A Viral TikTok Made Us Question Everything We Know About ‘Rain Man’

Social media is both a hotbed of and dumping ground for film theories from self-styled cinephiles. My brain-warping favorite of 2025 came courtesy of a young Scottish woman who calls herself @Jencapella, whose viral fan critique completely reoriented the way I will forever think about Barry Levinson’s Rain Man.

Released in 1988, Rain Man follows Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise), who discovers that his late father’s $3 million estate has been left to Raymond, the autistic older brother he hasn’t seen since he was a child (and who he knew as “Rain Man”). Charlie soft-kidnaps Raymond (Dustin Hoffman, who won a Best Actor Oscar for the performance) from the mental institution where he lives, which has been endowed with a trust that will support him for the rest of his life. Charlie’s goal is to gain half of that trust—as he sees it, his birthright. Along the way, they bond, discover Ray’s mathematical genius, and make a shitload of money counting cards at a blackjack table in Vegas, all while Charlie grows a soul.

Rain Man is the type of film that doesn’t exist anymore: a buddy dramedy for grown-ups that was both a commercial and critical hit and had a massive cultural impact. In addition to being showered with Oscars (it also won Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay) and rave reviews, the December release brought in $172 million at the domestic box office, making it the biggest film of 1988.

It also essentially served as the introduction of autism into pop culture. In the film, Cruise’s Charlie Babbitt has never heard of the neurological condition and spends the entirety of the film (some might argue through the conclusion) unable to comprehend what autism is. (Early on, the head of the mental health facility explains to Charlie that Ray is an “autistic savant. Some people like him used to be called idiot savants.”) Today, the film is somewhat notorious for Dustin Hoffman’s creaky “Oscar Bait Disability” performance—a neurotypical actor playing a magical autistic who’s more a series of tics than an actual neurodivergent human. Raymond Babbitt remained the defining representation of autism in culture for decades. It’s what many Americans believed autism looked and sounded like, and served as fodder for comedians and sketch shows and spoofs.

@jencapella
#movies #autism
♬ original sound - Jencapella

Enter Jencaplla, who watches Rain Man, long faded from the popular imagination, for the first time several months ago with little to no familiarity with the movie’s plot. “It’s Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman, and it’s about an autistic man who reunites with his estranged adult brother, and they go to Vegas and count cards like short kings,” she says into her phone’s camera, presumably at home, with her standard delivery of pithy observation via Scottish brogue.

The film opens with just Cruise, alone and struggling with his gray-market collectible cars business for 20 minutes. Jen comes to an immediate, stunning, and perhaps obvious conclusion: Tom Cruise is the autistic brother. Over the course of four minutes, she surgically dissects Charlie Babbitt’s autism using clips from the film as evidence: “He’s got a special interest in cars, he doesn’t really get small talk, he’ll do repetition and echolalia when he’s distressed” Jen says, while I—and I assume most people who know the film—have all been reduced to the Wee-Bey meme. Once Raymond is introduced, Jen reaches the next logical conclusion: that the movie is actually going to be about Cruise discovering, through his relationship with Raymond, that he is also autistic.

Jen is an engaging and insightful film critic. She uses not just her projection of autism but specific shot-by-shot filmic language from Rain Man to make a case so persuasive I am not entirely convinced she’s wrong. Charlie’s girlfriend, Susanna (Valeria Golino), is constantly telling us he’s not well adjusted, that he’s shut down, unempathetic, unable to connect to people or his own emotions, then lashing out unconcerned with repercussions or social discomfort when he can’t get his way, and by all accounts his father was the exact same way. He becomes compulsively fixated on several challenges and desires throughout the film, insists on his specific logic and interpretation of what is “fair” in regard to his inheritance at the expense of others, and several times in the clips Jen shares appears to be echoing Raymond. Maybe Rain Man is a subversive masterpiece about how we’re all kind of autistic, hiding in plain sight?

“Jen comes to an immediate, stunning, and perhaps obvious conclusion: Tom Cruise is the autistic brother.”

More likely, regardless of the screenwriters’, director’s, and actors’ intentions, what Jen presents is a read that displays how our understanding of autism (and men) as a society has evolved over the course of a few generations. She was born into a world in which the idea of the spectrum and high-functioning autism exists, which allows her to read the film with a nuance we didn’t have at the time, when autism was an exotic “disease” and Dustin Hoffman’s caricature made sense.

What I love about the theory is it opens up an entire world of possibilities when it comes to alternate reads of classic films that feature quintessentially American male loner protagonists. Was The Conversation’s Harry Caul kind of autistic? Was every Gene Hackman character autistic? How about Clint Eastwood, or Steve McQueen’s “strong silent” drifter types? “The Spectrum in 20th-Century Film” certainly sounds like a doctoral thesis, or a senior seminar, or an entire wing of study in film schools in the near future.

Jen ends the video (currently at 42,900 likes, and reposted and dueted 13,900 times) stunned that Charlie Babbitt never realizes he’s autistic. A text box appears over her head, reading: “Pop off my undiagnosed king.”

The Latest