earticle

영어

All the reviews of the film, If You Could Say It in Words (2008), written and directed by Nicholas Gray focus on Asperger’s syndrome. Those critiques can mislead the interpretation of the film and impede its multidimensional discourse. Nelson Hodge is not only a sufferer of Asperger’s syndrome but a black man of distinctive characteristics. His counterpart, Sadie Mitchell, is a white proletarian girl struggling with “false hope.” Then there is an experimental “romance” between the two, which is, in essence, a concoction of racism, classism, capitalism, and the ambivalent perception of “artistic integrity.” Evaluating the film merely as an advocate for autism diminishes the multi-layered significance of the work. Therefore, in this paper, by scrutinizing the characters and their relationships through such diverse perspectives as socioeconomic, ideological, and racial, by recounting figurative representations of them, and by elucidating the significance of Asperger’s syndrome as a metaphor, I argue that the film should be interpreted as a metaphorical visualization of a black man’s affliction in the United States.