"Radio" and Autism

Week of 9/26 – 10/2

Over the weekend, my girlfriend and I watched the 2003 film Radio, starring Cuba Gooding Jr., and inspired by true events in 1976 in Anderson, South Carolina. What made this movie something to comment about in my journal is because the story centers around a mentally challenged man named James Robert Kennedy, nicknamed Radio. The young man drives around in a grocery cart, collecting radios and listening to radios, and yet he talks to know one—he’s a social outcast because everyone insists he has lost his mind. But at this point in time in America, the term “disability” really covered everything structured outside of the norm; though, in Radio’s case, he was autistic—not disabled. After I did some research of my own, I learned that the genetics attached to autism didn’t surface until the early 1980’s, and even then there was little knowledge surrounding the conditions. If anything, autism would be classified under Galton’s theory of eugenics, labeled as a “defective” and under the category that included “feebleminded, deaf, blind, and physically defective”. During the 1970’s and especially after World War II, the elimination of deviance from the norm and human perfectibility were not subjects to be taken lightly anymore, so the result is public isolation. And this isolation really came from not understanding what autism truly was.
Even though we haven’t covered this chapter in class yet or if we will, I went ahead in The Disability Studies Reader and took a look at Joseph Straus’ chapter on autism in culture, thinking this might be an interesting topic to consider for the final paper. Coinciding with Radio, Straus includes a section about autism in music and the way they comprehend and perceive it. He states “autistic listeners may be more attuned to private, idiosyncratic associations than larger shared meanings…[whereas] normal hearing involves the creation of hierarchies, autistic hearing involves the creation of associative networks (547)”. In this sense, rote memory and association constitute autistic hearing, which is a perfect example of Gooding Jr.’s character’s aptitude for radio music. I never knew that this type of engagement of memory and fixity of focus was attributed to autism, but as I recall from class it makes perfect sense in relation to Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man.