Autism in Entertainment Begins With a Deep Dive into 1988's RAIN MAN

It's hard to overstate the role this played

In the weird world of autism-themed entertainment, one movie looms above all others. It was so successful in every conceivable way that for decades, it was better known and more famous than the neurological condition at its core.

I’m speaking, of course, about 1988’s Rain Man, the top-grossing film of the year (beating the runner-up, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, by twenty-five million dollars) and won Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Screenplay at the Academy Awards. Adjusted for inflation, Rain Man grossed the 2024 equivalent of nearly a billion dollars.

For a good long while, more people knew Rain Man than were familiar with autism. If I had discovered that I was autistic in 1996 rather than 2024, I suspect that “like Rain Man” would be a phrase that I would use regularly as shorthand for the condition.

This would undoubtedly cause many well-meaning folks to reply, “That’s weird. You don’t seem anything like him.” That would be intended as a compliment but would not be received as such.

When I saw Rain Man in theaters in 1988, I did not relate to Raymond Babbit, the man Dustin Hoffman made the world’s most famous autistic character in his Academy Award-winning performance.

I did not look like him. I did not talk like him. I did not have the same tics and mannerisms. At twelve years old, I identified with Charlie, the resentful luxury car dealer played by Tom Cruise, in one of his best and most bizarrely under-recognized performances.

Dustin Hoffman won pretty much all of the acting awards for Rain Man because he played exactly the kind of role that wins Academy Awards, but Tom Cruise's sole nomination or win came from the Kansas City Film Critics Circle Awards.

Good job, Kansas City film critics from the late eighties! Cruise has the less flashy, less awards-friendly role, but he carries the film. The role of Charlie Babbitt plays to the actor’s gift for portraying selfish yuppie assholes.

Cruise is very convincing as a narcissistic jerk. We see the world and Raymond through his eyes. He’s the audience surrogate because he’s neurotypical and played by one of the biggest movie stars in the world, but also because his motivation is one everyone can understand.

Raymond just wants to be left alone with his rituals and obsessions. I know the feeling. I share the feeling. As a recently diagnosed autistic man, I am torn between wanting to be my truest anti-social, obsessive autistic self and feeling the need to make an effort to try to make up for the many anti-social symptoms of autism/ADHD.

Charlie, on the other hand, wants to get his hands on at least half of the three million dollars his estranged father left Raymond while leaving him almost nothing. Who can’t understand the dogged pursuit of money?

Re-watching Rain Man, I saw a lot of myself in Raymond but also a lot of both of my sons, particularly my younger son, whose autism is more pronounced. He was the character that I identified with, even if he has a much more intense form of autism than myself or my older son.

The problem was that for a lot of people, Rain Man was their only exposure to autism. Because the film was such a smash, it became the primary reference for autism for much of the public. For many, Rain Man wasn’t a depiction of one of the many different kinds of autism, and a very extreme one at that, but rather the cinematic depiction of autism. And that created all sorts of strange expectations from a public that was really just learning about a condition that now has a massive cultural impact.

Rain Man was so huge that Raymond’s oft-repeated utterances, like “I’m an excellent driver” and “Five minutes to Judge Wapner,” became comic catchphrases recognizable enough to be the basis for jokes on The Critic.

In 1988, Raymond Babbitt seemed alone in pop culture and the world at large, but now there’s a whole army of us who don't make eye contact and avoid social situations, and we’re not going anywhere.

A movie about the fragile bond between an asshole workaholic and the much older autistic brother he never knew he had has to be pretty damn entertaining to absolutely dominate at the box office and the Academy Awards.

Rain Man is, indeed, a slick piece of work. That’s both one of its greatest strengths and one of its most glaring weaknesses. It is a sleek, dynamic piece of entertainment to a fault.

Barry Levinson’s iconic blockbuster feels like a New Hollywood-era script about a selfish man who learns how to feel compassion during a cross-country road trip given a Reaganite yuppie polish.

Tom Cruise stars as a hard-charging businessman who learns that his estranged father has died. He’s mortified to discover that the wealthy, stern patriarch left him only a vintage car and his prize roses while he left a mystery benefactor the rest of his three million dollar estate.

Charlie discovers that the mystery benefactor is a much older brother who has been living contently and peacefully in an institution and has no real concept of money.

So the opportunistic schemer sets about procuring what he sees as his share of his old man’s fortune by taking Raymond out of a world he knows and feels safe and nurturing so that he can try to get his hands on his loot.

Cruise’s character begins the film in a place of selfishness and self-absorption. His initial response to Raymond and his autism is intensely negative and hostile. He throws around the R-word and sees his brother the way much of the world sees autistic people: as an inconvenience.

Charlie views Raymond less as a human being or a close relation than as an obstacle. Raymond stands in the way of Charlie and the million dollars he feels he’s entitled to.

Charlie doesn’t have patience for anything, particularly a brother whose behavior he does not understand because it is so different from his own, but also because it doesn’t make sense to him.

As an autistic dad to autistic children, that was a big revelation for me. It took me a long time, but I finally came to understand that the world doesn’t make sense. The behavior of my autistic children doesn’t make sense. My behavior doesn’t make sense because I’m not ruled by rationality, but rather, the weird wiring in my brain is unknowingly shaped and molded by autism and ADHD. Expecting my behavior and the behavior of my autistic children to make sense in itself does not make sense.

Charlie learns that lesson the hard way. He is initially enraged by a brother whose words, actions, and behavior he does not understand and finds utterly foreign because he’s in a neurotypical mindset ruled by logic rather than self-regulation, rituals, and repetition.

When I worked at The A.V. Club and The Dissolve, I tried to show my coworkers an excess of patience, compassion, and sensitivity because I knew that I myself needed other people to be patient and empathetic towards me. At the time, I thought it was because I was sensitive, prone to depression, and emotionally fragile. Now I realize that I was autistic, and I was subconsciously wanting people to make accommodations for my autism and ADHD.

Autistic people need patience, understanding, and empathy. Charlie does not possess those three qualities in abundance at the start of the action if he has them at all.

Charlie is apoplectic at his brother. Raymond is accidentally an agent of chaos who complicates his brother’s life and makes it considerably more difficult because he has been ripped away from his natural habitat and thrust into a scary and uncertain world.

The abrasive jerk’s opinion towards his older brother begins to change when he discovers that he’s a savant with a photographic memory and superhuman grasp of advanced math.

Like a disproportionate number of autistic characters in film, Raymond is a genius who may be completely lacking in social skills but whose gifts allow Charlie to win a fortune in Vegas for his brother counting cards.

Movies love magical autistic super-geniuses whose highly specialized knowledge makes them useful to neurotypical characters. The implication seems to be that if an autistic person does not possess these remarkable gifts, then they are not useful to the neurotypical or society as a whole. If we’re not wowing people with Stupid Neurodivergent Tricks or making them money through our freaky gifts, then they seem to have much less use and time for us. Autism is a daily reality for millions of people like me, but in movies, it’s frequently a plot point and often a tasteless and unearned one at that.

Rain Man is another redemption story where a neurodivergent character proves the vehicle for a neurotypical character’s moral growth. Charlie changes, but his brother does not. He engages with the outside world just a bit, pretty much because he has to, but he otherwise remains exactly who he always was.

Hoffman delivers a very big performance here. It’s tic-laden and mannered but also tremendously powerful and effective. Hoffman and the film resist the urge to make Raymond cute. Rain Man is admirably devoid of hugs, smiles or moments of canned uplift.

There’s a moment deep into the film when Charlie, who somewhat unrealistically has forgotten that he had an older brother for at least a little while, realizes that he’s misremembered Raymond as an imaginary friend named Rain Man who sang to him when he was upset.

It’s a gimmicky, unrealistic moment that should ring utterly false, except that Cruise finds the exact right tone for the scene. His closed-off materialist opens up and begins to understand his connection to Raymond and the strange but important bond of blood, memory, and history that they share.

Rain Man leaves behind a complicated legacy. Now, when people think about autism, they connect it with a family member, friend, coworker, or partner rather than a popular Dustin Hoffman/Tom Cruise buddy movie from the late 1980s. Yet, the movie remains culturally relevant and important.

Thirty-six years later, no film about autism that followed has had a fraction of the cultural impact that Rain Man did despite the increased visibility of autism and other forms of neurodivergence. Even The Accountant.

Knowing that I’m autistic made re-watching Rain Man a deeper, more powerful, more personal, and more emotional experience, as well as a more problematic one.

Rain Man remains the biggest movie about autism more than three and a half decades on, as well as one of the best.