How Pop Culture Like ‘Will Trent’ Misunderstands Dyslexia and Why It Matters
Over the weekend, I sat down with a glass of wine to watch “Will Trent,” the ABC series about a detective (Ramón Rodríguez) who sees things that others don’t. Will Trent’s secret weapon in fighting crime is his dyslexia. I wanted to watch because, as a dyslexic myself, I was curious about how the show portrayed learning differences. Was it just another farce or a sincere attempt to bring nonlinear thinkers into popular culture?
Flawed protagonists who use their differences as a crutch are hardly a new trope. Monk, a strangely perceptive detective with OCD, did just that. “The Good Doctor” examined autism to learn more. While dyslexia in popular culture is a step in the right direction, we should be mindful of how the dyslexic experience is portrayed. Creative freedom taken away without truth can be dangerous. They shroud learning differences, which are widely misunderstood, in mystery and rumor.
In “Will Trent,” the pendulum swings mostly in the extreme: dyslexia is portrayed as either a disability or a gift. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. Dyslexia is not a gift. Nothing is a gift unless you have the tools to exploit it and use it to your advantage. It’s hard to believe that Will Trent, a brilliant detective, doesn’t have an alternative. For example, he’s completely stumped by the task of reading names on a flyer and can’t tell the difference between “Push” and “Pull” on a door.
But dyslexia is not illiteracy. People with dyslexia can still read, it’s just that their brains don’t read in a straight line, like people without dyslexia. Dyslexia is also not about writing E’s and K’s backwards – that’s dysgraphia – and there’s really no evidence that dyslexics flip or reverse letters. Young children may write their letters upside down, but most adults with dyslexia will no longer struggle with that particular task. Finally, Will Trent owns an old flip phone, presumably to avoid the complexities of modern iPhones – really? I assure you, dyslexics are just as grateful for and capable of navigating modern technology as anyone else.
But “Will Trent” does get a few important things right. Will seems embarrassed about his diagnosis, and goes to great lengths to hide it from his spouse and co-workers. “I forget I’m an idiot and it takes me an hour to read a damn sentence,” he tells Angie (Erika Christensen), his on-again, off-again love interest. I bet most dyslexics feel that way. I certainly did. Because of the words we sometimes use to talk about dyslexia—disability, disorder, diagnosis—it’s easy for most people to see it as a handicap and associate it with lower intelligence. In fact, some of the greatest thinkers of our time were dyslexics, who figured out how to overcome their language processing problems by developing other skills, like memory, visualization, imagination, or observation. Many dyslexics eventually “compensate” for their language processing problems by doing other things really well—things that linear minds don’t naturally do. California Governor Gavin Newsom, who is also dyslexic, has said he struggled with reading so much that he trained his brain to remember. He credits dyslexia with giving him his prodigious memory. And that’s exactly what Trent did: He seems to have a gift for visualization—Ramón Rodriguez, the actor who plays Trent, describes him as a master of puzzles, recreating crime scenes in his mind.
Some people with dyslexia excel in art, design, and music because instead of written language, their brains think in images or sounds; they’re hardwired to speak a completely different language. My own experience with dyslexia has been a process of accepting that, while I will never be good at reading and writing, my ability to visualize like Will—to think outside the box, to negotiate what others take for granted, to challenge the status quo—has been the driving force behind my creative career. If I hadn’t had the opportunity to explore this part of my brain as a child, I might have dropped out of school, like so many dyslexic children who are faced with rigid learning environments that teach them their own way.
