Aug. 19, 2017 "Netflix's grown up dramedy about autism": Today I found this article by John Doyle in the Globe and Mail:
Skip the streaming service’s Marvel Comics mash-up – there’s a genuine kind of heroism at the heart of poignant, charming Atypical
Another week, another launch of a new Netflix series. This weekend, it’s the superhero-posse show The Defenders, a Marvel Comics thing with lame quips and ludicrously staged posterior kicking of no-goodniks.
Previous Marvel-inspired series have concentrated on one hero figure, most notably and successfully Jessica Jones, marvellously played with humour and pathos by Krysten Ritter. The character is part of the posse in this one, but another season of Jessica
Jones would make more sense, as it had an adult sensibility, while The Defenders is all silliness and childish shenanigans. It isn’t a grown-up drama.
Atypical (also new on Netflix) is most definitely grown-up and certainly worth your attention. It’s funny, wise, sometimes a bit wobbly in tone but always charming. At eight half-hour episodes, it’s a delightful experience.
When it was initially promoted, Netflix used the question, “What does it really mean to be normal?” as a tagline for the series. See, the show’s central character is Sam (Keir Gilchrist), an 18 year-old high-school senior who is on the autism spectrum, and much of the drama and comedy is anchored in Sam’s innate need to have “normal” experiences now that he’s 18.
He wants to date a girl. He wants to understand the high-school hierarchy of cool kids, nerds and mean kids. He wants to think about a career.
Around him – and this is what lifts the level of quality in the show – his family is trying to figure out how to help and deal with a more mature Sam. His mom, Elsa (Jennifer Jason Leigh, who is wonderful, in full-throated possession of the character), is a bit frightened – she’s been, essentially, a caregiver and deeply protective of Sam. As soon as Sam announces he thinks he should start dating, mom reverts to the nervous parent, saying, “Every time the phone rings, I jump. Maybe he crossed the street with his eyes closed again.”
In a way, what Atypical is about is everybody letting go of the idea of Sam as a delicate creature to be coddled.
Sam is an utterly compelling figure. Gilchrist is sublime as the volatile teenager who is aware of his limitations, hyperaware that he’s more grown up now and driven to have the usual teenage experiences, no matter how awkwardly they might unfold for him.
His sister, Casey (the wonderful Brigette Lundy-Paine, in a star-making turn), is both protective and sharply sarcastic. It takes a while for it to become clear that Casey is a fine athlete and hoping for a college scholarship, but her achievements and ambitions have always taken second place to her brother’s well-being.
Sam’s dad (Michael Rapaport) is a man who knows that he, too, has taken second place in his wife’s affections, but he senses that Sam’s reaching for adulthood is good for the entire family. Perhaps, as we see, it isn’t.
In the early episodes, there is much wry humour derived from Sam’s rather tortured attempts to have those “normal” teenage adventures.
And this is where the show can be both strangely affecting and funny but in a way that might unsettle some viewers.
Sam’s odd tics and his blurting of the obvious is both the source of humour and is a request for understanding from the viewers.
This kid is weird and, yes, his weirdness is funny, but when you laugh you are asked to recognize that, in the full spectrum of human behaviour and experience, he’s not that weird at all.
It’s true that Sam fails to understand social cues and is very literal. He has his obsessions – a formidably energetic interest in Antarctica and the Arctic, along with the wildlife there, especially penguins.
Yet, this obsession emerges as an unlikely strength, a kind of lyricism. In a voiceover, he says,
“I think all girls are pretty in their own way. Like a snowflake in a seasonal Arctic storm.”
The dates that Sam attempts to have with young women his own age are, at first, disastrous and hilarious. The temptation to resist laughter and feel compassion is then assuaged by the experiences of others –
his mom is embarrassingly tipsy in a bar;
his sister trying to stave off the attention of a hunky local guy who is weirdly persistent in his crush.
See, if Sam is to be perceived as abnormal, then look at yourself and your life and explain how closely you align with what is perceived as “normal.”
As happens with umpteen Netflix series, Atypical sometimes feels capriciously loose. It is not plotted with exactitude but, unlike some recent Netflix flops, it also feels driven by genuine storytelling buoyancy. It’s unpredictable and all the better for it.
Created by Robia Rashid and Seth Gordon (The Goldbergs, How I Met Your Mother), Atypical falls somewhere between a smart network show and a provocative cable series.
Sam isn’t a boilerplate figure and the show isn’t formulaic. There is, of course, a small media fuss about how accurate the series is about the autism spectrum, but the fuss doesn’t amount to much. Atypical is simply this – often achingly sweet and bold in its blunt poignancy. And it’s far more rewarding than any superhero tomfoolery.
Aug. 24, 2017 "The complicated case of Glenn Gould": Today I found this article by Jamie Portman in the Edmonton Journal:
A recent BBC radio documentary about Glenn Gould has renewed speculation that the legendary Canadian pianist suffered from Asperger Syndrome.
“I think it’s very likely that Glenn had it,” says American music critic Tim Page, who himself suffers from Asperger — also known as autistic spectrum disorder.
“I think it’s responsible for his extraordinary genius, but also his loneliness.
This is a man who never had a particularly long love affair in his life.
He liked to have control of things.
He liked to have things done just so;
he was anxious about being touched;
he did not like to be over-stimulated.”
Page, who also discussed Gould’s psychological condition in a 2016 article in The New York Times, tells his BBC interviewer about his own struggle with the disorder. But he stresses that there are “a tremendous amount of things that I have done” and suggests this is because of “the kind of intense concentration” that the condition makes possible.
Gould achieved international celebrity at 23 when his recording of Bach’s ferociously difficult Goldberg Variations was released. He quickly developed a reputation for eccentricity, performing concerts on a chair with sawed-off legs and singing along with the music.
Gould hated the life of a concert pianist but was fascinated by technology. That led him to quit public performances in 1964 to concentrate on the recording studio — an action that sparked widespread controversy at the time.
The BBC documentary, part of a Canada 150 series commissioned by the British broadcaster, is hosted by London pianist James Rhodes — a self-confessed “Gould geek.” Rhodes travelled to Toronto to interview friends and colleagues of the driven genius, who died in 1982.
It’s available online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08vy8d6
Rhodes also talks to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who hails Gould’s early readiness to embrace technology.
“He was someone who focused on challenging his listeners, challenging the community he was part of,” Trudeau says.
“I think the idea of accepting and embracing disruption in something as comfortable as classical music is a great example of what we’re trying to do
— what we have to do —
as a country and as a world,
in looking at new ways of doing things.”
Trudeau also cites Gould’s historical significance in achieving fame at a time when Canadians craved to make “a cultural imprint on the world. We tend to need validation outside our borders before we recognize our great artists. It’s always been that way, (but) it’s getting better now.”
The broadcast reveals a musical genius — and a complicated man.
“In many respects, Glenn was a little boy,” says one former friend. “He never grew up.”
What also emerges is a portrait of a man of such enormous ego that you quickly learned not to criticize him. He was also capable of dropping friends and colleagues in the blink of an eye.
“That really hurt,” admits one sudden victim of his indifference. “But he was Glenn Gould.”
The program features the voice of Gould himself — at one moment indulging in comic buffoonery and at the next talking eloquently about contrapuntal technique.
Always, however, the quirks and eccentricities keep surfacing, Among the glimpses of the real Gould:
• Even in the middle of a steaming Toronto summer, he would show up for a meeting dressed in winter coat, hat, gloves, scarf and galoshes.
• Asked to prepare a 7,500-word television script for a program he was hosting about the City of Toronto, he responded with 75,000 unusable words that included an intricate analysis of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.
• Gould loved dogs, but the insurance policy on his hands wouldn’t allow him to own one.
• He could tolerate Toronto but said he would “crack up” if forced to live in New York or Rome.
• He learned new repertoire not by practicing it on the piano, but in his head.
• He was a 2 a.m. fixture at Fran’s, an all-night diner in Toronto, and always placed the same order — scrambled eggs, white toast and weak tea.
• A notorious hypochondriac, he had the habit of calling acquaintances in the middle of the night and subjecting them to an interminable monologue at 4 a.m. One friend tells the BBC that he had a surefire way of terminating the call: “You only had to sneeze to get him off the phone.”
So what about Gould’s mental state?
“I’m not going to diagnose Glenn Gould, but I honestly think one of the reasons we became friends was that we were very much like each other,” says Page.
However, University of Toronto psychiatrist David Goldbloom is cautious in his comments to the BBC, although he finds Gould’s “style of social interaction was statistically abnormal at least — and personally abnormal for most people I know who had spoken with him, that includes problems maintaining and sustaining relationships.”
Goldbloom says Gould’s perception of other people’s needs “was not within the norm of empathy and reciprocity.
"Gould would be like a needle stuck in a groove around certain themes, and the symptoms normally cause some impairment in their social or occupational function.”
So was Gould impaired? “It depends how you define impairment,” Goldbloom says.
“Did it impair him from being a concert artist? It certainly sounds like it, but it was profoundly enhancing for him as a recording artist.
“The difference is how much it’s debilitating you, that’s really the dividing line.
Everybody loves some measure of order,
but if it interferes with your ability to function
then it spills over into the direction of disorder.”
Then, Goldbloom adds a rider to his views:
“The reality is that none of us looks good under a microscope.”
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