emma 🐋

Please Stand By

wendy lowkey kinda me but instead of star trek it’s snl

elidperry2000

Please Stand By

Portrayals of autism in media are very tricky to trickle down. You have the idiot savant trope which was kickstarted by Barry Levinson’s Rain Man and prevalent in the 90s with films like Silent Fall and Mercury Rising. On the other side of the spectrum, you have films that completely dehumanize people with autism, like Fred Durst’s The Fanatic and, most recently, Sia’s music. That said, I found Please Stand By to be an empathetic view of autism (and this is coming from someone on the spectrum), and Dakota Fanning’s character Wendy feels very human and not a voyeuristic look at autism or a reductive stereotype. While it does fall into the trappings of indie quirk, I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, as I feel it’s heart is in the right place, and the film makes for a decent watch on a quiet afternoon.