then there’s Rachel Israel’s Keep the Change – a rom-com star­ring actors with autism that shows autis­tic peo­ple doing rad­i­cal things like being inter­est­ed in sex and being fun­ny, round­ed humans. But an indus­try that still relies heav­i­ly on being per­son­able, con­nect­ed, and play­ing the game’ auto­mat­i­cal­ly shuts out many autis­tic peo­ple regard­less of film­mak­ing talent.

There’s no way a film can per­fect­ly cap­ture every autis­tic woman’s expe­ri­ence, nor should it try to. Maybe ide­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion looks like char­ac­ters where autism isn’t some grand plot device or weath­er­ing hard­ship a long-suf­fer­ing fam­i­ly mem­ber has to endure. An imper­fect exam­ple is Zoe Kravitz’s char­ac­ter, Angela Childs, in Steven Soderbergh’s 2022 thriller Kimi. Sure, she’s an ago­ra­pho­bic tech work­er with quirky blue hair and a puz­zle piece keyring (a sym­bol for autism), but beyond some heavy-hand­ed sign­post­ing, many autis­tic women have con­sid­ered Kravitz’s por­tray­al a relat­able one. Every­thing from her eschew­al of tra­di­tion­al roman­tic rela­tion­ships to her sen­so­ry issues with liv­ing in the city, and pref­er­ence for being alone has relat­able tones for many women. Per­haps had it been direct­ed by an autis­tic woman rather than a neu­rotyp­i­cal man, it would have ful­ly closed the circle.

We cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly don’t need anoth­er Rain Man or Music. In order to realise true progress, we need nuance and actu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion both behind and in front of the cam­era. This can only come when autis­tic women are no longer forced to see them­selves in stereo­types or quirky’ plot devices but in ful­ly realised, com­plex pro­tag­o­nists who reflect the vast gamut of our expe­ri­ences. While there’s been a hint at a shift, real change will only hap­pen when autis­tic women are giv­en the space to tell their own sto­ries, on their own terms.

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