Autism, Performance, and Sociality: Isolated Attention in The Social Network

The lasting impact of David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010) surely has its deepest source in Dustin Hoff man’s performance in Rain Man twenty-two years before. As Jason Jacobs notes in his appreciation of Hoff man’s work, the actor inhabits a character “who is both human and apparently without a legible interior, a mindedness that most of us watching any other film would recognize in a character even if we did not share it” (2018-213). Raymond’s mindedness, however illegible, is nevertheless and undeniably there. It is in front of us to be seen.