'Deej': a nonspeaking author tells his own story
Robert Rooy's 2017 documentary follows DJ Savarese — a nonspeaking autistic young man who types to communicate — as he navigates high school, college applications, and life as a writer and advocate.
Deej is unusual among documentaries about autism in that the nonspeaking subject is also a co-author of his own story. Savarese narrates much of the film in his own typed words. The film does not present him as a curiosity; it presents him as a writer with a perspective on his own life.
What it shows
- A person who began with supported typing and progressed to independent typing over years of instruction.
- Education as a site where presumed incompetence has real cost — and where being included with peers makes a measurable difference.
- The role of family, teachers, and a community of nonspeaking peers in sustaining a young person's communication and identity.
- An honest portrait of how hard the work is and how unevenly it is supported.
Why it belongs in this conversation
Deej is not a controlled study. It is one person's story, told with his own input. But the existence of independent typers like Savarese is one of the empirical facts the strongest skeptical positions on supported communication have to account for.
If supported typing cannot, in principle, lead to independent communication, what is the story about people who started there and ended somewhere else?