Have you ever gone to a movie, seen a character on screen and said, “Hey! That person’s just like me”? It can be pretty special when that happens, especially when you don’t see a lot of people like you anywhere else.
So it was great to hear (from Legends of the Knight director Brett Culp) about Tumblr’s merryweatherblue, who posted the following to his account:
“I took my little brother (who falls on the autism spectrum) to see Guardians of the Galaxy and after this scene he lit up like a Christmas tree and screamed “He’s like me! He can’t do metaphors!” And for the rest of the film my brother stared at Drax in a state of rapture.
“So for the last 6 days I have heard my brother repeatedly quote all of the Drax lines from the movie verbatim (one of his talents), begin studying vocabulary test words, and tell everyone he knows that people with autism can also be superheroes.”
Pretty great, huh? Probably no one at Marvel ever thought of Drax as autistic. And yet, a boy with autism found a little of himself in the big blue guy. And it makes me wonder whether the movie’s ability to relate to people is one of the reasons why it’s been so popular.
I just went to see Guardians of the Galaxy again on Friday. Near the movie’s grand finale, Peter Quill/Star Lord stands up and gives what he intends to be a rousing speech to his friends. “Look at us!” he says. “We’re all losers!” And then he pauses and says, “Well, I mean, we’ve all lost something.”
But part of the charm of Guardians is that they are losers, in a way—the sort of losers that most of us have felt like some time in our lives. They’ve got the wrong sorts of friends or don’t have any at all. They don’t pick up on jokes or joke a little too much. They’re like the superhero version of The Breakfast Club—high school misfits with a spaceship.
Movies don’t always influence us in the greatest of ways. But sometimes, they can make us feel a little less alone, a little less strange. They can help us see that the things that make us different are the things that make us special. And they can help us see, maybe, a little hero in ourselves.
But don’t tell that to Drax. He’d try to literally look inside himself to find that pesky hero, and none of us wants to see that.
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