Monthly Archives: June 2014

Was John Carpenter’s Michael Myers autistic?

04 Wednesday Jun 2014

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An idea, I’ve had for years (and I’m not the only one who has thought this) is that that the Michael Myers character from John Carpenter’s Halloween (and its sequels) was autistic.  I realize it was not the film maker’s intention to make him autistic (autism was not well known in the 1970s) but characters take on a life of their own.  Autism is a developmental disorder characterized by impaired communication skills, repetitive ritualistic restricted behavior, obsessive interests, and poor physical coordination.

Myers clearly fit the criteria.  His communication skills were so impaired he went completely non-verbal, and facial expressions displayed only what his psychiatrist Dr. Loomis called a “blank, pale, emotionless face” with no understanding of human concepts like “life or death, good or evil, right or wrong”.  A key deficit in autism is impaired “Theory of Mind” (ToM).  ToM is the ability to understand that other people have minds just like you do and to form theories about what they’re thinking and feeling; why they behave the way they do.  Because of this, many autistic people are said to relate to other people more like objects than like living entities.  If Myers lacked ToM, it would explain why he couldn’t grasp the difference between life and death, since he was oblivious to the mental states of living creatures.  Also, the scene in Halloween (1978) where he pins the teenager Bob to the wall and then Myers tilts his head to the left and right looking at the hanging corpse, seems to suggest Myers was viewing a person as just another object. Autistic people also struggle to make eye contact and communicate with appropriate facial expressions, so it’s no wonder Myers avoided both by always wearing a mask.

Myers also had repetitive ritualistic restricted behavior and obsessive interests.  He repetitively killed people over and over again in very much the same way, making a ritual of only killing them on Halloween while always wearing a mask.  Indeed he spent his whole life doing nothing but obsessing about his childhood crime of killing his older sister Judith.  Myers killed his older sister when she was 17 on Halloween and then spent 15 years planning to kill his younger sister when she too was 17 on Halloween and ritualistically brought along the big sister’s grave stone to make it more ceremonial.  When he failed to kill the younger sister (Laurie) when she was 17 on Halloween, he then waited 20 years to try to kill her when her son was 17 on Halloween.

This kind of repetitive obsession with symmetry (both sisters, both 17, both Halloween), numbers (17) and calender dates (Halloween) seems classically autistic.   Indeed some autistic people are so obsessed with numbers and calenders that despite being mentally disabled, can multiply huge numbers in their head or calculate the day of the week for almost any date you can throw at them.

Myers also lacked physical coordination.  He seemed incapable of running, despite being physically fit, and had terrible aim and hand-eye coordination: In Halloween (1978) he tried to stab Laurie but ended up stabbing the couch.

Also, the fact that Laurie was his sister, also reveals autism.  As I explained on my other blog, there seems to be a genetic link between autism and nerdiness, so many autistics tend to have nerdy family members.  This happens because nerds and autistic people have certain overlapping traits: interest in numbers and systems, social and physical awkwardness etc.  The main difference between nerds and autistic people is that the latter seem to have a mental disability called executive dysfunction which prevents them from living a normal life.  By contrast, nerds can be extremely high functioning and successful (i.e. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg), however because nerdiness and autism are genetically linked, it’s not uncommon to see a hyper-successful silicon Valley millionaire, with a child so autistic he requires life-long supervision.  This was clearly the pattern with Laurie and Michael.  She was the successful high functioning nerd while he was too low functioning to live anything like a normal life.  Despite being high functioning, Laurie’s nerdiness was revealed by the fact that despite being pretty, she couldn’t get a date because boys thought her too smart (she was probably better at nerdy subjects like math and science than they were) and was treated like a freak by her friend Annie.  And like her brother Michael, she was a virgin.

However while Michael Myers seemed clearly autistic, in Rob Zombie’s remake, Myers was schizophrenic.  Some horror fans hate Rob Zombie’s remake because they feel Rob Zombie turned Myers from a middle class person they could relate to (scary thought) to what these people call “white trash”.  It’s fascinating that Myers went from seeming autistic in the original series when he was middle class, to being schizophrenic in the remakes, when he was lower class.  As I’ve previously explained, autism is more common in the higher social classes, while schizophrenia is more common in the lower social classes.

What’s fascinating is that autism and schizophrenia appear, in my opinion, to be opposite sides of the same coin.  When someone with a nerdy middle class or upper class personality has executive dysfunction, it tends to turn into autism.  When someone with a cool lower class personality (like the long haired heavy metal fan Myers of Zombie’s versions) has executive dysfunction, it tends to turn into schizophrenia.  Isn’t it interesting that the Halloween franchise so perfectly fits the pattern?

 

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Autism, schizophrenia & social class

03 Tuesday Jun 2014

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I’ve come across some fascinating research showing that autism is more common in higher social classes and schizophrenia is more common in lower social classes.  In my opinion, this is because the higher social classes tend to be more nerdy (K selected) and the lower social classes tend to be more cool (r selected).  The higher classes are nerdy in that they are more educated, more monogamous, more scrawny, and less sexually active.  By contrast, the lower classes are “cool” because they are more blue collar, more muscular, more likely to get arrested, more into sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.

Nerds tend to be more focused, less social, more scientific, more rational, and more logical.  These traits are all quite useful, but when a nerdy child is born with executive dysfunction, the result might be autism.

By contrast, cool people tend to be more distracted, more social, more spiritual, more emotional, and more intuitive.  But when a cool child is born with executive dysfunction, the result might be schizophrenia.

As I’ve previously explained, autism and schizophrenia might be the same disorder, just applied to humans at opposite ends of the evolutionary spectrum.  

Elliot Rodger: A real life slasher with racist motives?

01 Sunday Jun 2014

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On May 23, 2014, 22 year old Elliot Rodger unleashed a massacre in Isla Vista, California, stabbing to death three men in his apartment before driving around town shooting three college students.  A striking aspect of this tragedy was how much it resembled a horror film, with Hollywood savvy Rodger, the son of the assistant director for The Hunger Games affecting an evil chuckle in the web videos he posted, fantasizing about turning humanity into mountains of skulls and rivers of blood.

And like the killer in a 1980s slasher film, Rodger targeted sexually active young adults, stating in his manifesto:

I often fantasized about barging into their rooms while they were having sex and slashing them to death with my knife.

In his manifesto, Rodger, a self-proclaimed virgin,  is obsessed with taking revenge on those who have more sex than he does.  In the slasher sub-genre,  the killing of the sexually active had become such an overused cliche that it was openly parodied in the 1996 film Scream.  This slasher convention, largely originated with Halloween (1978), where the killer first murders his sister after witnessing her going upstairs to have sex with a boy, and then returns to his small town to murder other sexually active teenagers (the only survivor being the virgin played by Jamie Lee Curtis).  In Friday the 13th (1980) the killer targets sexually active camp counselors because they were making love while a young boy allegedly drowned.  In Silent Night Deadly Night (1984), the killer dresses up like Santa Claus and punishes sexually active young people for being “naughty”.  In all of these films, the murders occur on a single day (Halloween, Friday the 13th, Christmas); similarly, Rodger did all his killings on May 23, which he labeled “the day of retribution”.

From his manifesto, and other online comments, what bothered Rodger most was not so much his virginity, but the fact that women rejected him for men he regarded as inferior to himself (full-blood minorities, short men, ugly men, non-rich men, dumb brutish jocks). Nothing makes humans angrier than that which violates our expectations.  In his manifesto, he describes the rage of learning about a black boy’s sex life:

And then this black boy named Chance said that he lost his virginity when he was only thirteen! In addition, he said the girl he lost his virginity to was a blonde white girl! I was so enraged that I almost splashed him with my orange juice. I indignantly told him that I did not believe him, and then I went to my room to cry. I cried and cried and cried, and then I called my mother and cried to her on the phone.

How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me? I am beautiful, and I am half white myself. I am descended from British Aristocracy. He is descended from slaves. I deserve it more. I tried not to believe his foul words, but they were already said, and it was hard to erase from my mind. If this is actually true, if this ugly black filth was able to have sex with a blonde white girl at the age of thirteen while I’ve had to suffer virginity all my life, then this just proves how ridiculous the female gender is. They would give themselves to this filthly scum, but they reject ME? The injustice

In a bodybuilding discussion forum, he similarly ranted over an Indian boy:

Seriously, today at my college I saw this short, ugly Indian guy driving a Honda civic, and he had a hot blonde girl in his passenger seat. What on earth is up with that?!?!?! I would climb Mount Everest 10 times just to have a girl like that with me. I drive a BMW Coupe and I’ve struggled all my life to get a girlfriend. What’s wrong with this world?

 

In the manifesto,  the rage of learning about an Asian boy’s sex life:

I came across this Asian guy who was talking to a white girl. The sight of that filled me with rage. I always felt as if white girls thought less of me because I was half-Asian, but then I see this white girl at the party talking to a full-blooded Asian. I never had that kind of attention from a white girl! And white girls are the only ones I’m attracted to, especially the blondes. How could an ugly Asian attract the attention of a white girl, while a beautiful Eurasian like myself never had any attention from them?

Rodger apparently grew up feeling special because he was half-white, and I suspect his mother told him all the girls would swoon over his exotic Eurasian good looks and he was even given a BMW to further entice them. So when women not only didn’t swoon, but rejected him for mono-racial shorter Asians with crappy cars, it added insult to injury in his twisted young mind, and he lashed out violently against his Asian roommates.   It reminds me a bit of Rae Dawn Chong who was a rising mixed race star in the 1980s. When she first met Oprah on the set of  The Color Purple circa 1985, she assumed this unknown overweight full blood black woman was no competition for a thin, pretty mixed race light skinned star like herself. But when Oprah went on to become the richest and most influential African American of her generation and Rae Dawn turned into a  has-been, she lashed out in a horrific racist tirade.