Different but Not Less

 Autistic children can be a nightmare. They have strange speech (or no speech at all), they won’t meet their parents’ eyes, they scream and shout for no apparent reason, no one can touch them, and they rock or spin. If this was not enough there are the seemingly irrational pranks. The autistic son of close friends once brought the garden hose into the house and proceeded to hose down the living room, paying particular attention to the television set.

Many autistic people don’t think the way most of us do. They think in pictures. We know this because of Temple Grandin—a remarkably gifted autistic woman who has been the subject of a recent report on SBS’s Dateline by David Brill and a Home Box Office telemovie (in which she is played by Claire Danes). Thanks to the determination of her mother and an extraordinary teacher Grandin learned to communicate and has been able to explain autism from the inside. Temple Grandin has described how without medication she lived in a constant state of anxiety with quite ordinary sounds causing acute pain. Most important of all she discovered that instead of using language to formulate her ideas she uses pictures. Her memory, she has said, is like having a video library in her head. Dr Grandin explores much of this in a remarkable book, Thinking in Pictures, that is part autobiography and part handbook on autism. It also includes a fascinating series of reflections on animal behaviour—“They think in pictures too,” Grandin insists. Dr Grandin is now Professor of Animal Science at the University of Colorado.

Temple Grandin, the HBO film, begins virtually in the middle of the story with Temple’s arrival at her aunt’s ranch just after leaving high school. From the outset the viewer is immersed in her world of heightened sound and mental images. For her private joke about the television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. we see black-and-white images from the series. When she exclaims, “It’s hot here,” flames are superimposed over the middle of the frame; when her aunt tells her, “We get up with the rooster,” there is a flash cut to auntie sitting on the roof and crowing with the rooster. Similarly, geometric drawings are inserted to show how she can visualise movement. (Grandin told David Brill that she described these images to the film-makers.)

None of this is the slightest bit confusing. It’s all set up in a pre-credits sequence where Claire Danes walks into a full-size version of the box we are to see her build later and says cheerfully, “My name is Temple Grandin. I think in pictures.” The credits then roll, backed by what we discover later is a montage of Grandin’s own drawings. Director Mick Jackson and writers Christopher Monger and Merritt Johnson chose to begin with Grandin’s discovery of her vocation: the study of animal behaviour. We are also shown the origins of her famous hugging machine when she sees that cattle are “gentled” by being placed in a device that constricts them so they can be inoculated. Later we see Temple construct one for herself. It is here too that she makes the vital discovery that her autism enables her to think like an animal, and in one delightful shot through a wide-angled lens she seems to be observed from a horse’s perspective.

The college scenes are built around a series of confrontations as Temple and her mother (Julia Ormond) strive to persuade the authorities to recognise the girl’s highly individual abilities. One of these clashes is used to motivate a flashback to Temple’s childhood seen from the point of view of her mother. Jackson and his writers only touch on one of the major debates over autism in the 1950s and 1960s—the so-called “refrigerator mother”, the idea that autism is induced by the mother’s lack of affection for her baby. It is certainly suggested, but Eustacia Grandin’s battles with the authorities and her own husband over Temple have been minimised. Perhaps it was felt that in a telemovie there wouldn’t be time to cover the debate over whether autism is a physiological or a psychiatric disorder, and the film-makers wanted nothing to distract from the portrayal of Temple herself. Nevertheless Julia Ormond’s beautifully understated Eustacia conveys much of the lady’s warmth and determination and makes us want to know more about her story. (Just how good Ormond is can be seen from the interview with Eustacia herself in the BBC Horizon documentary “The Woman who Thinks Like a Cow” that is posted on YouTube.)

Equally fine is David Strathairn’s Dr Carlock, a skilfully crafted portrait of a remarkable teacher. Strathairn strikes just the right balance between sympathy and objectivity and avoids any hint of sentimentality. It is through his character that the film’s main theme, “different but not less” is defined.

Dominating the film is Claire Danes’s superb interpretation of Temple Grandin. Reportedly Danes went around for months listening to a recording of Grandin’s voice to get her distinctive toneless speech pattern right. She also viewed earlier films of Grandin where the autism was more obvious so she could reproduce her lumbering gait. David Brill told me that Danes’s imitation of Temple’s hand gestures is just about perfect. Most important of all she conveys the anguish and loneliness of autism, embodying rather than playing the character.

My one caveat is that Temple Grandin’s narrative conforms a little too closely to the structure of the classic telemovie, with the narrative compressed to fit the networks’ time slots. The film is certainly beautifully structured but we need to know more about Grandin’s achievements in the cattle industry and the debates over autism. Certainly the film-makers have reproduced her designs for the curved chute system for the more humane treatment of cattle. As well there are telling scenes showing the appalling sexism Grandin encountered that are nicely balanced by portrayals of some of the men who treated her with respect. But these are little more than vignettes. In spite of these limitations the film is an extraordinary achievement that shows the viewer what it is like to be Temple Grandin.

The film’s success when it was screened earlier this year in the USA attracted the attention of Jane Worthington at SBS. She took the idea of doing a story on Grandin for Dateline to cinematographer and video journalist David Brill. He liked the idea and on his last visit to America followed Professor Grandin around for two weeks, shooting well over two hours of footage. This became a tautly edited portrait of Grandin as she spoke at a conference on autism, showed Brill her awards, and discussed her career. Good as the item was, there is a richer, more complex portrait in the rushes David allowed me to see after the story went to air.

Brill met up with Grandin outside Seattle where she was one of the star speakers at a conference on autism. He had been told to be wary, so he observed her for a few hours as she interacted with the other delegates. Grandin, he found, is an imposing middle-aged woman—a little shy but able to handle the celebrity that has come from her books and the film. When Brill finally introduced himself she simply said, “Welcome,” and allowed him to start filming as she chatted with the people who came up to ask her advice and signed copies of her books. One book was for a rather overwhelmed but delighted autistic boy. David seems to have noticed him out of the corner of his eye, and whip-pans to capture his reaction.

Grandin herself shows little outward signs of her autism. One slight eccentricity is that she always appears in a stylish cowboy shirt. “It’s what I am,” she told David. (Grandin has explained elsewhere that the attire was the best solution for the highly sensitive skin she has because of her autism.) Most of the shirts she is seen wearing are red. “Cattle can’t see red,” she tells Brill, “but they can see yellow.”

Always a sensitive reporter, Brill records the way Grandin can still withdraw into herself. One shot shows her sitting alone, her eyes blank, with slight movements of her face muscles suggesting the tension within. Brill captures a revealing moment at the conference when she vehemently questions the mother of an autistic boy, urging her to be more specific when the woman talks in generalities about “accessing information”. Grandin remains polite, exclaiming at the end, “Now you see how much more we have discovered,” but clearly is prepared to be quite blunt when a child’s welfare is at stake. I found her clarity and incisiveness refreshing.

David soon had Grandin happily co-operating in his filming. She obligingly lies down in a cattle yard to illustrate her theories about animal behaviour and helps out by taking some of the low angle shots herself. There is also a long sequence where she explains the workings of the curved cattle handling facility she invented. Later Brill shows her gently mentoring a student who is about to join her class at the University of Colorado. Grandin also tells David that she has used the money from her books to fund scholarships for autistic students, adding, with a mischievous grin, that she has managed to get some of the quirkier ones in by the back door.

What I have been describing is unedited footage. But much of this has been edited in the camera so that the individual shots already form sequences. It is in effect the director’s cut of the item that went to air. In this fuller version it is clear that Grandin trusts Brill implicitly and is at times delightfully unguarded. In addition it demonstrates the extent to which she has succeeded in transcending her autism. For this reason alone I hope SBS will preserve this material in their archives as a resource for further documentaries on autism and the continuing achievements of Temple Grandin.

Temple Grandin has been released on DVD in a special edition. David Brill’s report (“The Cow Whisperer”) can be viewed online at www.sbs.com.au/dateline.