Screening Madness in American Culture

This two-step argument first establishes that the majority of recent American films dealing with mental illness draw on a traditional iconography of madness as it has been established over the centuries in Western culture. In this vocabulary of images, the mad are typically seen as wise fools, as dangerous villains or as gifted geniuses. The author then argues that some of these new films add a fourth category in which the mad are defined as normal and the person with autism as the embodiment of this normalcy. A close examination of the films then suggests that high functioning autism has become the embodiment of America's current cultural condition.