Why I Am Glad No One Remembers The Boy Who Could Fly

Two weeks and one apartment ago, I reviewed Rain Man, an 80s film that I named as a pioneer and originator of autism representation tropes. However, there is a film that was released two years before Rain Man that is what I was picturing when I wrote that Rain Man could be way worse. I am referring to The Boy Who Could Fly, which was written and directed by Nick Castle and released in 1986. This film follows a fourteen-year-old girl named Milly who develops a relationship with her nonspeaking autistic neighbor, Eric. Most of the story is dedicated to Milly and her family adjusting to life in a new town and Milly dedicating her time to studying and trying to assist Eric, and then it is revealed that Eric can literally fly. I found The Boy Who Could Fly to be the definition of inspiration porn, and the boy in question is more of a prop than a genuine character. Eric has very few characteristics that make him an individual, much less an autistic individual, to the point where I have to deviate from my usual format for evaluating representations and just focus on the small handful of things that stand out about him. 

Eric not only does not speak, he is absolutely silent. Real nonspeaking autistic people still make other sounds, such as crying out in pain, laughing, and various audible stims such as humming and buzzing their lips. There is a scene where it looks like Eric mouths Milly’s name, and there is still no sound. The stereotypical moaning sound that has become a stock sound for disabled people onscreen is completely absent, but I almost would have preferred that over this kid who seems to not have vocal chords for most of the story. At the very end, Eric suddenly gains the ability to speak, and his first sentence is to tell Milly he loves her. First of all, this reeks of sparkly cheese and makes it look like Eric overcame his autism through the power of love. Hopefully I do not have to explain how wrong this is. Second, while plenty of autistic people who are late at learning to talk eventually do, going from no words to “I love you” as a teenager is incredibly rare. There is not a lot of information on exactly when the cutoff is for gaining speech as an autistic person, but it is generally stated to be around eight years old. This lines up with the fact that the window to learning a second language completely fluently closes between eight and ten. Seeing fourteen-year-old Eric as part of the film’s happily ever after not only sends a pro-cure message, it is inaccurate to the experiences of actual autistic people and gives their families false hope. 

Flying is an action associated with Eric throughout the film, and in the end, he is shown to literally fly. He is often seen mimicking a plane by sticking his arms out like wings and tilting his body, and he also folds and throws paper airplanes. One could make the argument that flying is Eric’s special interest, which I have no complaints about on its own. The pretending to be a plane could also be a stim, but it is rather unusual. More often, autistic people “fly” like birds rather than planes by flapping their hands. It is also possible that Nick Castle did not know what the function of a stim was and just thought the action would add to the motif of flight. Strangely, Eric’s fascination with flight is connected to the death of his parents in the narrative. His uncle seems to think that since his parents died in a plane crash, Eric fixates on planes. I have never heard of a SpIn developing from a traumatic event, but feel free to educate me if your experience or observation is different. 

As for Eric’s literal flying ability, I took that as an incredibly clunky and left-field interpretation of the autistic superpower trope. Usually, when autistic characters are “superpowered”, it is in the form of a savant skill such as memory, not a comic book hero ability like flying. I wish I could fly, in fact, a huge part of my sensory profile is seeking flying sensations through things like swings and roller coasters (which Eric never does in the film), but being autistic does not give me the ability to actually fly. (Unless you count when I make it happen in dreams; there is a correlation between autistic people and lucid or vivid dreaming). The fact that at the end of the story, Eric can both fly and speak is both too sweet and contradictory. He goes from a misunderstood outcast to a normal and accepted person…who can also fly. It would make a more compelling story if he was shown to fly throughout the film but lose that ability when he started speaking, forcing him to choose between having a fantastical strength and being accepted by the neurotypicals. 

Another motif that shows up in Eric’s arc is the act of catching a ball. One of Milly’s first public interactions with Eric is in PE, when she volunteers to play a warmup game of catch with him, even though the teacher says he will not return the ball to her. Later, Eric saves Milly from a rogue baseball by catching it right before it hits her in the face, to the shock of Milly and everyone else around. Milly tries to repeat this to prove Eric’s ability by telling her classmate to throw a volleyball at her, only for Eric to freeze, leaving Milly injured and humiliated. Catch was a weird choice for Castle to focus on as a struggle for Eric. He most likely thought the reciprocity behind the game would be foreign to autistic people like Eric, or he interpreted it as something “normal” kids like Milly did, and therefore something Eric would fail at. According to multiple autistic people in my life, it is not the reciprocal concept of catch that we struggle with (I actually preferred it as a kid because the rules were so simple), but the physical aspect. Lots of autistic people find catching balls hard, especially if they are small and/or fast. Eric’s moment of heroism makes no sense because a foul ball is arguably more difficult to catch and return than a gently-rolled volleyball. 

One quote that has been ringing in my mind from The Boy Who Could Fly is “He doesn’t see the words, or the book. He just sees me.” This is said by Milly in reference to her efforts to teach Eric to read, and it is straight-up wrong. In this scene, Eric and Milly are sitting in a classroom surrounded by stimuli. Eric, as an autistic person, would either be perceiving everything happening in the room and getting overwhelmed or be hyperfocused in on the text or the sensory aspects of the book. He seems to have no negative sensory reactions to Milly touching him, speaking close to his head, or breathing down his neck either. I suppose it could be interpreted that Milly has become a laser for Eric too, but at the time, it was generally believed that autistic people did not develop interpersonal connections or have curiosity about other people. It is more likely that Castle just picked Milly as the one thing Eric did not ignore for narrative’s sake, completely ignoring the idea that autistic people tend to experience the exact opposite of what Milly describes. 

Eric’s inclusion in the mainstream classes at his local high school is completely inaccurate to the times. Yes, there probably were autistic people in classrooms in the 80s, but they were most likely undiagnosed and hidden, and they were definitely not nonspeaking. Someone like Eric would be found in a specialized class or school, at an institution, or being homeschooled. (Willowbrook closed a year after this film was released, so institutionalization was still a relatively common practice). Although Eric is technically in the class, the teachers stick him at the back of the class and mostly ignore him, rather than including him in the lesson. It is possible that the school does not have a specialized class for kids like Eric, but having him not attend the school at all would not be as plot convenient for Eric and Milly’s interactions, so he’s shoehorned into the mainstream class. This makes Eric look like the school’s charity case or pet project, and then Milly comes along and gets the medal of honor, the A-plus, by turning him passably normal. 

The Boy Who Could Fly is a glurge-tastic, pro-cure, pro-assimilation mess that has been deservingly relegated to the dusty video cabinet of classrooms and the part of Netflix that only the desperate scroll through. The character of Eric is barely an example of an autistic teenager, and his only purpose is to be a flat love interest for Milly. Milly, meanwhile, is painted as an angel who turns an outsider into someone beloved by helping him “overcome” his autism. This film is in the bottom tier of autism representation, and hopefully it serves as an example of how not to write an autism-focused story.