Wretches and Jabberers: And Stories from the Road is a powerful, moving documentary that follows two men with autism as they travel the world, visiting friends with autism and changing attitudes about disabilities along the way.
The potentially groundbreaking film opens in 40 cities in April to commemorate National Autism Awareness Month.
Many people with autism have extremely limited verbal skills or no speech whatsoever. It has long been assumed by the general public, and even by many parents, educators, and caretakers that scant speech equals low intelligence.
In Wretches and Jabberers, the movie’s protagonists dispel this myth. The two men and the four friends they visit show the world that they are in fact exceedingly intelligent, eloquent in their writings, and charmingly funny. Like Helen Keller before them, the “wretches” in the movie are pioneers, blazing trails for others to follow. The message of the movie is to show the world that there are others like them who are vastly underestimated and whose potential is untapped. It is a message of hope.
The central figures in the film are all either non-verbal or possess limited speech, and they also struggle with many of the sensory and motor issues common to others with autism. What is unique about the stars of this movie, however, is that all of them communicate by typing. They type on keyboards that speak the words and show the text they type. The microphone picks up the tapping of the typing, which can be a time consuming process. But it’s well worth the wait to find out what they say.
The film follows Tracy Thresher, 42, and Larry Bissonnette, 52, both from Vermont, as they travel to Sri Lanka, Japan, and Finland to visit friends during their globetrotting tour who, like them, type independently to communicate.
Academy Award-winning filmmaker Gerardine Wurzburg directed the feature documentary. “The message of the film is very much about presuming competence,” Wurzburg told Examiner.com. “I was at a conference with these two guys and once I saw them I realized I had storytellers. They have humor, they’re political, they have all those elements.”
Wurzburg’s other films include Educating Peter, for which she won an Oscar, and Autism is a World, which was nominated for an Academy Award.
As children, and even into adulthood until they learned to type, Thresher and Bissonnette were presumed to be profoundly retarded, and were written off as incapable of being taught how to learn anything more than just basic tasks. It was only in their 20s and 30s that they learned to type and showed people they were “more like you than not,” as Bissonnette says in the film.
Bissonnette, an artist whose paintings are featured in private collections and in a museum in Switzerland, says in the film, “I was eight years old when I was put in an institution. I had no idea what I had done wrong. After 15 years I was released and began painting.” It wasn’t until ten more years had passed that Bissonnette began to communicate by typing.
“Nothing I did in acting and living my life convinced people I had an inner life until I started typing,” says Bissonnette to a Japanese audience. “Knowing my intelligence was a matter of self learning through CNN, and powerful impulses toward growth and the beast disappearing.”
Thresher began typing to communicate in 1990. “I was trapped in a body that didn’t work right,” he says. “I’ve always been very angry about my autism. I didn’t get seen as intelligent until I was out of high school.”
Bissonnette and Thresher can each speak a limited number of the words they type. The four friends they visit either have no speech or minimal verbal ability.
Typing has helped even the playing field for the “wretches” in the movie, enabling them to live fulfilling, productive lives after decades spent in social isolation. In the past, people spoke about them; now they speak to them, realizing they are capable not only of communication but of stimulating, intellectual dialogue through typing.
Thresher, Bissonnette, and the friends they visit can all type independently. But they first learned to communicate using supported typing (click here for an article about that technique).
Wretches and Jabberers is also unique in that it tells stories from the perspectives of five adults and one teenager with autism. Virtually all of the focus on autism by the media through the years has been about children, and seen from the viewpoints of parents, educators, and researchers, while adults with autism have been largely ignored.
Thresher and Bissonnette begin their globetrotting tour in Sri Lanka, where they catch up with Chammi Rajapatirana, 35, an old friend from autism conferences. Chammi is a writer, poet and advocate who learned to type at 17.
Chammi’s autism and apraxia have prevented him from developing speech other than a few isolated words. Apraxia is a neurological and movement disorder that affects the ability to speak and execute motor skills. Chammi’s family was told when he was a boy that there was no hope for him, and that he was profoundly retarded. It wasn’t until he learned to type that a new world was opened up to him.
“Mostly helping others find their voice has helped me find joy,” Chammi told Examiner.com. “Wretches and Jabberers asks us to see the awesome contribution we people with disabilities can make, and what a pity it would be if that were lost.”
Now Chammi is the co-president of the Educate, Advocate, Support, Empower (EASE) Foundation in Sri Lanka, a small learning center that students with disabilities attend for free. “EASE is finally turning lives around,” Chammi told Examiner.com. But Chammi says discrimination is still prevalent. In the film, at the foundation’s Open Education Institute, Chammi is seen typing, “We live as outcasts in Sri Lanka.”
Wurzburg does not edit out of the film the typical autistic “behaviors” Thresher, Bissonnette and others display. They are seen making shrieking and groaning sounds, hand flapping, and engaging in impulsive movements. It turns out that actions that are usually perceived by onlookers as unnecessary behaviors are frequently accommodations people with autism need to manage or compensate for their bodily or sensory difficulties. Anxiety is also common among the group.
The “wretches” and their brethren with autism each experience the world in a unique way, responding to sensory stimuli with unpredictable reactions. In Sri Lanka, Bissonnette becomes restless with anxiety and says he has “low barefoot tolerance” upon being asked to take his shoes off while visiting a Buddhist temple.
The phrase becomes the title for one of the 20 songs on the soundtrack, written by J. Ralph, also the composer of music for Academy Award-winning documentaries The Cove and Man On Wire. The soundtrack is performed by an eclectic and star-studded group of artists that includes Judy Collins, Ben Harper, Scarlett Johansson, Nic Jones, Norah Jones, Carly Simon, Stephen Stills, and Bob Weir. The movie’s score, the background music composed by J. Ralph, evokes a mood of optimistic traveling and discovery.
Wurzburg told Examiner.com J. Ralph recruited all the performers and worked from a transcript from the film to write the lyrics. “J. Ralph was brilliant,” said Wurzburg. “The artists did it because they were introduced to a world they didn’t know.”
The co-stars are nothing if not real. After visiting the temple, Thresher tells Bissonnette, “I wish you could have relaxed and enjoyed yourself.”
When Bissonnette and Thresher become anxious or need help, their assistants are there to support them. Pascal Cheng has assisted Bissonnette since 1991, while Harvey Lavoy has worked with Thresher since 1994. Cheng and Lavoy are there at every step as Bissonnette and Thresher trot around the globe in the movie, providing emotional support, advice, and friendship. For the four other stars of the movie, their parents provide their primary support.
Proving to people that they are intelligent is an uphill battle for many people with autism, who because of their low verbal ability and sensory and motor difficulties, are regularly underestimated. Even today, the term “low functioning” is often used interchangeably with “non-verbal,” despite evidence that people such as those in the film can be both non-verbal and exceptionally intelligent.
If a person with autism doesn’t respond to a request, it’s usually assumed to be a lack of understanding, but they may be mistakenly perceived to have lower cognitive skills than they actually possess. In reality, movement and other physical problems may prevent them from expressing their level of understanding. “You will be surprised how often we make wrong assumptions about ability,” Chammi says in the film.
One of Chammi’s essays, On Being Mute, is posted on the Wretches and Jabberers website. He writes, “Autism/apraxia took away my voice, and a world that equates muteness with stupidity took everything else. Yes it really is as if my brain were gouged out. It hurts so much I want to scream…When you judge me by my muteness and deny me the power of my intellect we all lose. Ignorance and the lack of assistive technology held us autistic people hostage in the past. How many people lived alone and abandoned, how many lives lost? Hear me now. Ignorance and prejudice still hold too many of us in that silent abyss.”
Chammi and those like him long for social outlets. He says of the visit by Bissonnette and Thresher, “Feasting on my friends’ company, I store up memories.”
After returning to Vermont, Thresher visits State Senator Phil Scott to advocate for the importance of keeping services for people with disabilities. Emblematic of the times, Thresher says, “I do get anxious about losing my support system because of budget cuts.”
While Bissonnette lives with his mother and his sister, Thresher shuttles back and forth between two to three places per week. “I have no permanent place to live,” says Thresher. “It really sucks and I have no hope of finding a place to hang my hat.” Thresher hits himself in the head.
The second stop for Bissonnette and Thresher is in Japan, where they meet Naoki Higashida, a 16-year old boy with autism who communicates by typing. Higashida has written more than 10 books on autism and fiction, but his disability prohibits him from attending the local school.
Thresher tells Higashida, “Let’s forge a bond to work together to set our mission to change the world’s view of disability.” Thresher decides to call it the “World Intelligence Magnified Tour.”
Thresher describes the transformation he went through after learning to type: “Trapped inside like a caged animal, waiting to be released. The animal was a beast. Sorting through my emotions and thoughts is difficult and not pretty at times…but the beast has been tamed. Opening up the world for me was learning, advocacy and purpose.”
Higashida says he was thrilled to learn that there were others like him who communicated by typing. “There must be many more people with autism who, like how I used to be, have the inner worlds but have no means to express them,” he says to an audience at Tokyo University.
When speaking to a class at Tokyo University, Bissonnette’s humor comes out again. He asks for suggestions on any “steak-oriented restaurants.” The crowd breaks out in laughter.
While Bissonnette and Thresher revel in meeting new friends and advocating for others with autism, they still struggle with anxiety and, sometimes, despair. They visit monks in Japan to look for meaning in life. Thresher comes away with a epiphany: “I have decided that my purpose in life is to show that people like me are intelligent,” he tells the monks.
The final stop on the Wretches and Jabberers world tour finds Bissonnette and Thresher in Helsinki, Finland, presenting at the Autism Foundation Conference.
The two meet in a cafe with Antti Lappalainen, 21, and Henna Laulainen, 23, Finns with autism who type to communicate. The film’s title is born when Lappalainen self-deprecatingly calls those who cannot speak “wretches” and typical people who blurt out what they say without thinking “jabberers.”
Lappalainen spends time folding towels and doing other menial tasks in a center for people with disabilities. When he is asked, “Don’t they know you can read?” He responds, “I think they are too scared.” It is apparently easier to ignore intelligence than to develop it.
Laulainen, with a far off look in her eyes, says, “I would like to learn to live my life as others my age live.” She strikes up a conversation with Thresher, who asks her to visit America sometime. Despite the age difference, chemistry is apparent between the two. (After the filming of the documentary, Laulainen traveled to Vermont to view the premiere of the movie last October).
Thresher writes one of the most memorable lines from the movie when he says, “We are the perfect example of intelligence working itself out in a much different way.”
Chammi told Examiner.com he hopes the film changes attitudes about people with disabilities. “Wretches and Jabberers shows the importance of living productive stimulating lives for everyone. Often people assume that all we people with disabilities need is to be taken care of: this is because they are looking at only our disabilities. It is easy to see that all the people featured in this documentary refute that assumption. We are simply like everyone else going on with our lives. We are artists, poets, philosophers, and advocates for all of humanity.”
In his Wretches and Jabberers blog, Thresher exhorts people with autism to keep their heads held high even when they struggle:
"I would like to let everyone know that things do not always meet your expectations. The important thing is to keep plugging along. The world is a tough place and change comes slowly when we are dealing with discrimination that is so entrenched. There are those times when you may struggle and feel down. I know that feeling very well. I have had to push very hard to make change in my life. There have been many heartaches along the way. I have often thought things would remain terrible. The best advice I can give is to keep your chin up and tell everyone your story."
Wretches and Jabberers opens April 1 in New York and is playing in 40 cities during the month of April.
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