Two weeks ago on my channel video blogs I reviewed the Ben Affleck film 'The Accountant', but will not really do a review here.
The film is a rather loud and outlandish story about an autistic savant accountant leading a life of super spy and cleaner for the baddest bad guys in the accounting world.
It sounds on the offset like a cute idea, a kind of Jason Born with issues, but those issues appeared to be played for snickers more than a tug at the so called autistic community.
The premise is immediately ridiculous to actual spectrum ASD people as they would make utterly terrible spies! Seriously. Autistic children and adults cannot lie, have a tough time with social cues, and lack the capacity for rapid adaptation to new things.
This means that if you trained one to shoot straight, he would react slowly, contemplating the range, direction and timing, and moral reasons, and likely be killed in reprisal long before actually hitting said target.
Now granted some autistic people make good spy story writers. They can study the workings of people in a world 'they control' and can make for some surprising villains with complex back stories, and some interesting and complex heroes, if they understand the story outline.
But there is a big difference between someone crunching numbers, someone breaking down a story, and someone programmed as a spy in 'real life'. The key is in a story you can control the world building so that your human characters behave in a certain way. In real life, it is not so easy.
The Affleck character tries to play it off as autistic in the movie. He really isn't though. He's much too tactical and closed off.
A common misconception, gleamed from misunderstood books, is that autistic people have no feelings for others. This is because of a delayed reaction, not an absent one. It seems like this is a form of lying, which it is not.
It is true that they could be good at a poker face, but not what the movie shows.
The character in the movie is abused all his life by a jerk parent who is a military madman who thinks might makes right, and boys should fight to solve things, no matter what, and that he should be essentially programmed via over stimulation. This turns him psychotic so that he becomes somehow an assassin, and also a competent accountant, no make that a genius accountant.
Maybe his other parent taught him about accounting. He has god like accounting powers, able yo focus on a single night of red tape and sort out everything by going full Beautiful Mind with a black dry erase pen all over this office room in one scene.
The producers did not really serve justice to the autistic community. The movie is a false narrative and a fiction.
If anything, the character, named Chris, actually is not autistic. He has too many adaptations for that. Although not a medical professional, I can look this kind of thing up and find out what he is. Also because I am autistic, I want to detail that I looked this up.
Anyway, it appears that Chris in the story suffers from a similar but misdiagnosed for of spectrum disorder, but it's not autism.
He has too much ability to shoot and aim, and be laser like, not just in focus but adaptation. Although autistic can focus, this does not translate to adaptation and change at all. The intense focus is OCD in his case. OCD is not autism. Obsessive compulsive tends to be equally focused, but unable to stop that constant repetition, like in the stimulus scene, or the night in the office scene.
He also might be borderline personality, which does show actual apathy, unlike the delay with autism. This would account for his ability to shoot all the bad guys without so much as a flinch. A true 'sociopath', which can be genetically inherited, is sometimes not capable of conscience and would be apathetic. Like that old saying goes, 'he just doesn't care'.
Also he seemed unusually indestructible in battles, which was just Hollywood making him off as Batman or something. Sure he gets a leg wound later, but it is never mentioned after the scene is over, save for a limp.
So in this editorial I make him out to be obsessive compulsive on the spectrum, of that, but also with borderline parts, stemming from abuse, training, and genetic markers.
He is not autistic. Hollywood needs to quit trying to make the autistic out as unfeeling circus attractions, thank you.
Actually on the CSD side, this guy still would be lousy at math and figures. He's not that then. So the girl got it wrong too. The creative end works well, but not math so much.(Ergo his 'apathy' would revert and make him not want to collect art, or anything artistic).
The savant like math side is the other end, and they usually become programmers or accountants.
The other girl in the story who becomes his Sari computer pal is probably not autistic either. Deciding not to speak at all unless through a computer is something else. It is partly on the CS part, as she could then speak through something, but not really as portrayed in the movie. She was also a master hacker. Unlikely if she could not communicate somehow verbally somewhere, and there is no computer that can do what that one did in the movie, at least not in the hands of the autism guy at his house. Come on! Did he work for the secret service? He would be a target for the bad guy then.
If Chris the character was that apathetic to bad guys, he would be to good guys also, and would have accidentally had him taken out.
It is not consistent.
Yeah, if he's that much of a an unfeeling bad ass to the marks, he should be equally unfeeling to those he 'likes', even if he 'wanted to learn', and he could not be able to learn as portrayed in the movie.
Well it was a better portrayal than Rain Man, but that's not saying much. We have not improved much in 30 years.
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