I appreciate Evasive’s series on “This group watches this offensive film” but sometimes audiences think they know what they want, so they demanded “Autistics Watch Sia’s Music” and somehow this was the most offensive film you could present any group of people.
I already talked about the autism shit, I know she was diagnosed, I think she’s left the internet at the right time. But I also didn’t know she’d ended up in the weirdest, most isolated social bubble. Because she inserted herself into the film as herself, who was purchasing oxy and other pain meds illegally from Music’s sister to ship to Haiti on the basis other charities couldn’t even get on the ground to do it. So somehow, on top of insulting autistic people, she managed to be a White Saviour character, all while convincing Ben Schwartz he’d look good in cornrows (and a slight tan as well). There were a lot of people involved in this who were scammed into something really inappropriate, surely while reading the script someone should’ve said, “Hang on, Sia. This is racist/ableist maybe don’t put it in.” That way, it probably would’ve cut itself into nonexistence given there was nothing salvageable. Kate Hudson can’t just drunkenly blurt out she doesn’t care another character from Africa has AIDS while hitting on them. You can’t just “crush autistic kids with love “ it’s actually illegal in many states. It was Autism Speaks propaganda, but the character of Music has no development, she’s only a catalyst for everyone else to revolve around while Kate Hudson goes through a cliched drug addict storyline. Then she decides not to dump Music in a care home. All we know is she loves dogs so another “love interest” with autism buys her one despite never interacting with her and being killed off right after. Music is exactly how Autism Speaks wants us to see these kids, as needlessly troublesome, deadweight stress-inducing burdens that need to be either fixed or isolated from society, or at worse, exterminated. I don’t think Kate Hudson’s character is supposed to look good when she’s demanding Music “behave and get all her shit out of her system”. If anything, you could argue she’s autistic but had to mask her meltdowns and she turned to drugs and booze. I know Sia went through all this herself with incorrect diagnoses like Bipolar, her music reflected her own spiral, if she wanted to make a movie about her experiences, she did a better job of that while tacking on a whole other pointless character to maybe generate interest in the film. It feels highjacked by her ego.
I feel awful for Maddie now seeing she really was going full R-word for no good reason, and clearly knew she was doing an insulting performance and had Sia talk her through this and trick her into thinking it was an honest portrayal of ONE human with developmental disorders which barely looked like actual autism. In the 90s and early 2000s, you had your Gilbert Grapes and I am Sams and Rain Mans, that were supposed to be honest but were exploitative even by standards back then. This was made in 2020 where anyone with any sense would know this was wrong. And she had three years of editing while clearly isolating herself where she could’ve just given up and saved herself the public humiliation, but pushed through and wound up putting herself back in rehab. It didn’t serve her, the public or autism. The best it did was really, finally demonise Autism Speaks and expose their shitty agenda. They’ve “given up” finding a cure but they’re still misrepresenting shit and blaming externalities which have nothing to do with anything.
And that overshadows the racism in the film. If she wanted to make her dumb music videos with their simplistic, Play School BS production values, she could have. If Maddie hasn’t distanced herself from Sia by now, she needs to. It’s bizarre Sia asserted Maddie was on the verge of being exploited then exploited her anyway. Sia’s gone back to making music, I think she was better off writing for other people when she was in her pre-Guetta days making reasonably solid albums and memorable songs that were overused in TV shows and commercials. We didn’t need this movie, all good intentions aside, what a way to pave a road to the hell that is being cancelled on Twitter. And being cancelled as much more to do with how big you are and not what you did. It’s about how badly people want you to fail more than the crime itself, otherwise other unknowns would’ve suffered backlash for doing exactly what a hugely popular person did. And everyone bounces back, nobody’s ever cancelled. But if you can see yourself being subjected to this amount of hatred before you even do the thing, or release it, maybe don’t. She hoped the sincerity would outweigh the offensiveness. Sorry.
