Effect On Popular Culture
Rain Man's portrayal of the main character's condition has been seen as inaugurating a common and incorrect media stereotype that people on the autism spectrum typically have savant skills, and references to Rain Man, in particular Dustin Hoffman's performance, have become a popular shorthand for autism and savantism. However, Rain Man has also been seen as dispelling a number of other misconceptions about autism and improving public awareness of the failure of many agencies to accommodate people with autism and make use of the abilities they do have, regardless of whether they are savant skills. Rain Man has been listed as one of the best movies on the subject of autism.
The film is also known for popularizing the misconception that card counting is illegal in the United States.
In the course of the film, it is claimed that Qantas is the only commercial airline that has never had an aircraft crash. While it is true that the company has neither lost a jet airliner nor had any jet fatalities, it had eight fatal accidents and an aircraft shot down between 1927 and 1945, with the loss of 63 people. As of 5/29/2013, the last fatal accident suffered by Qantas was in 1951. The scene in which Raymond reels off a list of statistics of fatal airline crashes was cut by most airlines when showing the film in-flight – except for Qantas, which even promoted one of the movie's writers to first class when he traveled on their airline.
The use of the surname "Babbitt" for the brothers may be in homage to the Sinclair Lewis novel of the same name; Zenith, the city in the novel, is generally believed to be based on Cincinnati.
Read more about this topic: Rainman
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“Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“That when that knot’s untied that made us one,
I may seem thine, who in effect am none.
And if I see not half my dayes that’s due,
What nature would, God grant to yours and you;”
—Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612–1672)
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—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)