Life, Animated by Ron Suskind

behavior, like self-talking or flapping his hands, that more and more we are recognizing is prompted by situations whose complexities he has trouble understanding. “Context blindness” causes stress. When challenged, he retreats inward.
    But here, everything is inverted. He knows the context, can size it up swiftly and move easily within it, just like most folks do each day, with unconscious ease. Sure, he’s still having to talk, walk, interact, and make choices, like in the real world. But now those split-second decisions—what Disney-themed ice cream to order, whether to ride Peter Pan’s Flight again—rests on a firm, brick-and-mortar landscape drawn from movies he can recite; movies that seem to be shaping his identity—just as that wider world was shaping Walt’s. Whatever he’s feeling for the characters, we both agree that, here, he’s more attentive, affectionate, and available to us …even if, after seventy-two hours neck deep in Disney artifice, we can’t wait to get back to the real world.
    Owen could stay here forever. He’s comfortable at home and he’s comfortable here.
    Two places.
    He’s angling to add a third place—school—to that list.
    We all are. By the start of his third year at the Lab School in the fall of 1999, we see his skills improving—his rudimentary reading, his new ability to do simple math—but it’s uneven and unsteady, as is the building of social connections with potential friends.
    It’s a struggle for him to keep up, mostly—the school warns us, darkly—because his mind so often races through the parallel universe of movies.
    This hyper focus is part of the struggle with his PDD-NOS. We aren’t using the word autism , at least not in public, where we feel it still carries so many Rain Man stigmas. His presentation, as Rosenblatt rightly said, was not neatly aligned with more severely or classically autistic kids, who seem more shut off to the world. Owen, from that first day, beckoning Rosenblatt from under the chair, had the capacity—and, importantly, the periodic desire—to engage. But we now began to see that these labels have always been more strategic, socially and legally, than functional. The reality of “autistic-like behaviors”—where the kids are “self-directed toward narrow interests”—is what we live with. We begin to see the slip-sliding qualities of a spectrum, a concept many medical professionals have by now embraced: on one side, we notice kids like Owen, who more readily attend to their school work and manage more flexibility in moving to unfamiliar topics and new experiences. They are often socially obtuse but are building social skills through experience because they are better able to listen to the teachers, pick up cues from peers, stick with the group.
    On the other side, we notice kids like Owen who are more “involved,” according to the nonjudgmental term of art, like the son of Owen’s psychiatrist, Dr. C. T. Gordon.
    Gordon, who now sees Owen once a week, is one of a growing array of doctors who’ve found a specialty after discovering that their child was autistic. With the seeming growth in incidence of autism, there are now doctor-fathers and doctor-mothers across the medical landscape, rising—in part, from their relentless, night-and-day urgency to help a son or daughter—into leading roles in research and national debates. Gordon founded an organization that examines new treatments, claims of causation, and the latest scientific discoveries, and publishes those assessments in a journal of growing import. His son, Zack, has no speech—like many more involved autistic kids—and relies on a small device, a keyboard with a screen, on which, by age seven, he can type one hundred words a minute. His passion, though, is exactly like Owen’s: the Disney classics. He’s organized his viewings in vast, complex rotations and rituals, and derives inchoate joy from each session. Gordon’s view—like that of most