Post-Christmas bonus: Dragging Sia's "Music" On a One-Horse Open Sleigh with Eric Michael Garcia

There's one last present hiding under the tree.

(Photo via.)

Transcript:

Sarah: He's a boxer. So like, I assume that when you train they just bring in bears to squeeze and they're like, all right, boys, squeeze them.

Welcome to You're Wrong About where sometimes we just talk about a movie, sometimes. Hello, Eric Garcia.

Eric: Hello, Sarah Marshall. And welcome to You’re Wrong About, where we point your moral compass away from panic.

Sarah: I love that. What are we talking about today? For someone who just has no idea going into this, what we're doing, what is this phenomenon we're discussing?

Eric: We're talking about the movie Music by SIA that came out earlier this year. That was rightfully panned for being absolutely terrible about autism, because SIA couldn't be bothered to actually talk to an autistic person before the movie came out. But I wanted to go more onto what pop culture as a whole gets wrong about autism. And it feels like this is very much the afterword of the time I was on then Why Are Dads, now You Are Good, talking about Rain Man, and how we still get things wrong even after we had those short kings on the road.

Sarah: Yeah. I feel like this is Rain Man, Too: The Rainining. I don't know.

Eric: Judgement Day.

Sarah: Anytime I want to explore where someone made bad choices, or where a piece of attempted art went horribly wrong, or is talking about something that makes you think, who did this? Why did they think it was a good idea? The best way forward is to talk about, well, now that we've conducted this post-mortem, what next? What could be better? You are a part of the wave of what could be better. What are people trying to do that is creating a world where there will be new, more movies like Music.

And you wrote a book. I really wanted to start us off by offering a passage from your book as balance for, we're going on to talk about how can a piece of art that claims to represent autism or to express the ideas of autistic people go wrong. And the answer is, by not including them in the process in any way. That seems to be key here. And I feel like you have done a piece of work that strives to do the opposite.

Eric: Yeah. So I mean, well, I really appreciate that. And to those who don't know, and as a shameless plug into there, my book is, We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation. So what I did is I traveled across the country. I went to Michigan, I went to West Virginia, I went to San Francisco. I went to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I really just wanted to see what it's like to be autistic in America and how we can better serve autistic people. So here's an excerpt;

“The story of generation Z will be and beyond we'll be unique. To be certain, many of them live with continued challenges with the persistent misinformation about vaccines or incomplete portrayals of autistic people in pop culture. But they will have grown up with concepts like neurodiversity as part of the lexicon. Hopefully, they will not have to wait until their twenties to accept their autism like I did. They will live in a world with fewer institutions and cruel treatments. Through the work that their peers and predecessors have done, they will have role models, setting an example for how to be autistic in a world that is not built for us. I already see this new generation’s work on the internet, and I'm so impressed by their willingness to embrace the parts of themselves that sent their ancestors to institutions. They will blaze their own path far beyond any horizon I can see. I hope they find ways to bend the world to fit them. As the conversation continues to evolve, I hope new voices will join in and. My earliest writings about autism feature some concepts that I now find unsavory, like talking about a cure or functional levels. Meeting autistic people in my journeys as a journalist changed how I view autism and in turn myself. My hope is that I can do the same for the next generation of autistic people while giving them a working language to understand themselves. At the same time, I trust that they will refine the grammar in a way they best see fit.”

Sarah: I love that. That's very rousing.

Eric: I would ask for people is, I would ask that before you say how much you love autistic people, how much do you listen to them? How do you understand them? What do you understand with them? And I think that's why I try to articulate.

Sarah: Maybe this is the moral of our episode. It's like, if you don't know what somebody wants, you can try asking them, and then you'll get a lot farther than just making something up.

Eric: I was excited to talk with you. And that exuberance, I feel like, it always drips out of the speakers whenever we're talking.

Sarah: Yeah. I am incredibly grateful. Thank you, Eric. Thank you for existing. I'm just so happy we both exist. And like, at the same time.

Eric: Yeah. That's a miracle. Isn't it? It's a miracle that it can be on the planet at the same time.

Sarah: Yeah, let's go riff.

I am joined today by Eric Garcia who's a former guest and who is going to be talking with me today about the movie Music.

Eric: Talking is an understatement. We're going to be ranting. We're going to be raving. But also, how the hell did this go wrong? And also, I don't want to defend it, but I almost want to say, where it could have gone right.

Sarah: Yeah. I'm very interested in that, too. And was there ever a workable screenplay in here? What else could this have been? Where did it go so critically off the rails? Was it ever on the rails? Could have been lifted up and placed gently on some rails at any time?

Eric: Well, I feel like autistic people ,given our love of trains, we could have given it the right kind of train.

Sarah: You're like we got miles of rails over here, man. Just, you could have asked.

Eric: If you hang out with autistic people for any extended length of time, you know, we're all about the choo choos. But then also I want to talk about, and this goes back to when I was on your other show - the podcast formerly known as Why Are Dads, currently, You Are Good - because SIA said this is a Rain Man for girls. And we've gone into Rain Man at length, but why that movie about two short kings was okay for that time, but it's now not acceptable. And also, I think the other thing is like who the hell needs this movie?

Sarah: Right? Who asked for this? It's appropriate that you were a guest on one of my personal favorite episodes of Why Are Dads/You are Goods where we talked about a movie, about two siblings with a big age gap brought together by the death of a parental figure and helped to understand each other by a kind foreigner because we're doing that again.

Eric: Yeah, exactly. And like the other thing is Leslie Odom Jr., as far as I know, he's an American, but he's playing an African.

Sarah: I looked this up. I was like, oh yeah, look at that. He's an American.

Eric: Usually it's the other way around it. Europeans and English people playing Americans and tuning it pretty well. Music is not the only bad autism portrayal, but what it does is by it being so horrible it indicts the rest of Hollywood with how terrible it is.

Sarah: I really like this read. And also, I feel like this movie came out like 15 minutes ago and it's been out for almost a year. So like, what is time?

Eric: It’s funny because if I could be really shameless in plugging my book, Sia started promoting Music literally the few weeks after I turned in the final manuscript for my book, We're not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation - in bookstores everywhere folks. Like I was like, wow, I missed this. I didn't get the chance to write about this. The book though, I hoped to write about it in the paperback. And the thing about it wasn't that it felt like he was very connected to the whole point of what I was trying to write the book. Almost immediately there was blow back and Sia just got so much shit on Twitter because Maddie Ziegler, who is kinda like the Diane Keaton to Sia’s Woody Allen.

Sarah: I feel like that works as a metaphor. I'm going into this, just having watched the movie and keeping myself as ignorant of context as I can, but just doing that, I feel like I've seen a lot of people being like this relationship seems… I am concerned. I have some concerns.

Eric: Maddie Ziegler’s been in a lot of Sia’s music videos and things like that. But the big controversy was almost like immediately, why aren't you casting an autistic person for this role? And this goes to the larger problem of a lack of casting of autistic people in movies. And then she says, well, I had a bunch of neuro atypical people in the background. And then she said, you know, I tried having a wonderful autistic person doing this, but then she kept on crying and she kept on… And I, in the back of my mind, I'm like, yeah, she was crying because it's not only bad about autism, but it also sucks. But on top of that, it just showed that like, I think that she didn't expect, and I think Hollywood didn’t expect, this much of a blow back. They haven't recognized that Rain Man, if I remember correctly, won best picture or Dustin Hoffman won an Academy Award.

Sarah: And also, it was like maybe the top grossing movie of 1988, which is incredibly shocking today when you can't do that without it having Thor in it.

Eric: Yeah. But to that point, I think that Hollywood just didn’t expect this kind of blow back and Sia said that this was her love letter to autistic people. And you and I were discussing this and I'm like that kind of fits because love letters are almost never about the subject of the love letter. They’re often more about the feelings of the person and what they project onto the person, really in a lot of ways.

Sarah: Which has such a beautiful burn, because you're not trying to burn anyone. You're just like, here's this thing about human behavior that's often true. And it's like, ah, yeah, Ooh, I got burned.

Eric: They didn't realize that things have changed long past Rain Man, and they should have. As much as you and I have dragged Rain Man, and as much as Alex has dragged Rain Man, like as much as the autistic community has, there were some excuses back then because there was not a lot of understanding about autism in the way there is now. Now there's much more of an understanding and the information is there, the capacity is there. It's just that they just chose not to do this.

Sarah: Right. And it almost feels like plausible deniability. It couldn't really be about autism because it feels like it's about what the idea of autism represents to the person making it who is Sia.

Eric: Yeah, exactly. She could have consulted with autistic people. She could have had autistic people, even if she didn't have autistic cast members, which I would have liked to have seen, she could have talked to autistic people to say, this is what it looks like, but instead it's just this mythologized version to the point of it's almost minstrelsy.

Sarah: It's really uncomfortable.

Eric: It's really uncomfortable to watch Maddie Zeigler do those kind of accentuated facial expressions.

Sarah: Can we start by comparing these two performances maybe, and going back and saying - and I don't trust myself to be succinct - so I'm going to ask you to do it. Sorry. What is Rain Man about? What is Dustin Hoffman doing in this movie? And then what is Music about and what kind of experience is it to watch Maddie Ziegler, who I believe was 14 at the time. And I can't hold any 14-year-old accountable for any performance that they're giving. But what's happening here?

Eric: I can’t either. So Rain Man is, as you said, about two short kings on the road, which is still my favorite comparison. Came out the year of your birth. And essentially what Rain Man is, it's about Tom Cruise's character, Charlie Babbitt, is on the gray market for cars and sports cars and European muscle cars and things like that.

Sarah: God, a little Jordan Belfort energy clinging to him.

Eric: Yeah. Yeah. A little bit of Jordan Belfort, under the table kind of stuff. Essentially what happens is his father dies and he learns that he's recruited a lot of his wealth to his brother who you forgot that he had, who is played by Dustin Hoffman, who is at a place called Walbrook, which I guess is an institution. And he's autistic. And the whole point is trying to get him to California, and he’s on a road trip because he can't be in a plane. It's about a brother who kidnaps his older brother and learns to exploit him economically.

Sarah: And then makes him get new clothes for no reason.

Eric: Let him wear his own clothes. So that's Rain Man. I will also say that at the time there weren't a lot of portrayals on autism. There wasn't a lot of understanding of autism. So while it poisoned the well, it did bring autism into the forefront and of course the kind of catalyst for all this is the dad dying. In Music, it's a movie in which SIA is a magical drug buying queen. A grandmother is taking care of Maddie Ziegler who is portraying an autistic girl almost with accentuated facial expressions, but who communicates not through vocal communication, but through echolalia and more importantly, through interpretive dance. That is her means of seeing the world. What happens is the grandmother died. So what happens? Music's recovering drug addict, big sister, Kate Hudson, who is your classic recovering addict with a heart of gold, as my friend Sarah Lindemann says, is put in charge of taking care of music with Leslie Odom Jr. being essentially the magical autism and fairy explainer.

Sarah: The way it handles autism is so offensive that I feel like people didn't even have time to talk about how offensive it is racially.

Eric: It is incredibly offensive racially. I believe the character's name is Felix, who is the Asian American young man who helps Music navigate the world and make sure that her routine is row, but also one of the reasons why Ebo, which again, just feels like they just, that's an African name, you know, that'll work. But then they see, oh, I had a brother who was that way. And then they're like, what happened? And he's like, oh, he's dead now. And it's like, that's it? And they thought that it was a curse.

Sarah: This feels to me like a computer wrote a screenplay based entirely on other screenplays. It feels very, what my friend Jenna would call a movie ass movie.

Eric: It is what would happen if you watched every public service announcement about autism without ever meeting an autistic person. And that is what you would go off of when it comes to portraying autism.

Sarah: With Music for me, it was when Maddie Ziegler's and again, I don't blame her for this. She's a child. Like she, you know, you can't, I don't expect her to have done better. I expect the adults to have done better. But when we start to see her essentially performing this character, I was like, I'm not an expert and I'm not autistic, but this feels really bad to me to be watching. And I would love for you to express that more articulately than I'm able to.

Eric: I mean, what really offended me was just opening with it and you just immediately see that overbite. Some people have a bias in some people, you know, they have their mouse over there, but like, it felt like autistic blackface. And it looked like a pastiche. There was this smaller where I was just like, is she mocking me?

Sarah: Which isn't the feeling you want to cultivate at an audience.

Eric: I looked it up while you were talking and she's 19. So like she was 18 when this movie was being made.

Sarah: Well, what's interesting too, is apparently they filmed it in the summer of 2017 and then I don't know why, but it just was held back for some reason. I doubt it was because people realized it, you know. I don't know why.

Eric: It sucks, and it was offensive. There's an opening scene of Maddie Zeigler’s character getting ready and immediately without any kind of on-ramp, it immediately goes into this bizarre kind of interpretive dance. On one end I could see why Sia could trust someone who she's worked with in the past and why she might not want somebody who she's unfamiliar with. Then also I was like, if I were an autistic person, I would not have wanted to participate in this because it looks like sensory hell. The amount of flashing lights and the amount of sudden and quick interpretive dance moves and kind of the sudden quick kind of like, I want to be careful because that's what it was almost like a caricature of autistic traits.

So the difference between this and Rain Man, is that in Rain Man and you and I have discussed this is that there was never an attempt to understand what was going on in Raymond Babbitt’s head. They're projecting and imagining what it must be like inside an autistic person's world, but they took no kind of care or precision to understand that, hey, is this what it's like? Let's just make her this kind of magical fairy who lives in this LSD infused Wizard of Oz.

Sarah: Kinda like Funny Face, almost. Yeah. This is a bummer because I love musicals with big, opulent, dreamy dance numbers. And also reminds me of the big, Gotta Dance sequence in Singing in the Rain and we don't really have a lot of that anymore. We don't have a lot of musicals that are unapologetically musical. All I want is for there to be a musical where people are not sitting in a chair, and this is what we get.

Eric: The other thing that annoys me, and that other people have pointed this out so I'm not necessarily saying anything new and I'm relying also on Sarah Ludeman’s great review of it, but the thing that also annoys me about it is the musical numbers don't really move the story along.

Sarah: No, it feels like padding. It feels like they were like, oh shit, this is an hour long.

Eric: Yeah exactly. It's like, let's speed it up. If the point of this was to show what is in the world of an autistic person's world, it fails. Because we don't understand anything more about Maddie Ziegler's emotions throughout things. There's that scene where, you know, she learns to use the communication device. And then she says, I am happy. I'm scared. I'm sad. And my feeling when I was watching it, I watched it again this morning after I watched it when we were texting and the thing that I, the thing that came through my mind as well, isn't that enough? Shouldn't we take autistic people's expressions at face value? Why do we need a magical interpretive dance sequence? Isn't what they say on the surface level enough? And shouldn't we accept that? And I feel like that is how people view what autistic people say, writ large as a whole, in a lot of ways.

Sarah: So I feel like what this movie is doing is something that seems to be a trend in neuro-typical thinking about autism, as far as I can tell, which is the idea that the real you is locked inside and we have to get there. And it's like, what if the real person is this person? And you have to deal with that, and you're the problem.

Eric: Yes. And it shows how little we've changed about autism. Because like, if you remember there was that scene where Tom Cruise and it doesn't have this character in the car that he says, I know there's someone in there. Right. There is someone there who just wants to eat eggs and look at pictures of dogs and eat watermelons and eat snow cones. And that is totally okay. And it seems like a lovely kind of life.

Sarah: I was thinking that. I was like, man, she's got like her soft clothes, and her fanny pack, and her routine, and she goes and reads the encyclopedia section about dogs in the morning. Kate Hudson shows up, she's like the fun older sister who's wacky and insufferable and needs nothing more than the infinitely patient love of an African man. Hooray. And she's like, we got to have you have more fun and challenge these routines that you're stuck in. And it's like, most people have some kind of routine, that's not a problem.

Eric: This is where I'm going to be sympathetic. And I can't believe I'm being sympathetic about this movie, but.

Sarah: This is why you're a good thinker.

Eric: You're rubbing off on me, Sarah. Bottom line. There is a kernel of a good idea in there, which is that in the beginning when you see that opening sequence, it is possible to live a good and a whole and fulfilling life as an autistic person with the right kind of supports. And that autistic people are capable of being happy and being fulfilled in this kind of life without trying to change their routines.

First off, the one thing that is different is that they don't send her to an institution. Yes, it's hard. And you see when the grandmother dies, that there's no money. Because it does cost a lot to take care of an autistic person. I don't know if she was on SSI or anything or on supplemental security income, but there's something good there, there's an idea there that's not terrible. And I think the thing that annoys me is that they make it seem like it's bad. Oh, she lives such a limited life. When really, it's like there's some good things about having that routine. It seems to be working out for her.

Sarah:  I really did find a lot to enjoy in that opening sequence. I love any movie that can show city life functioning like a small town.

Eric: Yes. There were ideas there that were good, but it just was so poorly executed or immediately they veer off of those things. And then to say nothing of the kind of racist stereotype of the overly high expectation Asian father and the kind of demure Asian mother, Kate has this character, it seems like her life is pretty much a mess before she meets Music. I would very much like to see a movie where people see the virtues of the routine autistic life, and it's something that could help you get your life on track because at five you find happiness through routines. There's goodness through routines and there's virtues to it, and you can live a good and wholesome life and you can live and you can be happy. Music has these meltdowns whatever her routine is knocked off. So she has that one meltdown when Kate Hudson's character doesn't braid her hair, and then the other one where they go to the park. Which is again, off of her beaten path.

Sarah: I do find it amazing that any person, I get that you can grow up as a guy and not learn how to braid hair. But if you've ever once been a little girl, then like, how did you not learn how to braid hair?

Eric: Right? But by the way, for those who haven't seen this movie - and I hope you don't - we're doing this so you don't have to watch this movie.

Sarah: But you're right. The meltdowns, the loss of routine. And then we got into, I think what people have maybe talked about the most in this movie, aside from its existence, which is to learn how to crush autistic people.

Eric: Oh Lord Jesus. Can we talk about how serious this is? The first time we see it in the movie, it's when Ebo is when he says, I'm crushing her with my love when she's having a meltdown, because Kazu, I guess, who's Kate Hudson’s character, isn't used to braiding hair and immediately she breaks down and she has a meltdown, which is understandable. What happens is that she says, I am crushing her with my love. And he basically holds her down. And the reason why this was bad is that this happens twice in the movie. Autistic people have died because of this. It has killed autistic people. These restraint and seclusion things are deadly. It's seen as a form of love. And I feel like that is how neuro-typical people view autism as a whole. That we justify doing awful things to autistic people, because we love them. Or we quote unquote love them.

When she was doing the press tour, Kate Hudson was saying, “I hope people realize the kind of love and empathy that we did”, but honestly, I don't need your love if that's what your love is. I don't need your love if it is deadly, I don't need your love if it is abusive. And I feel like a lot of times there have been efforts to ban restraints and seclusion in schools, and almost always, it comes up short. You know, there was the keeping students safe act that tried earlier this year passing, but it almost always gets blocked. And usually it's parents or educators, even who usually defend it. It's funny that this was the thing that ultimately led to Sia deleting her account, autistic people, quote, unquote, “canceling” Sia. Which I think she deserved to be canceled. She deleted her account because she said we're removing it from the movie. But you and I were watching it and those restraints scenes are still there.

Sarah: Right. And you can't take it out. It's a theme in this movie. And to me, the story that we're seeing here, it's about addiction recovery, and learning to see yourself as worthy and learning to accept and therefore give love. And that's Kate Hudson’s story. And I, as far as I can tell, that's really the story of the movie. And then we have this montage at the end where things are at a low, we've been to screenwriting school. So things look darkest before the dawn and then Kate Hudson's like, I'm going to turn it around and I'm going to take care of my sister. And I’m gonna crush her and just throw her on the ground. And you're like, oh, it's in the empowerment montage at the end.

Eric: Yeah. It's like, this is her getting her shit together part, is that she learns how to smother and crush her sister. The fact that she might break any bones is negligible. Music isn't even really that much of a character in the movie. She's the plot device.

Sarah: That's what it feels like to me. Yeah. I was wondering what you thought about that.

Eric: There’s no relationship with the two. Where it's better than Rain Man is she tries putting Music in a home. In the beginning of the week when she first gets it, she tries calling child services to pick the fucking kid up.

Sarah: Do you do pickup?

Eric: Do you do pickup like laundry?

Sarah: Like, I laugh. I chuckled. I laughed.

Eric: Yeah, no, I did. But then later on when they sent her to a facility, she says she will love it like a home. But it's like, she belongs at home. It's not like a home because it's not at home. And then she says, it's what's best for you in the long run. It's only when she's about to be sent that you finally hear from Music. It's only when she has that breakthrough that we can understand that her agency is validated. It's not that her communication is valid in and of itself, it's only when she has a breakthrough that Kate Hudson's character can understand. We don't need to send her away. And it makes it seem like she's only worth hearing when she speaks without her tablet. Because again, the ending is when she sings, when Music sings.

Sarah: And it had already been really bad, but that somehow pushes it even farther.

Eric: Oh my sweet Lord, Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

Sarah: And all his angels and okay. To talk about this ending, this ending is terrible and it's amazing. Because you're like, so you wrote this. You rented a hall and you filmed it and you edited it and you were like, yeah, this is good. People are gonna like this. And Ebo, who is Kate Hudson's love interest, there's this whole other thing where his wife is now marrying his brother, ‘my wife’.

Eric: ‘My wife!’ Yeah exactly.

Sarah: Is that a Borat moment?

Eric: I want to ask Leslie Odom Jr about that. Because did he just do that because he was just like, fuck it, I recognize that this movie is so bad. I'm just going to have fun with it.

Sarah: I really liked that idea. I liked the idea that he was like, ah, this is a bad movie. I think I'm just going to do a bad job on purpose.

Eric: His one kind of dance scene where he's in those oversized suspenders… Kate Hudson and Leslie Odom Jr.’s characters do these kinds of outlandish facial expressions. And I think at one point I was like, wait, are they like becoming autistic in these dance sequences within Music? Because these aren't Music’s imaginations, but it's like, almost to be in this magical world is almost to become autistic.

Sarah: Or Sia’s idea of autism.

Eric: Sia’s limited capacity to understand autism. But like, if you notice they have these kinds of outlandish kind of fun house, mirror expressions.

Sarah: It's like, they're doing that to distract from the fact that they're not really dancing.

Eric: Like he's walking in oversized suspenders, on like a treadmill or something like that. And I'm like, look, we've all seen Hamilton. We know that Leslie Odom Jr. can dance.

Sarah: So this final sequence, it's, you know, we have the classic feel movie ending where Kazu, Kate Hudson's character, decides not to leave music in an institution after all. And they run, they burst into the wedding of her love interests’ ex-wife and brother, to which I don't think they were invited. And then they have this moment, and they kiss and I'm just sitting there like this is someone's wedding, the biggest day of their lives. Keep a cork in it, do this in the parking lot. And then they're like, we’re going to sing a song that has great personal meaning to us and also the audience. But these people don't care.

Eric: These people don’t know! This is an African wedding and some white girl, some shaved head white girl. And you remember according to Leslie Odom Jr. they think that autism is a curse, which is also racist. And these two random white girls come in and if I were Leslie's brother, I'm like, okay, I know I was a dick to you when I stole your wife. But like, come on, man.

Sarah: It’s actually kind of a great revenge.

Eric: It's a wonderful revenge. Yeah. And they have this supposedly sweet song, and it ends with Music seeing lyrics that apparently their dead mother, who was also a drug addict, wrote. And like, that's the thing, it's like, oh, she has been understanding this whole time and she's been a human being this whole time.

Sarah: So personally I was like, oh man, we just sank deeper somehow. Because the idea is that it's this great triumphant moment for her and for everyone.

Eric: She overcame her autism!

Sarah: She fixed it. And also how is Kate Hudson going to be like, I assume the institution was an answer to the problem of insufficient resources, and now she's still broke and things are still screwed up, but she's like, I've decided that I'm going to take care of my sister and it's going to be fine. And yeah, but what resources do you have? Do you have a job now?

Eric: I want to quote this reference from the late Mel Baggs, who was an autism activist for about this communication thing, which just says that ironically, the way that I move would respond to this is for those that don't know, the late Nell bags, they were an autism activist, they were limited speaking, and they released this video on YouTube at the time called, In my Language. This is like one of the first things I ever saw about autism. And they died last year. And it was interesting that the first half of that is done completely with autism communication, with non-speaking communication. And then the second half of the video is them using assisted communication. And it said, “Ironically, the way that I move when responding to everything around me is described as being a world of my own. Whereas when I interact with a much more limited set of responses and only react to a much more limited part of my surroundings, people claim that I'm opening up to a true interaction with the world.” And that was the late Mel Baggs, rest in peace. Thank you.

Because you remember there's that scene where Music says, “I am scared” with her keypad before everything goes to hell. And then she's like, oh, we're all scared. She doesn't stop to comfort her little sister. She almost dismisses it. This is like, we're all scared. Big fucking deal, you know. So I just wanted to get that other way. So now let's talk about the heist, or the plan alleged heist, which seems so ridiculous on its surface. I can't believe I'm actually describing. Do you want to have a go at describing this plant heisted hazard? Or do you want me to discuss it?

Sarah: I still don't know if I think that this is a joke or for serious in the world of the movie.  It's so weird. So Kate Hudson is running around town, dealing drugs for her cookie friend. She gets to sell some drugs to Juliette Lewis, so that's fun for everybody. And then she goes to this, some kind of a fancy spot, it seems like a salon where she's like, oh, is that a SIA wig? And I'm like, no, you didn't.

Eric: Oh, you're referencing your own persona in a movie. No, get the fuck outta here, Sia.

Sarah: Yeah. I also think Sia’s interesting because she, for a long time, never showed her face and there are still very few images of her. She really likes to hide her face behind hair, or she actually is wearing a clay mask. So you can see her, but there's like a level of facade there. And I feel like, is there a level of identification happening there where she's projecting herself onto the concept of autism? Because she has ways of limiting her…

Eric: Social interactions.

Sarah: Yeah. It's interesting to me. It's like the answer is not to turn other people into allegories of your journey, but to just be like, what's my deal. But anyway, she's like, “Hello, I'm Sia. And I want to buy lots of painkiller drugs from you so that we can ship them down to Haiti to give to children injured in an earthquake.” And it says a lot about this movie that I do not know if that was supposed to be funny or not.

Eric: All right. I don't know if that was supposed to be just rich people doing weird rich people shit, like Aaron Rogers, but it seems almost Fyre festival-esque.

Sarah: You're like, make a movie about that lady where you play a version of yourself who's doing that, or is pretending to be doing that, because we really want some drugs. I don't know. That's interesting.

Eric: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Because it's like, okay, you're doing something good, but you're still buying illicit drugs on the black market.

Sarah: It's like, you're a pop star. Don't you have a better dealer than Kate Hudson who has all her inventory in a little pouch?

Eric: I would expect Sia to have a top-notch fixer, you know. When she's with Music in the park, Music gets a bee sting, and apparently, she's allergic to bee stings, so it leads to this kind of, she has this meltdown. And then they go, and then what happens is they leave and apparently, she left the drugs back at the park and that's when everything is lost and everything is falling apart. And she's at her absolute lowest because now she can't help Sia help those poor Haitian children.

Sarah: Or she can’t help Sia get really tranked, either one. And maybe this movie is useful to us because it's making the same mistakes that we see all the time, but in a way that's so loud that it's impossible to ignore. But when this low point happens, she starts drinking. She goes on a bender. How does she turn it around? She wants to, she just wants to, and then she does.

Eric: That's not how it works, right? No, it very rarely works like that. It's not something that you can, will yourself into doing. It's something where you need an ecosystem that Music had at the beginning of the movie. What I would have liked to have seen is that Kate Hudson recognizes that she needs an ecosystem as much as Music needs an ecosystem.

Sarah: She realized she needs a really long-suffering boyfriend, but like that's not the same thing.

Eric: Yeah, exactly. Again, it puts too much stuff on Ebo. And again, going into the racist stereotypes, can we talk about the fact that Ebo was supposed to be African, and he has AIDS, or like it's implied that he has AIDS?

Sarah: Actually a lot happens in this movie. Kate Hudson, she's dealing medication for dealing with HIV. And so she shows up at the meet and it's Ebo, oh my God. And there's such a big moment. And I'm just like, this is so nineties, people having HIV and taking medication for it just feels like something that we are stigmatizing it again if we have this big dramatic moment about it.

Eric: You can't unring that bell because it's so integral to the plot. It's not like they could edit it out after when they realized, oh, this is racist and this is fucked up, you know?

Sarah: My read is that these music video kind of dance sequences are meant to be Music's inner life, a lot of them. And it's like, it's presumptuous to assume that her inner life is about her sister’s flirtation with their neighbor. I think she has other things, let's show that dog again?

Eric: Let’s show the dogs, the show, the watermelon, you know.

Sarah: It's based on the idea that her inner world isn't enough. And so her inner world has to be colonized by other people's lives.

Eric: It's like they are the ones who dominate it rather than they are invited into her inner world.

Sarah: If you could talk to Sia, maybe she'll listen to this. You never know. And maybe she’s still listening after getting through us, making fun of her movie for this long, like what would you want to say to her?

Eric:  What the fuck were you thinking? I think that's the first thing I was saying. And then B, what I would say is why autism? Music is almost non-essential to the plot point of this love story, this dysfunctional love story. Why do you think autistic people needed this movie? Why do you think that we would care? And why do you think that there was this gap that needed to be filled?

Sarah: Inside of this movie, a movie that could have been made that doesn't have music in it at all as a character and is just about a recovering addict finding love and learning how to take care of others. There you go. That's your movie. Just make that movie.

Eric: And I think the other thing that I would say is like, what did you think autistic people would say about this movie? And I think that this goes to the fact that Hollywood doesn't see autistic people as an audience, they still see them through the Rain Man lens. You can see this with shows like Atypical or the Good Doctor or Love on the Spectrum. I don't think that she expected this kind of blow back because she's not in tune with the autistic community. And I think that I would wonder, what did you think would happen?

And do you know anything about the autistic community before then? Is that in, 1988 autism had only been a separate diagnosis and the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders for about eight years. Up until then, it was seen as a subset symptom of schizophrenia in 1952 and in 1968, in those subsets Asperger's syndrome was not even in the DSM at the time. And then of course the 2013 ASD was, all of them were put under the umbrella of that. So a lot of things have changed since Rain Man. And the big difference was it did make people say, oh, this is autism? And it was no longer just something that Bruno Bettelheim would talk about on Dick Cavett, you know.

Sarah: And also really showed, I would say, of our two short kings that the autistic character is by far the more lovable one because the neuro-typical people of the world is Tom Cruise who's explosive, mean, likes to touch all your books for no reason, and doing something shady with cars.

Eric: I'm still not over that because I just moved. And I just like, and I just put up all my books and like, if someone fucked with my books, I would not be happy.

Sarah: It's very personal. Just assume they're in that order for a reason.

Eric: I had this in my notes, and I just thought about it right now. There's that scene in the park where if you remember Leslie Odom Jr. kind of talks through restraining Music. And then he says, squeeze her like a bear. And the one thing in my mind that I thought was, how many fucking bears has Ebo squeezed?

Sarah: He's a boxer. So like, I assume that when you train, they just bring in bears to squeeze and they're like, all right, boys, squeeze them.

Eric: It's bear squeezing day at the gym, boys.

Sarah: It’s bear day. Here's why I wanted to talk about this movie with you originally. People should know what happens in it without having to necessarily watch it themselves. Because I imagine that it might be very triggering, now having watched it, I'm like, aha. Yeah, I was right about that. I think. And then also make us be able to maybe roast it enough to take the teeth out of it, which I feel like talking about the silliness of the script really helps with.

Eric: Yeah, absolutely. So like, I mean, I think that like one of my friends, David Perry, when I was doing the beginning of this book to my friend, David Perry is like, how have autistic people won the culture wars? And my argument is they haven't won the culture wars yet because otherwise this movie would have never been made. But what happens is, now autistic people, speaking, non-speaking, everything like that. The best critique I heard ever was from a guy named Hari Srinivasan, who's a non-speaking student at Berkeley. He wrote a great piece called A Boy Like Me. I recommend everybody read it on top of that. The ADA and the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act ensured that plenty of autistic people could get services. So now that first generation of autistic people, myself included, have grown up with that. And now we can say this is bullshit because we have the resources to say that. That wasn't the case when Rain Man came out, there were autistic people individually, but even the ones who were out of institutions likely were undiagnosed. And a lot of them were in institutions or they were dismissed or there were a lot of other things that caused them to happen. So with all those changes, it baffles me that Hollywood is still basically in the same space that it was during Rain Man.

Sarah: And why do you think that is?

Eric: I think it's because a lot of people are that way, you know, the most prominent charity organization, non-profit organization for autism is autism speaks, which has very few autistic people in leadership. We spent the better part of the 2000’s freaking out about vaccines or one of the most prominent spokespeople about autism was Jenny fucking McCarthy. The chances are, one in 50 children are autistic. So chances are, you know somebody who's autistic. But it's like, we would rather believe what other people tell us about autism than what we see with our own two eyes. And what we see and what we experience and how we interact with autistic people.

Sarah: We talked about this in Rain Man. The shorthand, neuro-typical understanding of autism historically seems to be a lack of outward thinking. It's a lack of empathy. It's living in one's own worlds. And it's like, there has to be some amount of projection involved in that analysis.

Eric: Yeah. Cause Kate Hudson keeps on talking about paradise and she wants to live in her own world. And it's fascinating cause like even the word autism, it comes from the word art like auto, like self. Again, there's that projection, just like how Bruno Bettelheim said that he thought that autism was caused by parents who wish that their children didn't exist. I'm also thinking, well, Bruno, do they think that, or do you think that autistic children shouldn't exist? Is that what you think, Bruno?

Sarah: Why don't you just tell me what you think?

Eric: Maybe Sia thinks that autism is magical because she's magical. She went full William Shatner on autistic people on Twitter.

Sarah: What did Shatner do? What's this comparison based on?

Eric: Do you know about his whole fight with autistic people?

Sarah: No! Oh my God.

Eric: Which is funny Cause there are so many autistic Trekkies. I'm not one of them. I need to start watching some more Star Trek.

Sarah: And also isn't Mr. Spock, in the same way we were talking about Guardians of the Galaxy, backdoor representation before anyone knew what was being represented, basically. And also the most lovable character!

Eric: Yeah, exactly. So William Shatner, what happened is that he had promoted some stuff about Autism Speaks. This was like back in 2017, 2016, and some autistic people pushed back and said, hey look, Autism Speaks isn’t one of the best organizations. It's not one of the best. And then he just went off. And he went on for days and weeks and months on certain autism advocates. And he still to this day will occasionally go off on autistic people, or like he'll defend ADA, or he'll defend Autism Speaks. And he just will lose his ever-loving damn mind. It's such an in joke now with autistic people.

I write about in the book that I went to a retreat called Aut Space in Michigan with a bunch of autistic people. And I'm like, all right Emond, on of the autism advocates who William Shatner has picked on. He dramatically read the tweets as Captain Kirk. It's still one of my favorite moments from when I wrote my book.

Sarah: Have a little dignity! You're captain of the enterprise.

Eric: And it's like, you know, one of my friends calls him Space Trump. But basically what happened is Sia got really mad. And I remember at one point some autistic people were like, you know, we've tried really hard to get in movies. And she says, well maybe you're just a bad actor, or something like that. Or maybe you're just terrible. She got really mad at that. I can remember one of the most proud of was that she says, Fuckity fuck, why don't you watch my film before you judge it?

This is the problem I have with a lot of neurotypicals in their approach with autism, is that they think about it in terms of being nice to people and in terms of charity, rather than this is a group of human beings who have complex inner lives and thoughts and feelings. I'm pretty sure she thought she was going to get an academy award for this. Maybe even 10 or 5 years ago maybe she would have, before the autism community has grown up and become much more vocal and has been heard much more.

I think the other contributing factor was this movie came out during a pandemic when a lot of autistic people were killed. So it was almost one of those things where we were already pretty froggy. I don't think a bunch of autistic people who were parked in front of Santa Monica Boulevard, protesting Sia’s movie Music would've had as much impact as all the people on Twitter, just saying this sucks. So weirdly enough, the pandemic made the attention on Sia’s movie all the more negative.

Sarah: I was wondering about that.

Eric: Yeah, because now we're all at home, so it didn't matter. They could easily say, oh, those are just a bunch of zealots, if there were people protesting in front of the studio, but now you couldn't ignore it.

Sarah:  I want to compare this to another disaster of the last couple of years, which is American Dirt, which is another book. I feel like American Dirt kind of does for publishing what Music does for filmmaking. Which is to be like, we know exactly where these properties came from. They came from the same place they've been coming from for decades. And the only thing that's different is that somehow, because of technology and because of people being raised, being empowered to actually push back against media and things like that, it actually didn't just quietly become a bestseller like everyone expected.

Eric: Because American Dirt came out around 2020, like I think it was like right before.

Sarah: It was right before. One of the last scandals we had that wasn't about, oh, the government wants us to die. That's interesting.

Eric: It was one of the last collective outrages that we had in public.

Sarah: There was just this idea in the culture for the publisher, for the writer, of this is going to represent an important political issue. And it's like, do your autobiographical story, write about being someone with addiction issues who finds love and don't bring autism into this.

Eric: Yeah. What did autism do to you, Sia?

Sarah: We're in a moment of conversation about what does it mean to be an artist and artists of various kinds, like maybe tensing up and holding on to their right to do X, Y, and Z. And I feel like it's just always been true that it's good to do multiple drafts. That seems obvious.

Eric: Exactly. There are reasons why writers do multiple drafts, and it feels like this was just a rough draft that you had published on.

Sarah: Here’s another question I have for you. Let's say that you're, if not the king of Hollywood, then in a position where you have carte blanche to create your own movie that is your love letter to autistic people from an autistic people. What would you want for that?

Eric: One of the things I would just love is I would just love for autistic people to be ordinary. If I were to do something, I would want it to be just like, I don't know, like an offbeat sit-com about autistic people making their way through adulthood or like if it had to be in a nursing home and institution because even though I really recognize that they are often very harmful, kind of like shows about attention, like in cartoons, have a show about them pushing back against the nurses and the home care aides and things like that. Or I would want there to be a movie about a non-speaking autistic person who again, maybe teaches their autistic loved one, she's a bit of a fuck up that there could be goodness in routines and a routine can make you have a good life and get sober and things like that. That's what I would have done if I had done this movie. Music's routines teach Kazu to get her shit together and have a good and routine life, something like that. I haven't seen that many truly great portrayals of autism in pop culture. I don't know what I would want out of it.

Sarah: It's like, you have to have the buffet to be like I like this. I don't like that so much. That looked good, but it's actually not sitting well, just through the cultural references we've made. What exists in any numbers at this point is like people for whom it could be your head canon that they're autistic, but it's never stated.

Eric: Exactly. There are definitely characters who I think are head canon. In Community it's basically implied that Abed is autistic.

Sarah: Kent Davidson in Veep.

Eric: Yeah, exactly. There are some things where you're autistic, you know, is it Tina Belcher in Bob’s Burgers is autistic. In the pilot, they say, you're the worst kind of autistic there is because she can't count the toothpicks on the floor, but then later on they just never talk about it again. It's almost like those implied autism portrayals are better than the explicit autism portrayals.

Sarah: An un-lept leap, I guess, because it feels like these actual portrayals, these attempted portrayals of actual autism that we're talking about fall really wide of the mark, and also seem to be about neuro-typical baggage projected onto an autistic character.

Eric: Oh my God. Yeah, no, that absolutely is there. Yeah. Whereas I think when something is almost subtly autistic or not explicitly autistic, and it's allowed to blend into the larger tapestry, then it almost oddly enough fits in better.

Sarah: Or you're like, oh, this seems like a nice way to think or a nice way to live. And it feels like you're not allowed to think that in the kind of Rain Man music context. And yeah, it would be so radical for Kate Hudson to be like, you know what? I really do feel grounded when I have a snow cone every day at 1:30.

Eric: That same award season Crip Camp got a lot of awards. And it was because it showed when you have a humanizing portrayal of disabled people, you can make a great fucking movie. And this was a documentary to be sure, but it was a great humanizing portrayal that otherwise it didn't exist, and it made money. It got nominations. I almost worry that Sia poisoned the well about autism movies, because now I worry that anytime anybody comes to a studio with like, hey, I have an idea of that autism movie. They're like, we tried that show with Sia and we got hell for it. Even if there could be a better portrayal of it. The other reason why I hate that movie is that I worry it might've poisoned the well.

Sarah: Yeah. Which I mean, as the more pessimistic take, I have to assume is maybe the more realistic as far as industries, this size tends to go. I mean, what you were saying before, that feels important to that. We have people who are like in the prime of adulthood who grew up with adequate services with adequate support. That is also a bell that can't be unrung in a good way.

Eric: You can't shut us up. The fact that I'm a journalist now, and the fact that I can push back into the fact that you have invited me on for three episodes about autism now in one way or another, in the You’re Wrong About cinematic universe, just like how Dana Schwartz is your resident Royal's correspondent, I'm your resident disability correspondence for you're wrong about, I take that as a win.

Sarah: And then hopefully next time we can talk about metal or something and we won't have a movie to drag.

Eric: Yeah. That's the difference now is that like, just like you can't unring the bells of the damage that was done. You can't put us back in the box anymore, you know? And that gives me some comfort.

Sarah: Speaking of all these bells that are ringing, what is your book about? What do you want it to do in the world?

Eric: Now I wrote this book for three years. We have so many bad ideas about autism that permeate through culture, that permeate through politics that permeate through everything, but my argument is that autistic people are not failed versions of normal. What I would love is that to the point about like at the end of the movie where she's only treated as a human because she could sing, I want people to recognize that the way that autistic people communicate doesn't need to be considered less if they can't speak with their mouths. I want autistic people to be considered fully human because they are right from the beginning and right from the base because they are human. And I wrote this book, basically I traveled across the country to say, well, if we have so many bad ideas about autism, how does that affect autistic people today? And what can we do to change it, to change and radically improve autistic people's lives. And I hope I did something good with that. I hope that I did that, and I help people see that to borrow from your other things that autistic people aren't evil, you’re good.

Sarah: You are good! The nice boy. This is a mother's angel!

Eric: Exactly. I told you when you did the Frankenstein episode that like I said, this is a great context for disability rights and for loving this loving disabled people.

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, to speak to what happens in young Frankenstein, which is really like my core value explained, everything changes. We jump off the track of the Mary Shelley story and onto the Mel Brooks version, when the scientist embraces his monster, literally embraces his monster. And I feel as if this is so much of what we've been talking about this whole time.

Eric: And to keep on riffing on Mel Brooks, his communication, when he says ‘you are good’ is it's this primal visceral thing.

Sarah: It's beautiful.

Eric: It's seen as this acceptable form of communication that is amazing in and of itself is that he doesn't need to utter a single word, but like that's all Gene Wilder's character, Dr. Frankenstein needs to hear to love and accept his nice boy.

Sarah: And that we, as the audience, have the material, we need to see this, the monster experiencing shock and disbelief and vulnerability and the feeling of accepting love, which is what Sia was somehow going for. And then it just, things got derailed and fell into a lake and through the floor of the lake and into the center of the earth. We create monsters when we project what we fear in ourselves onto someone else and we lose the monsters of the world when we acknowledge our own baggage and claim it and then can see other people clearly.

Eric: The name of the book is we're not broken. We're not failed versions of normal. We're not something to be afraid or feared. We’re people who belong with everyone else.

Sarah: Because what the heck is normal? It's not serving anyone.

Eric: Ableism doesn't just hurt disabled people. It hurts abled people as well. When you recognize that your fate is tied with someone, into someone else's fate, that it makes you give a shit. I want to thank you that I did finally get the chance to give this movie the absolute dragging that it deserves.

Sarah: I'm so happy that we got to talk about this today. And also, I feel like this show is often the section of frigging downer that we have taken this, I say this as someone who fears every day that I'm making garbage. So maybe I'm projecting and comforting myself with this too, but this garbage movie, and have fashioned it into hopefully a lovely sculpture and come to a conclusion at the end about what would be productive or not productive because you deserve to be loved if you're not productive.

Eric: What would be positive?

Sarah: What would be positive? What would be worth doing and thinking and feeling, and how can we move forward and empower people to create better stuff.

Eric: How can we make stuff that's more accepting and teaches you to accept others, accept them. You know, I just want to say that from the bottom of my heart, the fact that I got to be a fan, to go from being a fan of the show, to being someone who just like talks to it with you guys on Twitter, to being an evangelist of You're Wrong About other people to get into, be on the fucking show is a dream come true. I cannot thank you enough. You guys have been some of the biggest supporters of my work when I needed it the most. So just from the bottom of my heart, thank you for letting me be on here.

Sarah: Yeah. I feel the same way. I feel like you're doing such important work. You were doing good and doing hard, amazing things that are amazing to me and totally beyond my skill sets. I am so honored that you want to come spend time talking about movies with me. And from the bottom of my heart, waaah (crying).