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 music, instead extending an outstretched hand to the community-at-large? Sadly not.

The controversy gained traction when it was revealed Sia casted "frequent collaborator" Maddie Ziegler, a neurotypical, non-disabeld regular contributor to Sia's music projects. This in itself is not necessarily intrinsically harmful. Keir Gilchrist, a non-disabled actor, plays Sam in Netflix's Atypical. It is a brilliant role that, despite facing criticism in being stereotypical, thus inadvertantly harmful, is not by any means reductive. The role evolves over time, reflecting and responding to differing degrees of dismay at Sam's characterisation with Season 3 gaining nothing but widespread acclaim. What we can see of Ziegler's portrayal of Music in the film's trailer, however, leaves an acrid taste in the throat. It is little more than "cripping up"; a non-disabled actor wildly exaggerating disabled behaviours and mannerisms, and sometimes manipulating their bodies to mimic disabled peoples' physical form. Though I obviously don't profess to speak for the entire autistic community, one can easily see reflected back at them the taunting, vicious, jock high-school bully flapping their hands and gurning, imitating us, with animated acrimony. As it stands, society cannot make literal or figurative space for autistic people to stim in public, without judgement. It therefore leaves an ache at the pit of my stomach when I see stimming being commodified, and ravenously and actively consumed on the silver screen. 

I feel that I should point out that, despite my feelings on non-disabled actors playing autistic characters, there are those who feel that this is intrinsically and irredeemably bad. This is cool, and valid; as professed, I don't and can't speak for all who exist in the community. We each have our own takes and, for better or worse, this is mine.

Sia claims this film was a "love letter" to the "special abilities" community. Coming back to the language used here in the next paragraph, I feel that dedicating a film filled with gaudy visuals and sonorous music to the autistic community speaks to a gap in understanding between our idealisation and the reality of living with autism. I feel that, despite being autistic and fairly stereotypical in my presentation, there are still those who cannot 'mask' as well as I can. To those people, this film is, and will continue to be, not just a source of emotional distress, but an absolute sensory nightmare. To claim that you have done "three years" of research on the condition, as Sia does, and not come to this realisation leaves only one conclusion to be reached: Sia is deploying autistic people in film for clout and profit. To use the aesthetic employed by Sia in her film, in the current climate of hypersensitivity to advertising, sensory stimuli and modern music transmission, is to appeal to market forces and circular patterns of consumption, and not the stirred passions of her audience. It is exhausting consistently thinking the worst of people. I am prone to reacting to distressing situations in states of emotional hyperactivity, but to see autistics presented as merely an innocent and fun extension of non-disabled peoples' experiences is ludicrous and glosses over the day-to-day social and functional difficulties we experience. 

To speak of us as "specially abled" is nothing more than patronising. We all experience our disability with varying degrees of severity, but we are disabled nonetheless. Many of us aren't specially abled. We are autistic, the every day confronting us with unique and bespoke challenges. Some of us are piano prodigies, or avid chess players, but most aren't. To view us through the prism of Rain Man-stereotyping is to look at us with the detached idealisation that one would visit a petting zoo with. We aren't all innocent, and pure-minded. As with any cross-cut of society, some of us are reprehensible. To brush over such a reality is to create artificial, treacly obstacles that others less confident and assured than myself are wont to struggle wading through. 

Sia collaborated with the hate group Autism Speaks for this project. Thinly-disguised as an autism advocacy group, Autism Speaks sponsors, propagates and promotes research into the prevention and eridaction, through clinical trials and genealogy, of autism. They believe autism is a behavioural disease that diminishes personhood. As their website so boldly claimed:  

"This disease has taken our children away. It’s time to get them back."

Moreover, its ex-chair, Liz Feld, suggested that this was their foundational objective because autism has multiple co-morbidities, such as seizures. It was, if not still is, prominently anti-vaccination, claiming autism is caused by childhood innoculation, despite the vast majority of board members and trustees being non-autistic. The 'charity' is a disgrace. It has explicitly eugenecist aims, and reminds one of Hans Asperger being complicit in sending dozens of children to death in Nazi Germany in search of optimising their social output. Worse than agreeing with Autism Speak's worldview, the fact that Sia used them as consultants reflects a sheer unattentiveness to the needs and voices of actually autistic people. 

The moral of this unfortunate story is that if you want to fetishize the autistic community, you first need to be aware of the complex needs that: a) define the community, and b) remain inarticulable to large swathes of said community. To do what Sia did, and presume a stereotyped, fetishized, gaudy voice for the entire community belies the fact she did not engage with any authority on the disability at all. Sia, in justifying casting her friend, said that the originally-casted non-verbal girl was difficult to work with, and that other autistics could not land the job because maybe they were just "bad actor[s]". Sia dismissed any challenges to this suggestion as "bullshit." To face such a Trumpian attitude from someone who, allegedly, merely wanted to extend a "love letter" to the community, renews your despair at the future of inclusion as a concept. 

We Si-a, Sia.