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Living With Autism: The Teenage View
By Richard | March 16, 2007
Autism, an enigmatic disorder of the central nervous system, excites an unusual kind of curiosity. The curiosity, it should be said, includes no small part of outright identification. After all, the disorder’s signature behaviors — shrieking, retreating, acting obsessively or withdrawn — are familiar to many of us in extremis, or at least in adolescence.
But very little in the popular literature is meant to engender empathy. Instead articles and documentaries on the subject whip up fear, and particularly fear in parents, because autism, which surfaces in early childhood, has no cure and no straightforward treatment.
Leave it to MTV, then, not to address terrified parents, but voyeuristic teenagers. That channel’s impressive, long-running documentary series “True Life” has always eschewed the news-at-11 take on suffering — the alarmist angle — in favor of the first person.
Tonight, with minimal voice-over, “True Life: I Have Autism” introduces viewers to Jeremy, Jonathan and Elijah, three high school students whose autism is now old hat to themselves and their families. No one cries when talking about it. Instead they plan new approaches, sigh as old problems resurface and laugh often.
Jeremy can’t speak — that’s the hallmark of his autism; the condition manifests itself variously in the three boys. In childhood this meant that he couldn’t communicate, but later he and his mother developed a system with a written “keyboard” that allowed him to point to letters and spell words. It was a breakthrough.
More recently, a Lightwriter — a keyboard that talks for you — has made this process more efficient. He’s finally able to strike up conversations with his classmates, who are receptive to his overtures. (It probably helps that he’s got MTV cameras with him.)
His segment culminates in a birthday party he gives for himself, complete with presents and a houseful of friends. He retreats when the crowd threatens to overwhelm him, watching from a balcony. Without the Lightwriter, his retreats might be seen as evidence of unhappiness instead of canny self-regulation. But using the Lightwriter, he regularly explains to those around him, “Happy and nervous, so I need to relax,” and they get it.
Whatever the official state of your central nervous system, the option of periodically withdrawing from a party with “happy and nervous” as a pretext seems like a great option. Jeremy concludes, “I must say this goes hands down as the best party I have ever been to.”
Jonathan comes across quite differently. He’s a terrific portraitist, who regularly sells and shows his work, and who was profiled by The New York Times in 1992, when he was 14. His charcoal faces — part cartoon and part Expressionism — have even been compared to the work of Francis Bacon and Al Hirschfeld.
Unlike Jeremy, Jonathan talks, but he’s less adept at heading off overwhelming emotions. Several times on camera he can be seen clenched and shrieking, seized by bouts of seemingly insurmountable frustration. These tantrums often happen within range of an easel; he looks more like an artist in the throes of concentration than he does like anything else.
Elijah, whose version of autism is the milder form called Asperger’s syndrome, is considered the least impaired of the three, and indeed he speaks so freely that he performs as a stand-up comic. The suspense of his story is whether he’ll take the advice of a seasoned performer at a comedy conference and introduce references to his autism into his act.
His parents seem uncertain about this suggestion: is it reductionist for Elijah to call himself simply “autistic”? While allowing their son, who has an engagingly mannered way of talking that he plays for laughs, to make up his own mind, they nonetheless take pains not to pressure him, and go so far as to scoff mildly at the idea that he tell audiences, “I’m autistic.”
But Elijah, in an intriguing twist, finds the idea liberating. This scene could occur only on “True Life,” and it’s a small revelation in the canon of reporting on autism. Elijah knows that so-called normalcy is not within his reach; he likes the idea of autism being an asset, or at least being somehow put in the foreground. Talking about autism, he tells his surprised parents, is “helpful for probably a new routine — it’s something new, and I’d like to try it.”
A new routine: there’s something elegant and hopeful in that phrase. One of his comedy coaches has proposed the lines: “My parents tell me I have autism. I tell them they have an attitude problem.” Elijah finds the suggestion funny, but like any self-respecting comic, he wants to refine it and make it his own.
He works out some new material, only to get cold feet about it the next day. The coaches urge him to think it over, and he does, only to break it out confidently at showtime. It’s a hit.
The documentary informs us that a joke or two about autism is now regularly part of Elijah’s routine.
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