Autism

Brüno, Bruno

by Kristina Chew

category: art and music

Published July 16, 2009 @ 12:37AM PT

To say that Jim and I "rarely" go out to the movies is a bit of an understatement. The last film we saw at the cinema was Mystic River; before that, it was When We Were Kings (the latter I particularly recommend, and I am no fan of boxing). Thanks to DVDs, Netflix, and YouTube, we manage to get some movie-watching in though, to be sure, there is nothing like seeing a film in an actual theater with the smell of the popcorn.

With all apologies to Sacha Baron Cohen, Brüno---the mock documentary about a gay Austrian fashion journalist seeking fame and notoriety in the US---is not the movie that we would be seeing if we were to see one. Nonetheless, I have been reading some reviews which (call me squeamish) have further given me reason to feel this film would not be my choice for a movie date with Jim, although Jim and I did get into a conversation about Brüno.

And also about Bruno.

That Bruno. You know who I mean, all you autism folk out there.

Yes, Bruno Bettelheim, the "self-styled expert on child development" who stated that autism is caused by "bad," emotionally "frigid" parents who wish that their child did not exist.

Besides sharing a moniker, there's some other coincidinks between Brüno and Bruno.

Two Austrians. (And here are two more: Hans Asperger and Leo Kanner.)

Was gibt mit dieser? Ich weiss nicht, aber........ dunno, but....

"The basic premise of the movie," according to the Times Online's Blockbuster Buzz blog, is this: "Naive overseas visitor exposes the not-so-secret craziness of assorted American stereotypes with a cavalcade of crude, daft and from some perspectives offensive gags."

"Naive overseas visitor?" Bettelheim (Bruno #2) was the son of a lumber merchant trained in art history who came to the US in the 1940s and procured a position at Rockford College in Illinois; he was a professor of education and of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Chicago for most of his career. He did not have formal training in medicine or in child psychiatry. He did, though, "expose" the "craziness" of some American parents who (these crazy Americans) had caused their young children to become withdrawn emotionally and otherwise---to be autistic----and who had therefore to be taken away from their parents and treated by "experts" (Bettelheim). While the protocols used at his Orthogenic School in Chicago were not "gags," when one reads of the school (see Richard Pollak's The Creation of Dr. B. and Roy Richard Grinker's Unstrange Minds), one wants to gag, for its crudity, daftness, and simple offensiveness.

The recipe for "treating" autistic, disabled children is to take them away from their parents and put them in an unfamiliar environment or facility with therapists who (compared to parents) are strangers?

People say all the time, how horrible. People say, how could anyone believe that? People say, we know better now.

But oh no.

Just recently, we heard someone say to us that we needed to do what is "best for our family" as far as Charlie. As far as his education. As far as his placement.

And what do you think it feels like to have someone else tell you, the parents of a disabled child, that your child might, would, be better off away from you, in a "temporary residential placement"? Shouldn't the family members make those judgements?

I sure know what these mothers felt, is what I have to say. And that, maybe my experience is a lot closer to theirs than I would like to think. Sure we don't have doctors telling us that, to do what is "best" for the family, our child needs to be taken away from us. It seems that others [fill in the blank] have taken up the baton of parent blame.

Just like, maybe there is more of Bruno in Brüno than might be at all apparent?

"Self-styled expert on child development." Self-promoting, self-humiliating, expert (of sorts) of getting us to see (and chortle) at the basic, elemental, atavistic, childish, ignorant preconceptions that we still hold in ourselves at gut level (and which we like to think we are "beyond"), who is of course the cousin of for reals autism expert Simon Baron Cohen.

And autism---it's a word from the ancient Greek word autos which means self (and "same," and some other things). And are Baron Cohen's films not all about one character, one self, alone and up against the world seeking to make that world see how wrong and deluded it is, how subject to stereotypes and mis- and perceptions about other people, and how stupid people, we, us, really are; oh how doth the stupid burn.

That is what Brüno exposes and what Bruno, the other Bruno, sought to show to parents of autistic children, parents who were unable to see that they, and they alone, were the sole cause of their child's withdrawal, problems, and disorder.

That Bruno was so very very wrong and yet his ideas have had a strangely lasting effect.

Mr. Baron Cohen, if I may, I think there may be a topic for a new project here.

If you do pursue it, please do not spare your satire and your send-ups. And as for the box office, well, I can at least almost guarantee you that this is a myth about autism that everyone (of whatever beliefs about what causes autism, neurodiversity, and a whole lot more that is thought divisive) would like to see ground down into the ground and exposed, and lampooned, and stood on its head.

Brüno, please meet Bruno.

h/t to jtf