Mental disorder depiction in movie Rain Man There are movies, the ultimate purpose of which is to help society come to grips with its own fears of AIDS, cancer, mental infirmity and even more arcane illnesses that people would not have known they should worried about if some ambitious script writer had not brought out to their attention. Rain Man, concocted with a calculated mix of information and sentimentality, was created precisely to accomplish this purpose. Barry Morrow, who co-authored the screenplay of Rain Man with Ronald Bass, has specialized initially in teleplays. His first movie was about a retarded man; he then went on to write for television the life story of Karen Carpenter, the anorexic pop singer who starved herself to death. Thus, not surprisingly, Rain Man has many of the characteristics of a society-disease movie. The disease in this case is a rare form of autism. Dustin Hoffman plays Raymond Babbitt, a man who can memorize the phone book at a glance and who thinks nothing of instantaneously extracting the square roots of big numbers. He never misses a question on jeopardy.
However, he cannot make change from a dollar. He is an autistic savant (what they used to call an idiot savant), a man who is part genius, part emotional/mental paralytic. The thing that makes Hoffmans performance so marvelous – the precision with which he delineates Raymonds behavior – also limits it because Raymond is so limited (OBrien, 71).
The unknown metabolic or neurological forces that created his condition cause him to deliberately constrict his world. He walks with curious, mincing steps. He never makes eye contact.
The Essay on Rain Man Movie Assignment
... as a way to communicate with Rain Man. Scene – Beginning of the movie at “WALLBROOK” Charlie hand signals Raymond by pointing at him to ... to express his self. He communicates and learns with a mental picture of the world rather than through verbal communication. Routines ... Never force direct eye contact as this may make them uncomfortable and make sure to keep proper distancing when communicating as ...
It is as though the genius part of his mind can take so much in so fast that his emotional side has shut down in self-protection. If he started taking in feelings the way he takes in information, he would have to explode. Raymond is incapable of change, and the movie makers do not cross the borders and thus, depict the actual scenario of autist-soceity interaction with ultimate accuracy. Simultaneously, Raymond does have a noble purpose. He is the catalyst for his long-lost younger brother Charlie, a young man in search of his soul. They are reunited after their father dies, having pretty much disinherited Charlie, leaving the bulk of his sizable estate to Raymond, who is spent his adult life in an institution (a caring place).
Charlie never knew he had a brother, and then steals him from his friendly keepers in order to convince them that he, Charlie, should have half his fathers fortune. After a week on the road with Raymond, Charlie sheds his callowness and emerges a better man.
The brothers country trip gives director Levinson the chance to orchestrate the kind of poignant comedy he does so well (Couvares, 52).
In a small-town doctors office, Raymond patiently waits next to an old man jabbering away to no one in particular. The nurse asks Charlie why he has brought Raymond in. Charlie explains that his brother lives in a world of his own. However, she asks, what is wrong with him? From the critical point of view, the primary purpose of Rain Man was not only to reveal the autism disorder and raise public attention to this mental illness, however to persuade the society or its separate members there are no actual limits between sound and retarded people. Filling a film with both touching and generous spirit, movie makers managed to depict peculiar and not familiar to general audience inner world of diseased man, genius and vulnerable. Bibliography OBrien, Tom. The Screening of America: Movies and Values from Rocky to Rain Man, Continuum, 1990 Couvares, Francis, ed. Movie Censorship and American Culture, Smithsonian, 1996.
