I don’t get round nowadays to watching much tv/movies but I made some time to watch X+ Y and the documentary that the film was based on. This was partly because James Graham is one of the most admired British playwrights and partly because the film dealt with an autistic spectrum character.
Of note are the parts of the film directly inspired by the documentary. The mother character is well written and portrayed with great humanity (if that’s the word) by Sally Hawkins. It also has a sympathetic ASD character as well as a less sympathetic AS character although even there the less sympathetic character has some redemption (in the audience eyes, at least) with an entirely cringe-worthy and socially inappropriately timed Monty Python skit - he can’t fit in socially - he seems to not even like maths and you have an impression his “gift” as perhaps as much curse as gift.
If you’ve met one person with autism then you’ve met one person with autism.
This adage is popular as it hints at the truism that all humans are individual and knowing one label won’t necessarily tell you anything much about that person. It riffs on that idea as many of us fall into stereotype thinking - quick pattern formation that can turn out wrong.
What unites us is greater than what divides us
We’re all different, all unique, and all equal. No one in our societies should be left behind or pushed aside because of who we are, or where we come from. Yet some of us are still treated differently and unfairly simply because of who we are.
And so the counter point is that many characteristics on the autistic spectrum are shared and can be understood together.
“People possess different points in an N dimensional space where N is a reasonable large and positive integer.”
This - to me - is hilarious and true and tragic and comes from the original documentary. People with a reasonable sympathy with a certain level of maths will understand that language but the average person is lost. This makes the phrase coming from someone atypical in social interaction as partly profound and partly tragic. He describes a truth of the world in a logical language to a typical audience who do not understand.
In England, “being clever, you are rejected” - this is another comment from the documentary partly echoed in the film.
Interestingly, I find this is reflected in directly in the English language. English has so many phrases for being “too clever”:
Smart Alec
Clever Dick
Too clever by half
Clever clogs
Smarty pants
know-it-all
Boffins, nerds, eggheads
And even crafty, sly, cunning - come with dark overtones
Is this a jealousy of “otherness” or this type of intelligence and knowledge ? Is it a fear of characters or things we can not understand - the unknown ?
To me, it’s likely a mix - a spectrum - of these items we fear and disdain things we do not understand and we belittle them to make ourselves feel better.
The documentary and hence the film suggests that the Chinese do not have this same disdain of cleverness, nor the same disdain of maths. The film has this as a small sub-theme. Although I’m unsure.
The film ends on a romantic high. True life has not followed such a straight path, where the real girl has left back to China and not stayed married, although as of recently the boy seems to be happily with another.
While the documentary and film only looks as a small slice in the rich humanity of autism, it’s an accessible and charming slice and it is a part of our untold stories.
Coda, my maths grasp is enough that if I recall correctly scored about a bronze (it might even have been silver) back in 1995 in the Junior Mathematical Challenge - this was a score in the order of 20 out of 50 in maths problems that look a little like this.
A 2015 interview of Daniel Lightwing.
Details on X + Y. Wiki
The Youtube of the documentary Bright Young Minds.