Semantic-pragmatic Deficits Among Neurodivergent Synesthetes: Why is Mario Italian?
The chair on the left if you’re sitting on the couch, in the living room, in the house my father shares with his partner, and my father asking me how I am since I stopped electroconvulsive therapy—I’m in that chair. I cast my eyes to the carpet; an inward turn isn’t always a retreat. Sitting on my left foot because that feels best, and leaning forward, and sometimes I can anticipate, but less often with his partner, and I say my mood swings have settled somewhat, and that the doubts I’d held about my spectrum diagnosis are extinguished, at last. I make my speech fluent, this despite the fact that there are four of us in the room, which might otherwise prove an impairingly large group. Inadequacy of that phrase, a weight has been lifted, owing to the fact that most weights lack singleness, ontological coherence. A better phrase might be many weights, whole onto themselves, fall from me like auburn leaves brushed from denim-clad shoulders, flutter across the always already soiled earth, scritch down the highway that goes back to our former home, remnants of holy, alone in their plenitudes. My doubt is gone, yes yes, but my father remains.
Doubt is a social phenomenon, residing within but also between people, like memory, like rumor, and those doubts I held about my autism diagnosis came in no small part from ones arising in my father. There is no good faith route to blame him for voicing his concerns, nor to fault my sister for the same; even during the intervening decade, the expanded diagnostic criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder that allowed me to be placed under that label remain little known, to the point that some have interpreted the increase in diagnoses as an “epidemic,” while others point to it as a “trendy diagnosis.” Well, no. Intensive research led to broadened conceptions of the disorder, that’s the spectrum part, which led to increased diagnoses, which, in theory, led and continues to lead to more people who need services getting them. Knowing all this, I’m confident that discussing my spectrum diagnosis with my family shouldn’t be a pedagogical task.
I’m making the case that I’m autistic to my dad and his partner in as intentional a manner as I can. I want to tell my dad something he’s not prepared to hear, in a manner to which he’s not equipped to listen. The fact of the matter is that, as I outline my points, I must step into his rhetorical arena. If I’m mellifluous, it’s because I’ve practiced this speech for weeks. Endless strategy sessions played out in my head. I’ve anticipated every objection I could think of, rehearsing my responses down to the catch breath, rehearsing eye contact in the mirror, scrutinizing well-timed smiles to ensure a natural look while tilting my chin low enough to leave my wonky tooth shadowed, and the crinkle, the crinkle around the eyes. I’m living an ascetic act of refusal that could be doomed to fail by the tiniest misstep.
During his high school years, my dad’s sport was debate; he made it to the national championships in both singles and doubles, and his conversation retains a probing, fact driven impulse. He’s a close listener who asks insightful questions. This tendency allows a space to talk about what you find most important, with questions that make you feel good and let your guard down. He likes to make you feel good, yes, and listened to, of course, but he also likes that he doesn’t have to talk about himself. The man is analytical in the way I wish I was, but I can never quite follow the thrust of a truly complex argument—never construct one for myself. Often, I’ve been told I lose the forest for the trees, though I’m not sure what that means. Speaking in four dimensional terms, (for spectra arise from spaces exceeding latitude and longitude), my father’s arguments emerge from some spectral corner at a right angle at a right angle at a right angle from my own, soft at first, then build to a frantic pace. It’s always clear where he will go next, like he’s reading from meticulous mental notecards, but you’re only ever one step ahead, and by his design. The whole proceedings are like high-stakes Tetris; one sees the next shape in the corner, but after a certain point the speed and intensity have ramped up to a level where that doesn’t help much.
My own rhetoric is accretive in a Tetris-y way, so that much can be adapted. The difference is I’m drawn to narrative and language suffused with feeling. I could show my father the results of my ASD diagnostic test, but instead I find myself tending toward confession. Or maybe not. I want to go saccharine, really truly actually existing sappiness. I want to grab his shoulders and shake him, tell him I love him more than he could ever know, but I just wish he could see me for an instant—this hysterical fact of me, insidious in his periphery, fact he’s sure will clamp down if he allows himself to internalize what I’m saying. I reach upwards at the love this son is capable of showing: these stories I’ve practiced. But I fall short, listing symptoms instead, as much from fear of argument, of embarrassment, guilt, shame, as reflecting any communicative deficit. I catch myself enacting a violent, flicking assault on the outside of my ear canal, stop myself, press hard into nostril and septum and pinch down before switching which foot I’m sitting on. Dad plays with a coaster, and I finally start to narrate.
&&&
Ad nauseum, a light brown leather seat on a dark folding chair, wedged between attending tub and a small shelving unit with foldable cloth boxes we had to rebuy when the initial set was one size too small. Hands unfold the chair, call the water from the spout, squeak temperature, water begins to open the tub. This body, pale, not wan, slim from my limited diet, helps, I help, fill the tub, again.
MacBook on the seat, 17th browser tab opened to YouTube, and the top suggestion, the latest video by Ryukahr, a Northern California streamer with straight-brimmed caps and a vivid beard; for his living, this man is Mario on the internet. His viewers pay him a not insignificant amount to play Super Mario Maker, a Nintendo game where players can design and upload their own levels, some bordering on impossible. Ryukahr plays these fan levels like a Stradivarius—played well, is the modifier. Under his thumbs, Mario’s deep musics unfold, unfaltering: the most tritonic of his leaps, intervallic devils surround the Italian plumber with lava, spikes, ghosts and turtley automata; everyday, jumps ring as octaves, pixel-wide landings shake the earth as mixolydian miracles reforming crumbled cathedral foundations; shell-jumps and mid-airs reed and bellow, bespeaking a healing mode—justice, finally—a sigh of self-sloughed scabs and dissolving suture.
Lately, the shower’s stricture and solitude frighten me—that’s not figurative—but I’m able to watch Ryukahr several times a week when I take a bath. Engrossed, I sometimes forget to wash and need to refill the tub after it has half drained. Some diagnostic criteria the DSM-5 lists for Autism Spectrum Disorder include: “Insistence on sameness, inflexible adherence to routines, or ritualized patterns of …behavior,” “circumscribed or perseverative interests,” while another lists “Hyper or hyporeactivity to sensory input or unusual interest in sensory aspects of the environment…e.g., apparent indifference to pain/temperature.” And admission/admonition, the tub filled with too-hot water is the only place one can really appreciate Ryukahr. I’ve chosen to watch hundreds of these videos, most lasting between 20 and 30 minutes.
Within the eSports landscape, Ryukahr is the rare player who has the capacity to game competitively but chooses to play single player games. This choice presents an implicit argument: if I play, they will watch. He’s keen in understanding what his viewers want. Regular videos are #1. In order to become a successful streamer, you must release regular content. He also knows his viewers want to see him suffer—Ryukahr plays the hardest game modes, and a good part of these videos is watching him fail: dozens of Mario’s deaths, always followed by one tiny victory. The key is that Ryukahr never stops, never gives up. Each level is a compulsion and any doubt that he might not finish has long since been eliminated from his emotional vocabulary.
There’s little plot to a Mario level. I’ve come to think of the plumber as a giallo or Italian exploitation star. Giallo, pl. gialli, the Italian literary and cinematic genre, combines elements of thriller, horror, and detective stories, all set in a highly stylized world. Giallo is the Italian word for yellow, the color of the paper used for their early pulps. Most are more familiar with it in its cinematic incarnations. Many Gialli and other Italian exploitation pictures are short, violent, and often have only minorly intelligible plots, relying more on dream logic than anything straightforward. Their casts were international affairs featuring actors who, in their home countries were little more than B-stars—one-off James Bonds and German superstars disgraced by drink and mental illness—this owing to the common practice of international film coproduction during the height of the giallo craze (the sixties through the eighties—though still true to this day), as well as that cinema’s technical oddities (sound wasn’t recorded on Italian film sets, [nor German, nor Spanish], it was dubbed until the mid-eighties.) Mario is just the same: short, plotless, and with violence taken to the extremes of aestheticization and abstraction. The main character, though still nominally Italian, is played by an American. Also, gloves are worn, another integral part of gialli.
Ryukahr’s role in these virtual gialli is acting as the producer/distributor—a crucial role in Italian genre cinema. In a way, the distributor is as important to an exploitation film as the director or screenwriter. They put the film in front of audiences through acts of creative (re)contextualization. If a film was successful, other, unrelated films—already produced, (some already released under different titles), or just beginning production—would be released as “sequels.” When George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead was an international craze in 1978, Italian filmmaker Dario Argento bought the European distribution rights, reëdited it, added a score by Italian prog rock gods Goblin, and released it as Zombi. The next year, Argento worked with fellow filmmaker Lucio Fulci to put out his newest film, originally titled Nightmare Island, as Zombi 2. Tonally and narratively it is more akin to something like The Island of Doctor Moreau or even voodoo films like I Walked with a Zombie, except with more eye-gouging and a scene with a zombie fighting a shark, but that didn’t matter. The main thing was to get butts in seats—by any means necessary. Before you ask, yes, there was a Zombi 3, two separate films released as Zombi 4, and a Zombi(e) 5, with the evocative—and accurate—subtitle Killing Birds. The same fake-out worked with The Evil Dead, Jaws, The Terminator, even The Exorcist. Ryukahr’s game, like the exploitation distribution game, is to take unrelated levels and recontextualize them, give them continuity. All Argento needed to do was slap on a new title. A streamer does the trick with the addition of a simpler element than even that: they add themselves, a tiny face in the bottom right of the screen, devoid of subjectivity.
Ryukahr has learned that his viewers don’t want much personality from him; he makes few, if any, jokes, repeats himself often, and reveals very little about his personal life. For a long while, he seemed wary to admit that the woman who sometimes appeared in his videos was his girlfriend (they’ve since married)—perhaps if those viewers who thought Ryukahr was cute thought he was single, they might click on yet another video. Yet it might be less complicated than that. Most of Ryukahr’s time in his videos is spent narrating what he’s doing. Because he plays several levels in each video (six to ten), his continuing presence adds a story where there might otherwise be nothing at all. I’d like to take this opportunity to repeat: I’ve watched hundreds of these videos. I buy the story he’s selling and he feels like a friend (he’s not). This beardo’s wily tricks have enchanted me completely, or maybe I just like to do the same thing again, and again, and again.
&&&
I’m at the edge of my seat, still in my father’s living room, close to crouching in front of it. This wasn’t the story I wanted to tell about rubbing Legos on my lips and faking sick every day of public school so I wouldn’t have to go be bullied by the boys I thought were my friends. I go off the rails, start ranting to my father about things outside his realm: federal climate change policy, the distinction between antisemitism and antizionism, and the idea that autistics lack a “Theory of Mind,” much ingrained in some circles. (Abbreviated as ToM, lol, the absence of which is sometimes called mindblindness—a word too melodious to find offensive.) Dad nods, is nodding. The story goes that we lack the ability to get into other peoples’ heads and understand that they, too, have thoughts, feelings, deep-seated inner lives. The offense I take is as an essayist. I’ve spent huge fucking swaths of my life trying to understand and more effectively communicate with my father. The idea that I wouldn’t even know he has an inner life, much less be able to access something of it leaves me crestfallen—not at some deficit I perceive in myself, but at the flagrant incuriousness, the complete rejection of self-doubt, flaunted by those trying to say something about autistic people.
Why must neurodivergent rhetoric hew so closely to that of the neurotypical? Why couldn’t an autistic rhetoric inhabit a lyricism, embrace contradiction, eschew coherence? I’m still talking about the essay. (Dad raises an eyebrow.) The future of the essay is neurodivergent: obsessive, encyclopedic, shapely, textural. Maybe even a little confused, by an outsider’s standards. And maybe this confusion is an illusion masking a generative, beloved doubt, behind which lies strength. A doubt confronted, conquered, begets strength. Autistic argumentation and aesthetics can inform a literature of IEPs, of Dewey decimals, of course, but they will also create one of tenses, moods, and modes that most haven’t yet imagined. This will occur in the interstices between narrative, image, argument, and fact—but don’t forget your Yvonne Rainer: feeling are facts. Dad’s glazing over by this point, and I turn back inside.
It’s quiet for a long time. Bodies in extension, mirror-twinned ecologies of consciousness and experience fill this room in dissonant keys. No ones’ fault. My difference lacked a name until I was diagnosed ten years ago, and I nearly forgot that name in the meantime. Now I’m in a place where the label means something. But there is nothing novel about the experiences, feelings, behaviors.
My dad continues to play with his coaster. There’s compassion, even understanding on his face. “I’m so happy for you that you have this new understanding of yourself.”
1. There’s an ideological/political story there, but I don’t find the Italian side terribly compelling after the Mussolini era. On the other hand, Spanish film dubbing, i.e. regionalized versions including Basque and Catalan dubs, remains more interesting to me at least through the death of the Generalísimo in 1975 :)
2. There is one game mode with a nominal plot, and it is the same one that has existed in every Mario game: evil Bowser kidnaps Princess Peach and it’s up to Mario to save her. This is such a given that it can be dismissed in the same manner that we might dismiss “There is a problem, and someone must fix it.”
TOM FRANK is a multispectral writer and filmmaker living and working in Minneapolis, though some aspects of this bio may be out of date.