Please tell me anything and everything about autistic Anton!! I thought I was crazy for thinking the same when I first watched the movie - so it’s really comforting to know others feel the same :)

Anon, I hope you know what you're doing, because you are absolutely going to receive it !!!! In a very autistic and in depth response, no less!

First off - no, you are not crazy at all. I'm coming at this as someone diagnosed as autistic, who due to a psych degree and in-depth knowledge of autism (Autism Spectrum Disorder, or ASD as I'll be referring to it from now on for brevity), has also gotten several other people diagnosed since (it's genuinely very funny).

I would like to add a caveat, however. Just because I have more knowledge on possible symptom presentation, and on psych in general, doesn't automatically make me right. (Even though I am ! XD)- different interpretations of this character exist, because he is a character up for interpretation. If he walked into any one psychologists office (which he would never do), and they diagnosed him (before they got killed) there would likely be differential diagnoses. The idea behind psych in general is to treat symptoms that are hurting your life, and to help you to maintain and improve your life in the best way possible for the individual. Because of this and frankly because of Anton's complexity of presentation (and the fact that he's less stereotypically autistic especially for hollywood), different psychs are likely to get a list of the same disorders, but categorise his behaviours within them differently.

If I were to hazard an educated guess (and I am) about what they would be, I would say ASD, ASPD (antisocial personality disorder) as the main two, with various differentials I'm sure you could add on.

Now, with all that said - the ASD itself.

Again, for simplicity, I'll be referring only to movie Anton, here, but I believe there is enough evidence for book Anton to warrant at least a partial diagnosis (I admit I lean more towards a dual diagnosis of ASD and ASPD for book Anton).  

From here, I’m going through the diagnostic criteria and what blanks we can currently fill in. The DSMV criteria for ASD goes through A-E.

Where section A represents “Persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction across multiple con­texts, as manifested by all of the following, currently or by history (examples are illustrative, not exhaustive)” (American Psychiatric Association, 2013)

1 – deficits in social-emotional reciprocity, ranging … Abnormal social approach and failure of normal back and forth conversation to reduced sharing of interests, emotions, or affect …

2 – Deficits in nonverbal communicative behaviours used for social interaction ... From poorly integrated verbal/nonverbal communication to abnormalities in eye contact and body language or deficits in understanding and use of gestures to a total lack of facial expressions and nonverbal communication.

3 – deficits in developing, maintaining and understanding relationships – from difficulties adjusting behaviour to suit various social context … to absence of interest in peers.

I hope that we can already see the pattern, here. I sure can.

Addressed point by point – 1. Anton has a specific abnormal social approach and failure of conversation very clearly, as he re-uses the words that others are using around him almost as often as he uses his own. He has an incredibly specific way of interacting with the world, and with people, that everyone around him can clearly cast as abnormal and other.

In both 1 and 2, he has severely limited facial expression most of the time and occasionally his facial expressions don't match what he's saying, he makes too much eye contact or none at all throughout the whole of the movie, and his body language is consistent and just about as blank as someone can get while still moving. He listens to peoples words, not how they say them, and even though he can indicate with his own tone, he struggles with others (a good example here is the gas station attendant as he makes an offhand comment, but Anton only listens to his words and thus gets concerned when he didn’t need to, something he doesn’t understand).

3 Also practically goes without saying, as he clearly has no interest in his peers (such as the men that showed him to the colossal goat fuck out in the desert, or Carson Wells) and to the best of our seen knowledge has no emotional or social attachment whatsoever to anyone around him. He also cannot adjust behaviour to suit a context – when he tells Carla Jean "I wouldn't worry about it.", it comes off as menacing, terrifying – but I hold every belief that he was genuinely trying to get her to feel better. He doesn’t say anything without two meanings, of course (which is another unusual way to communicate, and counts as further idiosyncrasy), but to him understanding your fate and future is a valuable thing which needs to be known when possible, and should soothe people.

Something else that Section A covers, but does not delve into specifically, is his difficulty with empathy. Throughout the movie, we clearly see Anton commit violent crimes without remorse. This paints him as someone who has “no empathy”.

I don’t consider this to be true. Anton has low empathy, absolutely, and difficulty identifying emotions within himself or others, difficulty with theory of mind and not understanding that the way he views the world is not automatically correct (all very autistic traits). But no empathy? Absolutely not.

Part of what makes him terrifying to most is his use of the coin toss. The idea that he would hold a human life on something as small as the result of a childish game. But for him, it’s everything. We see him use it twice – for the gas station attendant, and for Carla Jean. Both of which he determines to be innocent, but for different reasons also fit under the category of him doing what it is that he has to do. For this, he has a fallback. He considers fate to be everything – and so for people who he empathises with, and he absolutely does (they had nothing to do with this, were drawn into it either through no fault of their own or through an accidental action, which I’m sure he still views as a conscious choice) he asks the most important thing in the universe what to do. When he says well done to the attendant, he means it, he gives one of the only genuine smiles we see from him - it's small, but it's there. He didn't want to kill him, and was relieved when he didn't have to anymore.

To me- that is not the actions of a man with no empathy, who kills without reason and who is constantly holding himself back from bloodshed.

In other words, he ticks off every classifier for section A. There are other smaller details I could mention, but won’t, because this is already getting away from me.

Section B covers “restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour, interests, or activities, as manifested by at least two of the following, current or by history”, and then 1-4 run through potentials.

I believe that he fits into:

1 – stereotyped or repetitive motor movements, use of objects, or speech.

More specifically his speech, here. He says “Alright” the same way every time, he has a specific tone that he sticks to, the immediate “call it” after the very practiced flip of the coin. The way that he repeats what others have just said to him fit in here, too, as is the interesting way that he goes about conversation.

2 – insistence on sameness, inflexible adherence to routines or ritualized patterns of verbal/nonverbal behaviour …. E.g. rigid thinking patterns

We don’t see a lot of his normal routine, here, so I don’t have as much to go off, but his clear and rigid thinking when it comes to the way the world works, and the way that people work within it is clear to everyone who sees him. The way he talks also comes into this as an inflexible pattern of verbal and nonverbal behaviour.

4 – hyper- or hyporeactivity to sensory input or unusual interest in sensory aspects of the environment – e.g. apparent indifference to pain or temperature, adverse response to specific sounds or textures, excessive smelling or touching of objects, visual fascination with lights or movement)

Do I even have to mention his reaction to getting a slug through his thigh? This is a severe hypo reaction to pain and pain tolerance.

Temperature is more difficult to prove, but he is wearing a jacket in almost every scene we see, where several other people are in short shirts or just long shirts, etc.

I also believe he has visual fascination with visual presentation of his environment and facial movements, at least in part to be able to understand them, but also just because he likes looking, which may reinforce his over-exertion of eye contact, but regardless of whether this is true or not, he still meets criteria for 4 in other ways, so it's neither here nor there.

So, he meets at least two criterion on section B.

Section C specifies that symptoms must be present in early development, of which no one could say, but we could probably guess. I doubt that in childhood Anton had appropriate facial expression, interactions with his peers, etc.

Section D specifies that symptoms cause clinically significant impairment in social, occupational or other important areas of current function. This is up for debate, but I believe that it does due to his lack of friends, his ‘place’ outside of society, etc.

And section E just specifies that the disturbances are not better explained by intellectual disability or global developmental delay.

Anton is clearly horrifically intelligent, a clear and obvious trait of his.

Is it possible that he may have ASPD as well as ASD? Potentially, although I personally believe that ASD does cover all of his symptomatology and presentation due to the point on empathy.

I genuinely could go through the entire movie and point out everything autistic about him, but I felt like this was the most simple way to go about it. In conclusion, despite the fact we can’t specify for section C, I fully believe that there is substantial evidence towards the idea that Anton has ASD.

The other thing about it is, though, that in the 1980s no one would have known that. This is based on modern criteria, where we know so much more than we used to about it. Most people would have chalked him up as just plain crazy, and indeed we see most people do that in the film.

Feel free to comment, I would love to have other people’s opinion on this ! I hope this is at least somewhat in the vein of what you wanted, anon, I know I loved summarising for you !