Why is cinema still failing autistic women?

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 State’s 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.

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.