The other day my wife and I watched the stop-animation (i.e., claymation) film “Mary and Max.” It’s about a little girl living in Australia, Mary, who becomes pen-pals with a middle aged New Yorker named Max. The opening credits claim it’s “based on a true story.”
My wife usually refuses to watch stop-animation films, but for some reason, this one appealed to her. I suspect it’s because Max has Asperger’s and I told her so — she sometimes tries to figure me out by studying the behavior of fictional Aspies — but she denied it. I had a bad feeling when I saw that the Aspie, Max, looked like a human version of Shrek. But viewers gave the movie four full stars on Netflix (a rare accomplishment, as any of you Netflix viewers know) and besides I like claymation, so I said ok.
My wife really liked the movie; me, not so much. I’ll admit it was very creative, and different, and certainly entertaining. So I can’t say I hated it. But something about it bothered me: Max, even for an Aspie, was really odd.
Right off the bat, there’s his appearance — the human Ogre thing. He’s physically quite revolting, even in clay. Aspies are often awkward, nervous, and stressed out by social interactions, and he definitely was all that. But where in the DSM-IV does it say that Aspies, or people with autism generally, look like Halloween creatures?
I also can’t avoid mentioning his, um, girth. Now I know weight is a controversial topic, and lots of people struggle with weight issues. But Max isn’t just slightly overweight or even obese. He weighs 350 pounds. And that’s just at the beginning of the movie! By the end, he’s gotten considerably fatter (“wider,” as the movie puts it). I would guess — did they weigh the clay? — he was about 450 lbs. by the end. It’s no wonder, considering his diet — mostly “chocolate hot dogs,” chocolate bars nestled inside hot dog buns. I forget the exact number but one day he ate over 30 of them.
Someone reading this might be thinking, but the movie’s based on a true story, so what was the writer supposed to do? Well, it turns out that, in an interview, the writer, Adam Eliot, admits he fibbed a bit when he characterized it as “based” on a true story. He now says the term “inspired” is more accurate. But I’m not even sure that’s right.
The names are of course made up, but so are basic attributes of the characters. Turns out “Mary” is actually a boy — in fact, Adam Eliot based that character on himself. And it wasn’t Mary who wrote Max but the other way around. Also, Eliot wasn’t 8 when he started the correspondence; he was 17, almost an adult.
There are more fundamental differences. One of the key commonalities between Max and Mary was that they were loners, without any friends, shunned by the outside world and misunderstood. Mary was even suicidal at one point. But in real life, Eliot (i.e., Mary), though he claims in some sense to be “different,” was not bullied as a child and had plenty of friends. So that part was false as well. Even Max’s typing his letters was inaccurate — the real “Max” handwrote most of them.
SPOILER ALERT:
Eliot also says, quite significantly in my opinion, that the real pen-pal “looks very different” than Max. I take this to mean, although Eliot doesn’t explicitly say so, that, unlike Max, his pen-pal is not morbidly obese, doesn’t not eat chocolate hot dogs, is not hideously ugly (does Eliot even know what he looks like?), did not win the lottery and use his winnings to buy chocolate, did not kill a sidewalk mime when Max’s in-window air conditioner landed on top of the mime’s head, and was not institutionalized for eight months for a nervous breakdown. (It’s not surprising, then, that the real “Max” wasn’t very pleased to see how he was represented in the movie.)
In other words, and here’s why I supplied so many details about the movie, the writer made the Aspie far stranger than he actually is!
Why did he do this? I can’t claim to know his motivations, but here’s what I think — he used his Aspie pen-pal as nothing more than inspiration for a fanciful story, sort of a dark fairytale. That might be all right, except that for lots of people, this is is one of their first encounters with Asperger’s. In case anyone misses it, Max is identified as an Aspie in the movie’s description and at one point even wears a t-shirt identifying himself as such.
Now, I don’t necessarily agree with the media’s “Sheldon Cooper” characterization of Asperger’s either. (This excellent post dispels any doubt Sheldon’s an Aspie.) Sheldon, whom I’ll write about more in-depth in another post, is sort of the anti-Max. He’s brilliant, funny and endearing, and according to my female co-workers, quite handsome. (At last year’s “White Elephant” gift exchange, a cardboard cutout of Sheldon was “stolen” several times — it was the most popular gift!) But either extreme gets it wrong.
I realize Max (and Sheldon) is just a fictional character, and hopefully, most people can tell the difference between fiction and reality. But why couldn’t “Max and Mary” have featured an Aspie who was more, well, normal? Trust me, I’ve lived in New York, and your garden variety New Yorker is plenty strange as is.
Update (7/9/2013): Another blogger has published an interesting list of movies that feature Aspies, including “Mary and Max”: http://aspiegirls.wordpress.com/2012/12/28/2-movies-where-one-or-more-character-got-autism-or-aspergers/
Related articles
- Mary and Max (cryominute.wordpress.com)
- Aspies and Friends (whether they are normal or have Asperger’s) (pinoyaspie.wordpress.com)
- Movies where one or more character got autism or aspergers
Undercover Aspie 