Autism vs. Hail Mary

More on how Hollywood domesticates difference

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In response to my short review of Hail Mary, some readers said that they thought that the film’s message about difference was more nuanced or affecting than I gave it credit for. People suggested that there were possible positive queer, homosocial, or asexual readings. They pointed out that Grace chose difference and living (in the interstellar) abroad rather than returning home. Isn’t this a positive message about acceptance and improbable friendship/family?

I’m pretty skeptical of the way that Hollywood addresses difference by including metaphors of real-world issues while avoiding naming or actually engaging with those differences. It’s probably no surprise that I think Hail Mary validates that skepticism.

In the nature of these things, you can read the differences in the film in a range of ways—queer, asexual, racial, colonial. But since I’m neurodivergent and have been thinking about neurodivergence recently, I thought I’d talk about autism, and how Hail Mary toys with autistic identity in ways that are, in my view, condescending and ultimately even violent.

Grace and Rocky as neurodivergent heroes

It’s not hard to see Grace (Ryan Gosling) as neurodivergent if you look for it. He’s someone who gets very invested in and focused on esoteric ideas (in his case about extraterrestrial life) but whose inventiveness and brilliance is undermined by his lack of social skills. He loses his job as an academic because he publicly insults a leading figure in his field; he loses his relationship because his significant other feels (to paraphrase) that his head is in the clouds. He’s more comfortable with children than adults (a fairly common autistic trait).

Grace is also very resistant to, and reluctant to, change. He wants to stay in his classroom and teach his middle school kids; he doesn’t want to get in a jet, or speak to a roomful of scientists or go on a space mission. As far as the last goes, he says that he is not brave enough to risk his life and so won’t get on the ship, but when it comes down to it, he is in fact quite brave. The issue could instead be that—like many autistic people—he finds drastic lifestyle change overwhelming.

As with Grace, so with Rocky. Rocky is hardly the first alien who works as a metaphor for autism, and like many a Spock and Seven before him, his alienness is presented as a weird relationship to social interactions. He often misinterprets or garbles communication (confusing a thumbs up sign with his thumb down; referring to a fist bump as “fist my bump;” struggling with both understanding and making jokes.) He also has a problem with social “boundaries” as Grace says; he invites himself aboard Grace’s ship, criticizes his housekeeping, commandeers his space, interrupts his conversations with Earth, and wants to stare at his colleague close up as he sleeps. Like Grace, again, Rocky has a weird array of cognitive abilities and deficits; he is able to perform amazing engineering feats, but doesn’t understand radiation or relativity.

The point here isn’t that Grace and Rocky are necessarily meant by the film creators to be autistic (though they could be). Rather, the point is that part of the way pop culture represents difference is through nerdiness, social awkwardness, obsessiveness, weird skills and deficits—a range of characteristics associated with, and borrowed from, neurodivergence. That allows neurodivergent people to see ourselves in some pop culture narratives. Grace and Rocky connect because they are both awkward, neurodivergent oddballs, and save their respective planets through a combination of smarts, bravery, and neurodivergent oddballery. What’s to dislike?

Condescension and bullying

What’s to dislike—the problem with the autistic representation on display—is that, in part because that representation is not explicit, it slides easily into condescension, and even into a disturbing advocacy of violence against people who are different. The film often seems to see neurodivergence as either a cute affectation to be humored or as a failure to be disciplined, rather than as simply a difference worthy of respect, understanding and accommodation.

Grace does not have any relationships on earth in which he is presented as competent or really as adult, which effectively infantilizes him. He has no significant other, no friends, no dog, and apparently not desire for any of those things. Besides Rocky, the only two important people in his life are his assistant/guard Carl (Lionel Boyce) and his boss Eva (Sandra Hüller), both of whom treat him like a wayward child, alternately jollying him along and bullying him. They withhold information from him until the last minute; they answer his reasonable questions with sarcasm or deflections. This is supposed to be funny and cute, but the effect is to frame Grace as a lesser partner worthy of ridicule even when he is in many ways the single most important member of the team. If you’re neurodivergent, that treatment is disturbingly familiar.

The bullying reaches a really upsetting crescendo on the eve of mission take off. Thanks to a series of errors by everyone except Grace—a fuel measurement error, the decision somehow to have crucial personnel standing around in the same place, a failure to plan for sufficient redundancy— all the qualified science officers for the space mission are killed in a last minute explosion. Eva decides that Grace must go in their place. He has made it clear previously that he is not interested in a space mission, and when pushed, he has what is effectively a mental breakdown. Since he won’t consent, Eva kidnaps him, puts him in a medically induced coma against his will, and ships him into space.

In the film, this is presented as an intervention not just for the good of the world, but for the good of Grace. He refuses to go, it is suggested, because he doesn’t believe in himself. By kidnapping him, Eva is forcing him to self-actualize and discover his true strength. He even thanks her for it as the end of the movie, when he’s done all his heroing and come into himself.

Grace’s possible neurodivergence inflects this sequence in ugly ways. Autism can in many contexts l be considered a disability, and people with disabilities in the workplace will often need to tell supervisors or colleagues that they cannot safely perform a given task—especially a task that is wildly outside of their job description. Hail Mary suggests that, rather than listening to disabled people and providing accommodations, they should be forced to do things to which they object, even if it endangers them—even if it leads to their horrific death. Difference is a character flaw. Those who are different must be bullied out of it, regardless of consent, regardless of mental anguish, regardless of physical harms.

Eva, in short, never treats Grace as a colleague. She always treats him as a tool. That’s an example of hierarchical exploitation (by capitalist or government.) But it’s also, through this lens, an example of ableism. The neurotypical know best and they are therefore entitled to make use of neurodivergent people however they deem best.

Grace does have one more egalitarian relationship in the film; he and Rocky care for each other, listen to each other’s plans, protect each other from harm. It’s notable, though, that this mutuality is predicated on extreme isolation—and on a kind of ongoing infantilization. Grace not only has no sexual interests back home, but, again, no real close friends. Rocky says he has a mate, but we never see her, and indeed we have no idea what sexuality even looks like for his species. Their time together is a kind of artificial extended playdate sleepover, with messy relationships (sexual and otherwise) suspended to pursue a homosocial idyll.

As someone in a 28-year-long neurodivergent relationship, I could see this as a kind of vision of autistic utopia; you get to stay home forever with your best neurodivergent friend. The film’s insistence that Eva’s treatment of Grace was justified and good for him, though, makes such a positive reading difficult to maintain. Is this an autistic vision of neurodivergent utopia? Or is it a neurotypical vision of how to handle neurodivergent people?

Grace, the film seems to say, wasn’t fitting in on Earth; best to ship him off to the other side of the galaxy with other people like him, no longer bothering the serious, responsible people with his oddity. Put all the aliens over there, where they can do whatever it is they do. Isn’t that better for everyone?

Refusing to name difference

Again, Hail Mary isn’t willing to make a real statement one way or the other about what kind of difference it’s thinking through. You could read it as being about queerness (with the sex carefully erased from the central single-sex relationship) or about asexuality (with both Grace and Rocky carefully claiming sexual interests which are not visible) or about race and colonialism (in which case the parallel between Rocky and Carl takes on some unfortunate resonance.)

None of the metaphors precisely work, precisely because nothing is supposed to work. The movie clings to deniability since acknowledging real world differences in any sustained way would raise real-world political issues it doesn’t want to engage with, and/or would require audiences to think about real-world differences in a way that the movie doesn’t trust them with. The script is open ended enough for (say) autistic people to write themselves in as hero, but not specific enough to demand that neurotypical people interrogate their stereotypes about autistic people. God forbid neurotypical people ask themselves whether it’s actually okay to bully the shit out of neurodivergent people at work for a supposed higher purpose.

I’m sure that some neurodivergent people will see themselves in Grace and Rocky. I’m not saying that’s wrong. But for me, the characters seem more like caricatures created by neurotypical people, designed to assure the normies that they can treat me and those I love badly and/or push us off to the side for the betterment of all. Hail Mary doesn’t seem like an all out push for acceptance. On the contrary, it feels like the movie is hardly trying at all.