Billy the Kid Documentary De-labels Asperger's

Depending on how excruciating your teenage years were, the documentary Billy the Kid [blog] will have a different effect on you. Certainly if you have or know someone who has Asperger's syndrome, it'll make you squirm a bit. But it's also about being an outsider in a small town. About wanting to share interests. About negotiating the changes life throws at you. About falling in love for the first time and emotional insecurity. Except for Billy's unembarrassed trials at putting words to his feelings in public -- really, what being a teenager teaches boys *not* to do -- it's not that unusual a story. That lack of censorship can be hilarious, inspiring, or wildly inappropriate. (Which is not to mention the questionable shorts.)

The film runs through January 17 at SIFF Cinema, and at its heart is a statement that might read something like this, from the blog Asperger Square 8:

The idea of supporting people rather than trying to force them into those behaviors the majority can more comfortably tolerate, the correctness of this seems so very self-evident, I often forget what a radical concept it is, how much we are sometimes hated for expressing it.

As evidence of that last part, there's the clear revulsion in a Variety review of Billy the Kid, which ends in hysterics:

The only responsible note in "Billy the Kid" is that when Billy checks out multiple books on serial killers from his school library, someone has the sense to make an issue of it. You don't want to wish that the same librarian had worked at Virginia Tech, but the thought certainly crosses your mind.

The NY Times story is worth taking a look at, if you want to know more about how the film came to be. The short version is that director Jennifer Venditti, as "street" casting agent, was scouting in a high school cafeteria in Maine when she spotted Billy and went over to talk to him.

If there's a truly weird element here, it's that the film was made just a few years ago, and Billy was not diagnosed as having Asperger's until afterwards. If you know anything about Asperger's, you know that's Billy all over within the first five minutes. Of course, his mother was also told when he was younger that he'd never function on his own, and would need to be institutionalized -- we thought they cut back on habitually incarcerating the mentally diverse in the '60s, but here is news to the contrary.

Ironically, Venditti's film's relevance is promoted by that Variety review, the guy who doesn't want to see how Billy deals with his developmental, as well as social and personal, shit. He probably sat at that other table in the cafeteria, the one populated by the kids who told Venditti that Billy was a "freak" and nobody talked to him.