Opinion: Why Sia’s new movie harms autistic people

When I was diagnosed with autism at 17, I was forced to challenge everything I thought I knew about autistic people.

Kids at school had been throwing around the r-slur since first grade, and to me autism belonged in a special ed classroom. Not in the library devouring fantasy books or delivering lines in school plays. Through the neurodiversity community, I learned to expand my view of what being autistic means, but many people remain unaware that they even need to learn more.  

The most well-known organization associated with autism is Autism Speaks, and campaigns like their “Light it up Blue” are widespread, despite both being widely criticized by self-advocates who are autistic. “Progressive” autistic advocacy is too often made by and for allistic people, and too often shuts out the voices of the people they claim to represent.

An egregious and recent example is Sia’s new movie “Music.” While the movie has been nominated for two Golden Globes, autistic advocates have been expressing their concern for months.

The first round of backlash came over Sia’s tweets, in which she said that she consulted with Autism Speaks for the movie, insulted autistic actors expressing concerns, and insisted that casting an autistic actress would have been “cruel.” But with every bit of new information that’s come out about the movie since, it’s become clearer and clearer that this isn’t just a case of a bad first impression.

For one thing, in a 2019 interview, Maddie Ziegler (who plays the titular autistic character, Music) said that to prepare for the role, she watched videos posted by parents of their autistic children having meltdowns. Playing any role based solely on how a person acts under extreme distress is inadvisable, and that’s putting aside the privacy violation of parents publishing these videos in the first place. 

In a leaked clip, Music is held in prone restraint while having a meltdown. Autistic children have been killed by being restrained like this, and others have been traumatized. A college student named Eden, who runs an autistic advocacy account with over 7,000 followers on Twitter and 83,000 on Instagram, posted a thread about the dangers of prone restraint and the trauma they experience because of it.

Eden also posted their preliminary review of the movie. They include images and clips from the movie, describing it as “a caricature of autistic body language.” They continued, “It’s unsettling, and insincere. And it is deeply reminiscent of the exaggerated mannerisms non-autistic people often employ when bullying autistic & developmentally disabled people for the ways we move.” 

Another critic, Clem Bastow, blasted the movie in a Guardian article as being both trite and infantilizing. Bastow pointed out one line sung: “In my dreams, my body does not control me.” This shows a deep misunderstanding of autistic people’s experience. We are not “normal” people trapped in defective bodies or minds. We are people with brains wired differently than that which has been labelled typical.

Sia’s portrayal of autism is patronizing, othering, and based on stereotypes that could have been avoided by working with a single autistic self-advocate. However verbal we are, however well or poorly we blend in with allistic people, me and my community deserve better representation than this. We deserve to be seen as we are. 

In my dreams, I am still autistic. But in my dreams, I don’t feel embarrassed if I catch myself fluttering my hands in public, or when I need to wear headphones to the grocery store or a crowded restaurant. In my dreams, the people around me understand and accept me the way I am. This is what Sia has missed in her film.

Katelyn Allred is an opinion writer in her junior year of college. She’s studying English with an emphasis in creative writing and enjoys reading, listening to podcasts, and baking.

katelyn.allred@usu.edu