Disney, Sidekicks, Autism and Classical Myth

Over the past few years while I have been developing my autism and classical myth project, I have been thinking about the potential of classical mythology as a means to engage autistic children – and potentially adults too. Over the past couple of months, I have been thinking about how other kinds of stories can also provide this role, namely those put out by Disney. Disney taps regularly into fairy tales and folktales such as Aladdin and Mulan, though there has also been a foray into classical myth with their Hercules and so there already is a classical mythological dimension to explore and build on. 

What has got me thinking about Disney has been the hugely successful work by Ron Suskind who charts his journey to reach his autistic son Owen in the book Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism, which has provided renewed publicity for autism and how autistic children can be supported in the US and beyond. Right now, what he has done is hot news thanks to a recently premiered film charting his son’s journey since he suddenly started to show autistic traits as a three-year-old in the 1990s and lost the ability to speak in any way intelligibly to others. The one word he would keep saying sounded like ‘juice’ but it later transpired that he was saying ‘just your voice,’ which is what Ursela says in The Little Mermaid. Thus he was using a Disney film to communicate but no one could yet understand him. Then, one day, his father picked up his puppet of Iago, the villain’s sidekick from Aladdin and started talking as that puppet. Owen started responding – and thus began his father’s recognition that what he had here was a pathway to is son. It was not merely that there was echolalia here – whereby Owen had memorised lines from the plays. Owen was using the Disney characters to communicate his feelings while also to help him reflect on his own self and his relationship to the world. And, since then, including as he moved into adulthood, Owen has continued to draw from film to enable him to process his feelings at key points in his life including to deal with difficult experiences, such as a relationship break-up.

Previously, his parents had been told by professionals to ‘tame’ his love for Disney because they saw this as something that was holding back his progress, but it was in fact Owen’s gateway to the world, and the world’s gateway to Owen’s inner world.

The relevance to my work is something that I am currently exploring. I want to think about how the characters of myth – and the difficult moments they need to negotiate – can serve as a just such a gateway. As I have commented previously, whereas I started out thinking about how one might ‘reach’ autistic people, I am increasingly gaining a stronger sense of the distinctive world view of each autistic person. It won’t be solely that myth can aid autistic people to develop social and other skills to enable them to interact with the world – in addition, others can be enabled to gain a deeper understanding of the world of an autistic person.

In an interview with Ron and Owen Siskind for Democracy Now, the interviewer, Amy Goodman, asked Owen:
 

What does it mean to be autistic?

 

He answered,

 

It means that you have special skills and talents inside you.

 

Like Disney, classical myth might provide a means to help bring these skills to the world outside. By a really nice coincidence, I have been thinking about the specific Greek myth adapted by Disney – and one which Owen and Ron would also use to in their communications with one another – that of Hercules. I’ll discuss how I came to think about this myth, and what I’ll be doing with it, in the next posting, hopefully later this week.