“No more! No more!”

In this blog post, I’ll be discussing a facilitated communication (FC) session that appears in the movie The Reason I Jump. While there are numerous videos of FC out there, some of which we have discussed already, I have chosen this particular FC video because:

1.  It appears in a feature film that has been shown at film festivals around the world, has been reviewed in major news outlets, and now can be streamed on Netflix. It will therefore be reaching a much larger audience than most FC videos do.

2.  This particular FC session involves multiple instances of subtle cuing that raise multiple questions about authorship.

This video clip, it should be noted, is 1 minute out of an 82-minute movie and is excerpted not for commercial purposes but for educational purposes: namely, to discuss, with specific examples, the distinction between authentic and inauthentic communication, as well as to point out specific cuing effects. In excerpting the clip for this post, we thus meet the criteria for fair use. 

Here is the clip:

(A clip from the movie The Reason I Jump).

Part of the complexity of this scene stems from the fact that three different entities are communicating. 

One is the film’s voiceover, which reads slightly altered passages from the book The Reason I Jump, on which the movie The Reason I Jump is based. The book, in turn, is credited to a child with autism who types messages via letterboard with a facilitator holding up the keyboard or sitting next him. The book thus raises the same questions about cuing and authorship as the movie. In a sense, therefore, the voiceover itself evokes three entities: the filmmakers, the purported book author, and the purported book author’s facilitator.

The other two entities are a minimally-speaking autistic individual named Emma and her mother, Donna.

In this excerpt we see eight things happen simultaneously.

1. The voice-over: [Talking over Emma’s initial speech.] “Please don’t assume that every word I speak is what I intend to say. Making words with your mouth isn’t the same as communication.”

2. Emma: [Various unintelligible speech sounds.] “Let’s go home please. No more! Yeah! [More speech sounds.] No more. No more! No more. No, that’s a. No more. 

3. Emma’s right hand: Points to various spots on the letterboard. Because we only see the back of the letterboard, it’s hard to see which letters she might be pointing to.

4. Emma’s left hand:  Holds and perseveratively pushes a button on her electronic Simon.

5. The electronic Simon: Beep, beep, beep. [Beeps continuously throughout the session.]

6. Donna’s right hand: Holds the keyboard toward Emma’s hand, shifting it slightly to bring it closer to the letters that Emma is to select.

7. Donna’s left hand: Consistently moves over to the next letter before Emma’s hand does.

8. Donna, Reading out letters as Emma points to the letterboard: [Inaudible.] “l-D-F-I-N-A-L-L-Y — we could finally — L-E-T-E-A-C-H-O-T-H-E-R — could finally let each other— K-N-O-W-H-O-W — “how” — W-E-F-E-L-T [After pronouncing “T” in a lowered pitch finality, Donna shifts the letterboard downwards, away from Emma’s outstretched finger, and looks up at someone off-screen.] — “We could finally tell each other how we felt.”

Unlike Emma, Donna’s attention is not divided. Unlike Emma’s eyes, Donna’s are glued to the letterboard. She swiftly moves her free hand towards each next letter before Emma’s hand moves there. She also shifts the board to bring Emma’s fingers closer to this letter. She ignores some of Emma’s letter selections. She, rather than Emma, decides when the communication is complete. When Donna moves the letterboard away from Emma’s outstretched finger, Emma looks like she might have otherwise kept on pointing to letters. How has Donna decided that the message ends with “felt” instead of continuing with any number of words that could have come afterwards (“how we felt about each other”; “how we felt about being autistic”; “how we felt about being in a movie”)? 

Perhaps more importantly, how do we explain the fact that so many enthusiastic reviewers overlooked all these troubling signs? The distress and the desire to stop typing and go home that Emma communicates independently through her words? The voiced-over message that Emma’s words should be ignored? The discrepancy between what Emma’s words communicate and the typed message that her mother is cuing out of her?

To explain this, we have to look at one more level of cuing: the cuing of the audience by the movie as a whole. This excerpt occurs about halfway through (at around 43:00). By then, viewers have been treated to extended tracts of cinematic slickness and sleights of hand—many of them purported simulations of the sensory experience of non-speaking autistics.

By the time they reach this scene—a scene which in isolation should be highly troubling—many viewers must be thoroughly under the movie’s spell, convinced that it has, as the Detroit News puts it, “illuminat[ed] the mysteries of the autistic mind.” 

Just as with Emma’s well-intentioned facilitators, the viewing audience has been primed to ignore Emma’s own words, ignore the facilitator’s cues, and let in only the messages they most eagerly want to hear.