Recently I was pleased to discover that there is a lot of discussion in neurodiversity spaces about one of my favourite films. Amélie (2001) is well remembered for it’s vibrant colourscape, attention to detail and Audrey Tautou’s portrayal of a young French woman in tune with her own quirks and tendencies. A popular media website (who shall remain nameless) describes the character of Amélie as ‘a young and innocent woman with her own distinctive way of looking at the world’.
It is debated nowadays whether Amélie is in fact autistic, and in this light the way she is described above pushes some buttons. Naivety is a commonly found trait in autistic women, who are prone to being taken advantage of because of their ‘innocent’ qualities.
Her perceived innocence may relate to her quiet and introverted nature and rich inner world. Instead of everyday relationships, she develops a ‘taste for small pleasures’, such as sinking her hand into a sack of dried beans, cracking creme bruleé with a teaspoon and skimming stones. In the film, Amélie begins to orchestrate elaborate acts of anonymous random kindness and justice as a way of using her time. Taking a blind man by the arm, she leads him on a storied walk through Paris streets, narrating the intricate visual details he cannot see. Amélie is a sensory angel; gifting the unseen into the perception of others.
She finds comfort in solitude and often mis-reads social situations. The friendships she forms are unusual, and when Amélie Poulin loves, an eclectic, all-consuming romance unfolds. The expression of love, for Amélie, entwines with her sensory environment and is approached sideways; autistic people often don’t ‘get’ flirting or traditional ways or engaging in relationships. It is a rich, multi-sensory process where her environment and senses help her to pursue love in a non-verbal way. Luckily for her (and Nino) it turns out to be love. Autistic people often experience deep crushes they cannot actualise or enact, less commonly known as limerance (a term coined by Psychologist Dorothy Tennov in 1989). This meaning is painful, but the word is beautiful, describing liminal romance. As a mental health term, it means long-term intense feelings of a romantic (though not necessarily sexual) nature, which can seriously affect mental health. Turning this definition on it’s head, I feel the concept captures something of Amélie’s liminal experience.
It isn’t my place to say whether Amélie is autistic, but I felt a deep affinity with her the first time I saw this film. I think I’ve watched it over twenty times. Her persona, off the wall style and ways of perceiving the world resonate with my own. Romance for autistics is often a tricky subject, and I won’t go into the murkier depths of my personal history. The love-powered campaign Amélie enacts is not so unfamiliar to me. In the past, I have written my phone number on coffee cups to give to people I liked and could not speak to directly. I have decorated love letters as if they were precious artefacts, and coded messages into blog posts written publicly, but aimed at someone specific. The latter, by the way, is a terrible idea if you intend on respecting yourself as a writer (and fullstop).
Amélie’s sensory sensitivity heightens the world around her. Much is written about the pain of this for autistics, but not so much about the joy. In his recent BBC documentary on autism, Chris Packham (my latest autism crush, along with Fern Brady), describes experiencing his visual environment as a ‘hyper-reality’ where he is aware of every small detail whist simultaneously making sense of the bigger picture.
Until watching the documentary, I thought this was how everybody experienced the world. I share CP’s love of nature, where this filmic attention to detail comes in very handy. It’s part of what makes being in nature so therapeutic; letting the environment flood my body. These qualities are also what makes the world overwhelming in a not-so-good way, and it’s interesting to see people starting to make films about this such as Carly Fleischmann, a young non-verbal autistic woman (trigger warning: this video may be upsetting for some).
The speaker in the Chris Packham video, describes deliberately placing oneself in a favourable environment as ‘sensory seeking’. The quest for environments and experiences which are soothing, harmoniously multi-layered and full of nature has been with me my whole life. I remember being a young person living in cities, walking in the woods by my small hometown, telling the trees I would come back to them one day. More recently, I have entered conscious love affairs with nature via the medium of poetry, and created a tranquil, tactile sensory environment in the form of my own home. The romance contains pain and pleasure, and is eternally unfolding. Autistics are great at looking for signs and meaning, weaving together seemingly unrelated elements into a majestic storyline.
If the statistic of 1/100 people being autistic is true, there are a lot more of us about to come out of the woodwork and bring our unique, liminal perception of the world into being. Art is a wonderful vehicle for this, and I am getting very interested in the creative potential of neurodiversity. As well as enabling expression, art gives people a voice and helps them find each other. Rather than an isolated eccentric, I choose to see Amélie as someone who took a while to find her (small and well chosen) tribe. Though creative mediums, we may find each other and form strong, generative, healing connections. Here are a couple of videos from my TikTok poetry readings. TT is it’s own special kind of sensory hell, but I’m finding it interesting as a medium for sharing and recording.
I am not a fan of the word ‘neurotypical’. People who are classed as neurotypical are those who can easily manage the markers of a successful life (as defined by society) i.e. earning money, having children, having a job, a social life, ticking the boxes and fulfilling all the roles. The social model of disability sets out that society is the reason people have ‘disabilities’, rather than there being something wrong with the person. It’s becoming more and more apparently that the more-than-minority cannot tick all the boxes, even if it’s buried deep down.
Perhaps one of the reasons why neurodiverse people do not often embody many conventional roles is because we’re here to do other things. A groundswell is rising, one of highly intelligent, sensitive, creative, sensorily-attuned, offbeat quirky crusaders. We’re here to show you something, and we’re going to change the world.