We Si-a For What You Really Are
Sia, the Australian singer-songwriter, has received a fair bit of backlash for her recent ventures into the realm of the autistics. For the unaware, she has made her directorial debut chronicling the daily life of a non-verbal autistic girl called Music and her relationship with her sister, played by Kate Hudson. Early hopes for a reconstruction, in the popular mind, of what it means to be autistic slowly slid into peat, and Sia's subsequent Twitter tantrum has unveiled a particularly nasty underbelly as to how we may want to see autistic people. Very, very early responses to Sia's project were ones of promise and hope. Was the hugely diverse and wildly heterogeneous autistic community finally going to get adequate recognition, from a popular, accessible pop star? Was this the film that finally laid out the complex and broad range of emotional needs that some autistic people cannot expressly request? Was her film anything other than an insidious, shameless promotion of her own