[Moving] The movie 'Weekend Rebels' was truly interesting in that it 'deepens understanding of autism'
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Based on a true story about a father and son visiting soccer stadiums, the movie 'Weekend Rebels' is also a work that greatly deepens one's understanding of autism.
It was a quite interesting movie. It is a work that depicts a moving human drama through a very simple story, and I think that is basically why this work is evaluated as such. However, personally, I found this work interesting in that it 'deepens understanding of autism'.
Now, before I write about various things, let me first touch on a point regarding terminology. When people of my generation (I am 42 years old at the time of writing this) hear 'autism', I think the image that comes to mind is something like 'someone who doesn't speak at all and cannot communicate'. Certainly, there are such autistic people, but the autistic child depicted in this work speaks actively and can communicate. In fact, it seems that people who were once called 'Asperger's syndrome' are now classified as 'autism capable of conversation'. Those who thought 'my image of autism was different' should understand this point.
Now, Jason, who is such an 'autistic child capable of conversation', has a nature of 'strictly adhering to rules', and he decides those rules himself. In the work, 'eating meat is limited to twice a week' and 'I decide who is allowed to touch my body' were mentioned. And among such rules, there are 'do not throw away food' and 'no one is allowed to touch the food on my plate, and sharing is also prohibited'. Please keep this in mind as it becomes very relevant in a certain scene.
Now, Jason is quite sensitive to 'sustainability', to the point where he tells his father to 'take the train instead of the car'. Also, the reason he imposes restrictions on his family regarding 'meat consumption' is because he learned that 'it takes 15,000 liters of water to produce 1kg of meat'. He is the type who can restrict his own actions to help the Earth live longer.
Because of that, Jason has various detailed rules and thinks that 'they must be strictly followed'. It seems difficult no matter how you look at it, but perhaps it's a feeling of 'it can't be helped since he was born with that nature'.
The 'scene where he eats pasta on the train' where the 'logic of autism' is depicted in a very easy-to-understand way
Now, regarding Jason's actions, the 'scene where he eats pasta on the train' made me feel, 'I see, this is the kind of world autistic people live in'. Regarding the events at this time, Jason himself mentions it later when explaining his 'principles of action', and I think it can be said that it is a scene where one can understand very clearly 'what kind of logic autistic people use to act'.
The setting of this work is Germany, but it seems that there is a type of high-speed train in Germany where 'the conductor comes to the seat to take orders and the food is served at the seat', and Jason was ordering 'pasta' (would it be 'penne' for a Japanese person?). And being a person with strong preferences, he strongly insists here, 'Please serve the pasta and sauce separately'. For Jason, the idea that 'the sauce is already on the pasta when it is served' is absolutely unacceptable.
Now, the conductor served the penne and sauce separately as Jason wished. However, as is to be expected, the conductor did not understand the strength of Jason's preferences, and a little bit of sauce had adhered to three of the penne on the plate. That said, it's not something people would normally worry about, and I think the conductor also judged that 'this much is not a problem'.
However, for Jason, it was a big problem. He immediately threw a tantrum and strongly urged his father in front of him to 'fix it!'.
Actually, Jason's rule of 'do not throw away food and sharing is prohibited' is deeply involved here. Jason absolutely does not want to eat 'penne that has sauce on it'. However, throwing away that food or having someone else share and eat it also conflicts with his rules. In this way, Jason falls into a dead end.
This is one aspect of the 'difficulties' that Jason carries.
We surely have things in our daily lives that we feel like 'this is the only thing I cannot yield on' or 'I will absolutely push this opinion through'. However, there are times when things don't go well due to various circumstances. It is possible that 'if I push my opinion through, the situation itself will disappear' or 'if I keep insisting that I absolutely cannot yield, everyone will hate me and nothing will move forward', and in such cases, we should choose to compromise, thinking 'to some extent, it can't be helped'. However, Jason does not make such judgments. Rules are absolute, and even if the rules contradict each other and he is left in a dead end, he still does not try to bend the rules.
Here, let me introduce a scene where it is clearly conveyed how Jason sticks to his rules. It is a development quite late in the story, so I won't touch on the specifics, but even in a situation where 'the father is in a huge pinch at work due to certain circumstances, and to recover, he cannot afford to go along with his son's rules', Jason ignores his father's instructions and shows an attitude of not following them because 'it doesn't align with my rules'. For him, 'the fact that his father is in a difficult situation at work' doesn't matter at all, and 'following his own rules' is the top priority above all else.
That is precisely why, in a situation where completely contradictory rules like 'I won't eat penne with sauce' and 'I won't throw away food or share it' collide head-on, he falls into a frozen state, not knowing 'how he should act'. The reason they fall into a state of being unable to act is 'because the rules are clashing with each other', and I think it was a scene where that could be understood very well.
Of course, it must not be forgotten that even if we say 'autism', there are various people. At the end of this work, it was also indicated in the subtitles that 'the support needed for autism varies and differs from person to person'. Jason has a panic attack due to the 'collision of rules', but there must certainly be people who are not of that type. One must be careful about the point that 'just because you understand one situation, you should not feel like you understand the whole thing'. However, I still think that understanding one thing first is a good start.
The difficulty of the protagonist who is not good at 'noisy places' going to the stadium
Now, there is one more production incorporated into this work to understand autism. That is the 'reproduction of the hearing that Jason feels'.
It is said that people with autism tend to have acute hearing. Although I had vaguely known that fact for some time, I naturally did not understand what it actually sounded like. In this film, there is a scene where the direction seems to recreate 'how various environmental sounds in the world sound to Jason'.
I think many people will likely feel that 'living in a sensory world like this would simply be exhausting'.
I read in a book somewhere that humans do not actually hear various sounds at their raw volume. For example, the 'cocktail party effect,' which is famous in the world of psychology, refers to a situation where 'even in a situation where surrounding voices are difficult to hear, one's own name or information one needs can be heard clearly.' In this way, our brains judge various sounds by whether they are 'necessary or unnecessary' and adjust them so that 'necessary sounds' are heard more loudly.