Television and Autism

Like most autistic people I liked watching Star Trek when I was younger. Spock was my favourite character and I will watch an episode of the new Star Trek if it has Data in it. (I had a little crush on him for a short while). At the time I wasn’t diagnosed and I didn’t know why I liked these characters so much.

There were things I didn’t like about the Star Trek too. I didn’t like the way us humans thought we were a morally superior race to the other beings we encountered. A successful mission usually ended up depending on one person, usually Captain Kirk, whose ‘human’, ‘irrational’ and ‘emotional’ nature would save the day. It was supposed to be a crew that was representative of humanity but the people in charge were all men. (I was only about 10 at the time but I was acutely aware of these contradictions).

This is a problem I’ve always had with popular culture. To enjoy it the way I see NT people enjoying it, you have to share the values and beliefs of those who have made it. You have to suspended your own judgement and belief system and enter someone else’s. Maybe all those NT people who watch TV and go to the movies are lucky and their own value system just happens to coincide with what they see on the screen. Maybe they haven’t really thought about it and they just adopt the opinions of the people around them, in which case it’s always safest to go with the majority.

It just doesn’t seem important to some NT people, to have some kind of moral framework. Provided they can make it through life and get what they want; a family, holidays abroad, a decent job, nice house, etc… what does it really matter what you say you believe in? I suppose if you don’t have an ideology to defend, adopting someone else’s to get along with people is easy. I think you adopt whatever ideology helps you to get what you want out of life. If you’re a woman and you want a family, buying into a traditional patriarchal ideology is ’natural’. Also in some NT people I think they value ‘belonging’ so much that adopting your societies dominant ideology is almost a duty, and to hold a minority view is almost treason.

Another program I liked watching when I was younger was Knight Rider. Not because I liked David Hoffman, it was the car ’Kit’ I was fascinated by. It was a machine with human intelligence and like Data didn’t have any irrational or emotional tendencies. I didn’t like that David Hoffman behaved in a similar way to Captain Kirk, like some kind of superhero. Why was it women always needed saving and the men had to save them with their courage and brute force? The only way I could justify watching it was because there was a female scientist who worked on Kit.

It’s not just that Data and Kit were rational, unemotional characters, that I liked them. (They would never turn round and unexpectedly yell at you for something you may or may not have done). There was something else that was safe, and comforting about them. They were all knowing, never wrong and never open to criticism. They are what I imagine angels to be like. Despite Hoffman’s crime fighting abilities it was Kit who had to save him by taking him away to safety, over land or water.

One downside to watching programs like Star Trek and Knight Rider was that for a long time I believed them to be a true reflection of how people behaved towards each other in reality. In these programs people were honest with each, didn’t slag each other off, did their jobs properly and had respect for each other. If a character didn’t behave like this they were a ‘baddie’. (I suppose I bought into it because this is how I want people to behave).

It took me a long to realise that in fact, the majority of people have hidden agendas and are often less than truthful in what they tell you and how they portray themselves. Today, with reality television, and the impact this has had on fictional television, it would be easier to see the mistake I had made. What I was watching was society’s highest vision of itself and not a true reflection of how people behave. Maybe it’s a positive thing that we can see human nature in all it’s glory on screen. Before we can change something we have to first recognise it.