Life, Animated

by Ron Suskind

  Walt’s upset because he has endured many moments like we just did in the library and suspects we will have many more, and he’s probably right. From an eleven-year-old’s first-person perspective, that means he’ll have to go through his whole life being embarrassed or he’ll have to stay away from his brother, at least in public. A tough set of choices.

  Owen, meanwhile, wonders why Walt is so upset.

  A month later, in the summer of 1999, we step into an alternative reality—sometimes called the “Happiest Place on Earth.”

  On this, our third trip to Walt Disney World, Owen is nine. He can do more, and say more. Much more.

  Context blind? Suddenly we see him mastering a context that’s invisible to us.

  And to the Mad Hatter.

  That’s who we see on our first morning at what’s called a character breakfast, where a conventional hotel breakfast is interrupted by Disney characters. As we eat pancakes, suddenly Alice appears, and behind her, a crazy little man with a tall green hat.

  Owen rises from the table matter-of-factly and approaches him, the rest of us scrambling behind.

  “Excuse me,” he says, as the Mad Hatter turns. “Do you know Ed Wynn?” That would be the former vaudevillian who voiced the Mad Hatter in the Disney movie.

  “Of course, he’s a good friend of mine,” the Mad Hatter responds, in a stock response of the characters, who, after all, must always remain in character. Owen looks at him intently, trying to detect an inference from behind the fake nose and pancake makeup. None visible. He presses on.

  Owen: “So you know Verna Felton—the voice of the Queen of Hearts?”

  Mad Hatter (befuddled): No response.

  Owen (equally befuddled): “She was also Winifred in The Jungle Book, the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella, Aunt Sarah in Lady and the Tramp, one of the three fairies in Sleeping Beauty, and one of the four elephants in Dumbo—the mean one!”

  Mad Hatter: “Verna who?”

  Then off he rushes, like someone late for a very important date.

  Owen, that is.

  We’re delighted—scratch that, ecstatic—to have him lead. So much to do in three days at Walt Disney World, so many attractions, so many characters yet to question. Of course, almost none of them talk. Only the ones who are human, in actor’s makeup, like Alice or the Mad Hatter or Ariel can respond. But in those brief conversations—or through what Owen asks the nonspeaking animated characters walking to and fro—we catch a glimpse of an Atlantis he’s building under the sea. He’s not only learning to phoneticize words by reading the credits. He’s remembering the names, cataloguing them—those are five movies for Verna Felton—and creating a cross-referenced index in his head. When he meets characters, there is so very much to discuss.

  During its first fifty years, the Disney studios relied on a roster of actors—some famous, some less so—that it mixed and matched to voice the animated characters that were drawn, laboriously, only after the voice tracks were laid down. These voice actors move behind the scenes in little clusters. Verna Felton, for instance, matches up in three major movies with Sterling Holloway—he’s Kaa the snake in The Jungle Book, the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, and the stork who delivers the big-eared baby in Dumbo. Winnie the Pooh—famously voiced by Holloway—is asked about all of this by Owen later that day in Fantasyland. Pooh nods and shrugs, and Owen embraces him. It’s strange for Cornelia and me to watch: after years of one-way conversations with Owen, now he’s having one with Pooh. Pooh seems to understand and Owen acknowledges it with a hug. How many times did we do that with Owen? And, standing there, our eyes begin to adjust, to see what he sees. These characters are part of a family. His family. He’s grown up with them, relied on them, learned from them. This is his chance to tease out their relationships to one another, discover what binds them to one another.

  When he sees Goofy, whom he’s been looking for and was worried he wouldn’t see, Owen runs toward the giant dog, or horse, or whatever Goofy is, and throws his arms around him. They just hug for a moment, until I can get Owen to spin around, still in Goofy’s embrace, for a picture.

  It’s enlivening and humbling. He is expressive and affectionate with these characters in ways he rarely is with us, or anyone else.

  Cornelia and I talk about this in the café at the Wilderness Lodge that night. Is it okay for him to have such a strong emotional bond with them? Is there a danger here? Are there views and truths he was ingesting that were all but invisible to our adult eyes?

  Where do you begin? It’s a whole, self-sustaining artificial world. She mentions what we saw late that afternoon: a crowd gathered around the lagoon near Tom Sawyer Island, looking down at something in the water. What could it be? We crowded in and finally caught a glimpse. It was a small alligator, maybe two feet long. Gawkers were debating whether it was animatronic or real; no consensus was reached.

  I went with real: “And it’s been the only real thing we’ve seen here in three days.” “Well, there’s this beer,” Cornelia quips, as we lift our mugs and toast whatever Disney executive decided the Whispering Canyon Cafe should serve alcohol.

  These emotions Owen has can’t be equivalent to “real emotions with actual people,” I say, staying with it. “He has to know, deep down, that these characters—that they’re not real.”

  She shrugs. “Look, kids believe in Santa Claus long after they suspect there may be some logistical issues. Belief and nonbelief can hang together for quite a while. Mysteries of faith and all that.”

  The question, she says, is more how it makes him feel and how he behaves. After spending every day with him, for years, what she sees is how calm, self-possessed, and sure of himself he seems here. And he clearly isn’t doing nearly as much “silly,” the self-stimulatory 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 qualitie
s 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 professionals—is that this passion should be used as a tool, a reward, to encourage Zack to complete educational tasks and personal care goals he was otherwise resistant to undertake. Of course “Finish your homework before watching TV” is a common refrain in every household. But a typical child—the term of art is “neurotypical”—is able to discover and nourish interests much more broadly, more liberally, whether managing to find something provocative in that night’s homework, or seeking the joy, and affirmation, of bringing home the “A” on a test. With the autistic kids, their interest, say, in the desired video is deep and maybe unquenchable; their interest in so much else, often very faint. Left to their own devices, the thinking goes, they would slip into their chosen area, to the exclusion of all else. For some kids, their affinity is for train schedules; for others it’s maps. Or, in the case of Owen and Zack—and we’re certain, many others—it’s Disney movies.

  Don’t cut it off, Gordon suggests. Control it. Use videos as a reward, to be viewed at a designated time if certain things are done. And no rewinding, which Gordon feels just deepens the perseveration, like a wheel in a ditch. That’s what he did with Zack. Scheduled viewings and no rewind button: the videos were important, largely as a motivational tool.

  We’re already placing some controls on viewing. Now we add to them. We set up a point system at school, a behavioral technique, where he can pick up points for appropriate behavior—listening to the teacher, attending to his work. Enough points meant a video that night. Some nights, there are not enough points. Sorry. No video.

  There are modest improvements in his behavior at school—nothing dramatic—but after two successive days of no-video edicts, Cornelia is awakened in the middle of the night.

  She jostles me out of a deep sleep. “I definitely heard something downstairs.” I check the clock. It’s three A.M. Five minutes later, baseball bat in hand, I meet Owen in the basement. He’d settled in for a movie marathon.

  He’s profuse in his apologies. He says he won’t do it again. But, a few days later, we see clues in the morning. He’s just gotten better at covering his tracks.

  Soon, the house slips into low-grade guerilla war—a hearts and minds struggle that draws from us decidedly mixed feelings. It’s like we’re cutting off his supply lines. School is hard and stressful. His release, his refuge, is being cut off.

  Cornelia calls me one morning as she’s driving him to school. Owen is snoring away. What’s the point of bringing him to school, she asks. We need to bring in heavy weapons. After work, I stop by the hardware store.

  That night, we all gather in the basement to discuss the new house rules. I’ve padlocked the cabinet that holds the big TV. I hold the key, like a federal marshal.

  “Mom and I will hold this one key. There will be no other.”

  Disney is now a controlled substance.

  The concept is a massive redirect.

  With TV now limited inside the house, with us trying to help Owen control his passions and impulses, we need to channel the animated river toward school. Lab speaks endlessly about its arts-based learning. Let’s see if they can harness Owen’s self-directed learning, just as we’ve been doing in the basement and, now, everywhere. All we do is act out scenes; drama is one of Lab School’s specialties.

  Of course, the self-directed part makes it all a bit more complicated. We have to be guided by whatever Owen is into. As the fall of 1999 turns to winter of 2000, he isn’t into just any Disney movie. He’s deeply besotted with Song of the South.

  It was trouble when it was released in 1946. And that was before the civil rights movement.

  After its debut, Time magazine wrote that the movie’s rendition of race relations in the years just following the Civil War was “bound to land its maker in hot water.” It did. Activists picketed movie theaters with signs saying it was “an Insult to Negro people.” No doubt it was to some. It also won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.”

  Oh, America.

  Owen loves the song. It plays continuously inside Splash Mountain at Walt Disney World, his first high-intensity ride with a long rollercoaster-style drop at the end. Fear and joy fused together, and everything was “satisfactual.” He’s now starting to use the computer, and finds a clip of Uncle Remus singing the song. It’s among the first attempts at live action blended with animation—with the bluebirds flying around the smiling Remus. That combo—a live-action actor with animated characters swirling around his head—is pretty much Owen’s life, his particular context.

  Our seeing things through the lens of context is the great breakthrough of this time: seeing that, yes, he is disastrously context blind about the noisy, shifting, dodge-and-fake world of fast-fire human interaction, and understanding—as he becomes more active—what it really means to live a decontextualized life. Among the many things you are oblivious to are advertisements during commercial breaks, in magazines, on billboards, in shopping mall toy stores, and what they are all saying you just can’t live without. The constant buzzing bombardment—resulting in incessant “Please, please buy this for me,” or, for that matter, a consumer culture based on ever-escalating wants becoming needs—simply bounce off of him.

  But, in his chosen area, he’s context-deep. All he wants comes from that deep well. And the video of Song of the South tops this year’s wish list for Hanukkah and Christmas.

  Soon, “Santa” is locked in eBay hell.

  The movie has, of course, not worn well. Recognizing this, the company never released it on video in the United States.

  But, in this early chapter of connectivity called the World Wide Web, it can be found. It’s had limited release in some other countries, like Japan and the U.K., which is where we find a copy to bid on. We really didn’t want to know who’s on the other side of the transaction. All we know is that someone in England made a hundred dollars and we, soon, are looking at a box with Uncle Remus and those bluebirds smiling at us.

  It’s unplayable. The United Kingdom, we discover, uses a different video format from the United States. It needs to be converted. I’m doing some work as a guest correspondent on ABC’s Nightline, with Ted Koppel, and know video editors at the network. Even they couldn’t manage it, but they know of a video production house that can. And only four hundred dollars!

  So, as the new year approaches, we settle into the basement to begin to watch a five-hundred-dollar video. The kindly Uncle Remus is basically set up—with possibly horrific consequences in the Reconstructionist South—by some vindic
tive white kids. At that point, I’m regularly appearing on panels and doing speeches as a white guy who “gets race.” But that’s aboveground. Inside the house, we’re living inside a collection of Disney movies. In this case, one selected by an eight-year-old who is oblivious—often blissfully—to history, culture, social codes, and accepted customs outside his wonderful—and safe—world of Disney films. Even as a sixth grader, Walt knows more than enough to be mortified. Basically, he watches the movie shaking his head and saying, “Oh, my God.” When the movie ends, we try to explain to Owen why some people don’t like this movie. It’s hard to know where to start. “Remember when Jafar, as the Genie, put Aladdin in chains…” After a few minutes, he says, “Can we sing now?”

  So we join hands—Cornelia, Walt, and I, shrugging in resignation—for a rousing chorus of “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.”

  His fixation on the film is a tough turn for our massive-redirect strategy, but we get some lucky breaks: his teacher, Jennifer, had been his assistant teacher for the past two years and bonded with him, often putting Owen on her lap to calm his self-stimming; and the Br’er Rabbit tales have a long history among folk traditions of Africans that predates Disney.

  It’s just enough wiggle room. Jennifer takes charge, calling us often for strategies on how to manage Owen and pull this off. By the spring of 2000, there are regular practices of the play and props being created in art class. With Jennifer’s guidance, Owen is the casting director, placing kids in various roles—Br’er Bear or Br’er Fox—that seem to fit with their looks or personality. Owen, knowing the long rendition of dialogue of Br’er Rabbit’s battle with the tar baby, is the lead.

  On a mid-April Tuesday, kids, parents, and teachers gather inside the Lab School’s black box theater, modeled faithfully on the experimental theaters of New York. No one in the room knows what an edgy experiment it is for Cornelia and me: our double lives are becoming one. Disney Club is going public.