Longlegs Analysis: Lee Harker as Undiagnosed Autistic Heroine

Whether explicitly written as autistic or not, “Longlegs” heroine Lee Harker is a potent affirmation of the autistic experience.

Having spent most of my life as an undiagnosed autistic person has left me with a quandary as a writer. I now constantly re-evaluate films I have watched from the perspective of someone who is now diagnosed to see how it informs my viewpoint on films I have loved my whole life.

We all bring our lives and our experiences to the films we watch. It’s natural, and it could be the factor that causes a story to strike a chord with us on a visceral and cerebral level or not.

Like many viewers, when I walk into a theater, I am bringing a lot of baggage with me. I’ve got my suitcases of trauma and neurodivergence packed tight, and sometimes they pop open and spill out over two or so hours, but it’s a safe environment for that to happen in.

This might not be a profoundly ‘highfalutin’ think piece worthy of mountains of social media praise. Still, I think this is an important discussion now that we live in a post-release world where Osgood Perkins’s latest horror show, Longlegs, is available to the masses.

Within ten minutes of the movie, I knew that many in the audience were sitting with an unalienable fact that they might not even be able to identify with: Lee Harker, Maika Monrore’s intrepid and quiet FBI agent character, is autistic.

Whether Perkins or Monroe meant for Lee to code autistic is neither here nor there; art is meant to be subjective in this nature anyway.

Due to the film’s period setting, Lee would never have been able to get a proper diagnosis. The film is set in the 1990s, meaning that understanding the differences and nuances of autism in women was still a far-off dream—a dream about a good twenty to thirty years in the future. This is a reflection of the failure when it comes to autism research. It’s something that autistic women still have to battle.

Most research at the time frames Longlegs covers would have been mostly centered around young white cis male boys, which is why we now have so many women and other marginalized identities currently being diagnosed with autism well into adulthood.

Autism isn’t a fad; we simply have more knowledge than we did in the past, which is a positive result of research efforts.

During my appointment to receive the results of my testing, the psychiatrist looked at me and told me that, while the signs of autism were there even in my childhood, I wouldn’t have been diagnosed then due to being a high masking and low support needs individual, meaning that I can blend in with allistic people well enough and can mostly function within their societal standards to the point I would have merely been deemed odd or eccentric.

Thus, leaving Lee’s possible autism ambiguous or up to the audience makes sense as a stylistic and thematic choice.

Though I would love to hear Perkins’s and Monroe’s thoughts on Lee’s autism, I understand any decisions not to address this facet of the story early in the game.

The movie is fresh and deserves some time to generate organic discussion. As a horror writer and filmmaker, I have done this with my own film work as a way to speak to social barriers that prevent people from being properly diagnosed and allow audience inference.

Specifically, the character Gray, from my forthcoming film Bystanders, is written as an undiagnosed autistic young man who falls through societal cracks in a horrific and traumatic way, and Catherine, from my unproduced screenplay Housewife, is written as an undiagnosed autistic woman navigating 1960s society.

On a personal and artistic level, I am excited to see where the larger discussion of Lee’s neurodivergence goes.

Lee goes against the stereotypical grain of autistic representation.

She’s a low support needs individual. She’s able to hold a job. She’s highly efficient despite not being extremely sociable and unable to fit seamlessly into social situations. In fact, her efficiency can be deemed a byproduct of her autism.

Lee has a high level of pattern recognition to the point that this could be debatably supernatural within the context of the film. Yet, her ability to cipher through details that have previously been a mystery is a product of pattern recognition skills common within autistic individuals.

Society often thinks of pattern recognition skills as related to numbers and math, but the reality is far more complex. Autistic brains latch on to patterns, which can include words, letters, puzzles, social and life events, and more. Lee spends time with evidence for the Longlegs case, and due to her ability to hyperfocus on the task, she can decipher not only his letters but also the decades-old cracks in the mystery behind the meticulously planned dates of the murders.

Lee’s social issues pervade the film from the beginning.

One moment that made me laugh because it speaks to the autistic social anxiety experience is when Lee balks at meeting Agent Carter’s (Blair Underwood) wife, Anna (Carmel Amit), and daughter, Ruby (Ava Kelders), and then goes on to have stilted uncomfortable conversation with Ruby in her room. Lee has trouble holding eye contact and often turns away from people rather than looking at them head-on. The few times she looks at characters head-on are pivotal to the narrative and often turning points for her arc.

Lee also possesses flat and measured effects while communicating.

Autistic individuals can have a flat affect while speaking, causing some to find them dry or unemotional, though not all autistic people have a flat affect. She has a straightforward way of communicating, not mincing words like allistics. Some people may view Lee as a rude character (i.e., in the aforementioned scene where she doesn’t want to meet Carter’s wife and daughter), but she speaks sincerely and directly.

However, despite Lee’s lack of social skills, she seems to care deeply for those around her and is greatly affected by others’ emotions.

Monroe does a fantastic job of showing Lee wordlessly processing her feelings and her reactions to what is happening around her, communicating that she has a rich interior world.

This arguably pairs with Lee’s strong sense of justice, a common trait in autistic and other neurodivergent individuals. She’s morally unambiguous in a movie filled with characters who err on the Lynchian side of ambiguity.

There isn’t some big underlying plot twist regarding Lee’s allegiances in the movie. Lee is simply Lee, a woman striving to do meaningful work and make a difference in a disordered world.

There are no ill machinations or underlying subtext, which is displayed in her arc and actions.

When faced with decisions, she makes the difficult choice to minimize harm and protect those around her, even though that choice requires her to eventually kill Agent Carter and her own mother, Ruth (Alicia Witt), in the film’s heartstopping resolution. Even when other characters are making arguably confusing decisions and acting out of line with their character, Lee is the character who consistently makes sense and has a strong moral compass.

Autism comes with comorbidities, like most illnesses. A common comorbidity is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Australian National University did a study and concluded that autistic people are predisposed to developing PTSD. Autism and PTSD have symptoms that overlap and sometimes feed into one another if you are diagnosed with both. These symptoms include hypervigilance, social difficulties, sensory sensitivities, emotional dysregulation, repetitive behaviors, and so on and so forth.

Lee has the hallmarks of PTSD as a result of childhood trauma.

One of those key issues is the gaps in Lee’s memory. Memory deficits are common in multiple types of neurodivergence, including autism. Naturally, the throughline here is that Lee’s autism would compound the traumatic memory loss she experiences regarding her encounters with Longlegs (Nicolas Cage) as a child.

Researchers are currently doing studies regarding autism, PTSD, and memory function within children, so there are likely discoveries on the horizon in this specific area that will better speak to this unique experience. I can, however, speak on a personal level as an autistic person with a well-documented case of PTSD starting from the time I was a teenager. I have memory gaps. It’s scary. You wonder how you possibly could have ever forgotten parts of your own trauma.

The thing is, you didn’t forget. Your brain repressed them to protect you. Details of my childhood resurface in my day-to-day life, triggered by sometimes nothing at all.

Lee is isolated from those around her, even her mother.

Lee’s character is solitary, the only child of a single mother. Her childhood is marked by loneliness, with no family or friends. Even Lee’s mother hits on how isolating Lee’s childhood was and why the intrusion of Longlegs was such a traumatic event.

She is set apart from her fellow FBI agents, often working long hours alone while trying to crack the Longlegs case.

Whether by choice or societal alienation, autistic people are often extremely isolated from those around them because they are different. Whether it comes from painful societal misunderstandings, allistic individuals and their lack of empathy, or the myriad of other complications through at autistic people, isolation may appear to be a safer option than ridicule and further trauma.

Lee Harker is a character that goes beyond the awkward female FBI agent pursuing a serial killer in a male-dominated landscape narrative that Jonathan Demme set forth in Silence of the Lambs, a comparison that I have seen time and time again while researching, and sadly, finding nothing regarding Lee’s character.

Whether Lee’s autism is creator-intended or not, it opens up an important discussion regarding autism within mainstream entertainment and the lack of positive, nuanced, and empathetic portrayals.

Autistic people are allowed to have their existence affirmed by characters that aren’t explicitly stated as or even originally intended to be autistic. That’s the beauty of art and analysis, the ability to see and be seen.

The autistic experience is varied, and it’s time that our art starts to reflect that freely.