Blink

experiment. They decided to show Peter a movie and then
follow the direction of his eyes as he looked at the screen. The
movie they chose was the 1966 film version of the Edward
Albee play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?starring Richard
Burton and Elizabeth Taylor as a husband and wife who invite a
much younger couple, played by George Segal and Sandy
Dennis, for what turns out to be an intense and grueling
evening. “It’s my favorite play ever, and I love the movie. I
love Richard Burton. I love Elizabeth Taylor,” Klin explains, and
for what Klin was trying to do, the film was perfect. People
with autism are obsessed with mechanical objects, but this was
a movie that followed very much the spare, actor-focused
design of the stage. “It’s tremendously contained,” Klin says.
“It’s about four people and their minds. There are very few
inanimate details in that movie that would be distracting to
someone with autism. If I had used Terminator Two, where the
protagonist is a gun, I wouldn’t have got those results. It’s all
about intensive, engaging social interaction at multiple levels of
meaning, emotion, and expression. What we are trying to get at
is people’s search for meaning. So that’s why I chose Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I was interested in getting to see the
world through the eyes of an autistic person.”