Rain Man in the Desert

With my Arab students, I recently watched the classic film Rain Man. At the end of the movie, you may recall, there is a custody hearing, in which a local Los Angeles “expert” rules against Charlie Babbitt’s application to gain custody of his brother Raymond, who is autistic. Instead, custody is awarded to Raymond’s doctor, and he is sent back to his institution in Ohio.

Watching the film, I could not help feeling, personally, that this result, true to life as it no doubt was, was a travesty of justice and of humanity. The notion that his doctor had more claim to him than his family nauseated me. The assumption that an institution could do better for someone disabled than a caring family seemed madness. And not just any institution—one a continent away from his surviving family, so that he would get no visits. Nobody would check on his welfare—everything was left to the trustworthy doctor.

Further, it seemed obviously unjust to have a dispute between a layman and a doctor decided by another doctor—with whom there had obviously been prior communications, professional to professional. It reeked of power and privilege, not to say corruption.

All of this was compounded, mind, by my own conviction that the medical profession really have no idea what they are doing with an autistic savant—what business do physicians have dealing with mental, which is to say spiritual, phenomena? What business do they have making critical life decisions for someone obviously more intelligent than they are?

Nevertheless, taking care not to reveal my own feelings, I asked my class whether they thought the ending was right—whether Raymond Babbitt was better off going back to the institution. I was hoping for some kind of discussion of the philosophical issues.

But, without discussion, every single one of them said it was not. They could not conceive of any justification for what actually happened in the movie.

Of course, this is not real life, but the writers presumably selected it as, in their minds, the most plausible outcome. Nor did Western audiences apparently feel that it was unrealistically gloomy—despite their notorious preference for happy endings.

In this, as in not a few other things, Western culture is on the wrong road. For all the shouting on both sides, for all the wearying prejudice, the Arab and the Muslim world does have things to teach us. And I fear we are not listening carefully enough.