Martha’s, monitoring the emotional states of all three as the
temperature in the room rises. But Peter? He starts at Nick’s
mouth, and then his eyes drop to the drink in Nick’s hand, and
then his gaze wanders to a brooch on Martha’s sweater. He
never looks at George at all, so the entire emotional meaning of
the scene is lost on him.
“There’s a scene where George is about to lose his temper,”
says Warren Jones, who worked with Klin on the experiment.
“He goes to the closet and pulls a gun down from the shelf, and
points it directly at Martha and pulls the trigger. And when he
does, an umbrella pops out the front of the barrel. But we have
no idea until it comes out that it’s a ruse — so there is this
genuine moment of fear. And one of the most telltale things is
that the classic autistic individual will laugh out loud and find it
to be this moment of real physical comedy. They’ve missed the
emotional basis for the act. They read only the superficial
aspect that he pulls the trigger, an umbrella pops out, and they
walk away thinking, those people were having a good time.”
Peter’s movie-watching experiment is a perfect example of
what happens when mind reading fails. Peter is a highly
intelligent man. He has graduate degrees from a prestigious
university. His IQ is well above normal, and Klin speaks of him