The Lawnmower Man: That '90s Flick That's Weirdly Spot-On About Neurodivergent Life

So I rewatched The Lawnmower Man the other night - you know, the 1992 one with Pierce Brosnan playing a mad scientist and Jeff Fahey as the lawnmowing bloke who gets turned into a digital god. Bloody hell, it's still a wild ride. Cheesy CGI, over-the-top VR helmets, the lot. But underneath all the dated effects and horror cheese, there's something that hits different now. To me, it feels like a proper metaphor for what it's like living as a neurodivergent person - that whole "new living life" thing where your brain just doesn't run on the same OS as everyone else's.

Jobe Smith starts out as the classic outsider. Intellectually disabled, gets bullied by the locals, abused by the priest, stuck mowing lawns because that's about all the world reckons he's good for. Sound familiar? For a lot of us neurospicy folks - ADHD, autism spectrum, whatever flavour – that's the baseline: society looks at you, shrugs, and goes "nah, mate, you're not wired right." You're the one who sees patterns nobody else notices, feels everything at 11/10, or zones out so hard you miss the whole conversation. But you're also the one they sideline or mock because you don't fit the script.

Then Dr. Angelo comes along with his VR rig and nootropic cocktails, basically saying, "Here, let's crank your brain up to eleven." Jobe's IQ shoots through the roof. He learns languages in hours, starts seeing the world in code, gets telekinesis, the works. It's that moment a lot of us have when the mask slips or we finally get the right supports/tools/meds/environment - suddenly things click. You realise your brain wasn't broken; it was just running a different program. Hyperfocus becomes superpower, pattern recognition becomes insight, sensory stuff becomes... well, still overwhelming, but at least you understand why.

But here's the kicker, and why the film feels so real: the upgrade doesn't fix everything. It amplifies the isolation. Jobe becomes too much for the world - too powerful, too different, too "other." He turns vengeful, goes full Cyber Christ, starts jacking into phone lines and machinery like some proto-hacker god. It's that dark side we don't talk about enough: when neurodivergence gets misunderstood or unsupported, it can spiral. The intensity turns inward or outward in ways that scare people (and sometimes us).

Society's response? Try to shut it down or "fix" it, which just makes the gap wider.

It reminds me of those classic outsider arcs that always get me:

• Sarah Connor going from waitress to apocalypse-proof badass. She sees the threat nobody else does, gets labelled paranoid, but she's right. Neurodivergent hypervigilance in a nutshell.

• Will Smith's Agent J in Men in Black - suddenly the curtain pulls back, aliens everywhere, and he's got to navigate it with swagger while the normies stay blissfully clueless.

• Even Bart Simpson, the ultimate ADHD-coded chaos agent: labelled underachiever, constantly in trouble, but his brain is firing on creative cylinders the straight-laced world can't handle.

Jobe's endgame - ditching the meat suit to live pure in the network - feels like the ultimate neurodivergent fantasy and nightmare rolled into one. Online spaces are where a lot of us finally find our people, no sensory overload, no masking required. But it can also be escape to the point of disconnection from the real world. The film warns about hubris (Angelo's experiments, society's "cures"), but it also whispers: maybe the "bug" in the system isn't a flaw. Maybe it's the feature that sparks the revolution.

Anyway, that's my take. The Lawnmower Man isn't high art, but damn if it doesn't accidentally nail what it's like to wake up in a world not built for your wiring. If you've seen it lately, or if any of this resonates, chuck a comment. What's your "Cyber Christ" moment? Or are you still mowing the lawn, waiting for the right VR headset?