The Magic Dance of Dissociation: An Autistic Reading of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth

With the lights turned low and a plate of Pillsbury ghost cookies at the ready, my wife and I settled in for a viewing of Jim Henson’s 1986 cult classic fantasy musical, Labyrinth. For the purposes of this essay, I’ll assume that you’re familiar with the movie— if not, go watch it right now. If you’re anything like me, and you weep for the halcyon days of practical effects, you’ll love it as much as I do. There’s a saying that a classic is a work that never finishes saying what it has to say; Labyrinth, which avoids the 21st-century pitfall of over-explaining every aspect of its fantasy world, certainly qualifies. (A modern Labyrinth would likely be accompanied by a prequel miniseries detailing exactly how the by-all-appearances human Jareth became the Goblin King.) Within minutes of starting my most recent watch, the film began saying something new to me, loud and unmistakably clear.

I had related to Labyrinth’s protagonist, Sarah Williams (a teenaged Jennifer Connelly) from my first watch. Now, seeing it for the first time since being diagnosed with autism in my early twenties, I realized why: it’s because Sarah is autistic, too. While I had appreciated the film as an inventive, technically-dazzling adventure, the realization of Sarah’s autism radically altered how I read the film, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.

Sarah demonstrates several traits that remind me of myself as an adolescent. She’s attached to “childish” interests like fairy tales and stuffed animals far past the age that is considered typical. She has no discernible social life, spending her time acting out plays by herself with an audience of her dog— and, as her stepmother teases, never going on dates. It’s implied that she plays out the same scenarios over and over again, repeating the same lines each time— a common pattern in autistic children’s play. Throughout the movie, she struggles to communicate with others, frequently failing to ask follow-up or clarifying questions, and taking what she hears and sees literally (or, as it’s phrased in the movie, “taking things for granted”) without considering that others may be lying, missing information, or may have hidden motivations. Autistic hyperempathy— the assigning of feelings of personhood to inanimate objects or nonhuman beings— may explain why Sarah seems apparently unfazed to find herself in a world where worms, stones, and even doorknockers are sentient. In an early scene where Sarah disagrees with her stepmother about whether to allow their muddy dog in the house, it’s clear that she empathizes with her pet more than the typical 1980s owner did.

Even Jennifer Connelly's often-criticized acting reads to me as the affect of a person who does not know how to modulate her voice or expressions. Not all autistic people sound like the stereotypical flat affect of Mr. Spock; some of us sound like Connelly moaning “It’s not faaaaiiiir!” Speaking of which, Sarah demonstrates another hallmark autistic trait in her constant appeals to fairness. And, despite the common misconception within the autistic community, her actions demonstrate the autistic “strong sense of justice” is more a desire for things to be even than it is a superior sense of morality. It’s morally unjustifiable for Sarah to take out her frustrations with her parents on her baby brother Toby. After all, Toby didn’t ask to be born and has no control over whether or not his mother uses his sister as an unpaid babysitter. He’s, y’know, a defenseless baby. But in her mind, it makes perfect sense that someone who has caused her undue stress, and who her parents seem to favor, should be punished for it. It’s fair that someone who gets in the way of her fantasies should be disappeared into the goblin world. As soon as Jareth (David Bowie in famously tight pants) shows up to fulfil this desire, she recognizes that what is fair and equal is not always what’s right.

I’ve encountered this struggle in my own life. When someone hurts me, my autistic brain  becomes overwhelmed with the desire to make them suffer exactly how I have suffered. It would be fair to do that. But settling accounts in this way usually does little to fix the root problem, and it contradicts my values as a proponent of restorative/transformative justice. Like our heroine, I frequently find that what is fair and what is right may not be the same thing.

Still, it bothers me how Sarah’s concern for fairness is entirely dismissed as childish by the narrative. A key moment of her development comes when she steals Hoggle’s treasures in order to manipulate the dwarf into helping her, since he cannot reach them on his own. Hoggle protests “That’s not fair!” and Sarah verbalizes her realization: “No, it isn’t, but that’s the way it is.” She goes beyond simply accepting the unfairness of the world and instead begins to replicate the unjust structures around her— accepting, for instance, that it’s simply the way of the world for a human to take advantage of a dwarf’s size. The narrative accepts enacting unfairness as a requisite for growing up— a clear sign that the script is written from an allistic perspective.

But Sarah’s most dominant autistic trait is the one that undergirds the entire premise of the movie: her special interest in, and escape into, fantasy.

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I remember the knowing smile of the specialist administering my autism assessment when I told her about my past and current special interests: history, theater, and fantasy stories. She told me that these are textbook special interests of autistics who were socialized as girls, interests that helped us learn the complex social-emotional dynamics that our gender is supposed to intuitively understand.

In my case, rather than being a tool of socialization, fantasy served throughout my childhood and teen years as a wholesale replacement. It was difficult to make friends with my peers, but effortless to befriend Wendy Darling, Frodo Baggins, or Alanna of Trebond. For one thing, there was no frantic guessing at how these friends felt or what they were thinking; I had a narrator to tell me. At age nine, I began filling notebooks with elaborate fantasy worlds of my own, and I entertained myself for hours with the companions I populated them with.

Of course, this kind of imaginative play is normal for a child. What was abnormal was the degree to which I relied on it to get through my day, and the amount of time my fantasies consumed. Many afternoons were spent pacing back and forth through my room, muttering under my breath as a battle scene unfolded in my head, unconscious of the time slipping by or the schoolwork I needed to do. I wouldn’t have been able to do the work, anyways: I had no memory of the classes that bored me, like math, because I spent them in my kingdom. I succeeded in school primarily because my English, history, and art scores compensated for this.

As I got older, rather than outgrowing my habit, I became more consumed by it. I walked through my high school campus with the world misted over, literally bumping into people because I had no sense of my body in space. Anyone forced to play a team sport with me in PE could find me standing stalk still on the field, staring into space while they yelled at me to kick the damn ball. My daydreams became increasingly intrusive and involuntary. By that age, my fugues had evolved past fairytale scenarios; as a burgeoning theatre kid, I was swept away by visions of hanging out with my favorite Broadway stars, walking premiere red carpets, and being interviewed by Playbill Magazine. I lost hours of time to these, even when I didn’t want to.

I remember once going mini-golfing with a pair of church friends and barely being able to keep track of the conversation, because my mind was occupied with directing a scene of my favorite musical down to the minutest detail. I fought to turn off these images and engage with my friends, swimming against the current of my thoughts, but every time I surfaced for a few minutes, something would pull me down again. I felt trapped in my mind, and these periods of captivity were often signaled with physical sensations: racing heart and goose bumped arms, as if I rode a rollercoaster climbing ever higher, the world falling away below me. What had begun as a refuge became a malignant force wrenching me away from my own life.

I’ve come to understand my experience as dissociation. While research on dissociative symptoms among autistics is limited (most research into autism focuses on identifying causes or risk factors in order to discover a “cure”, rather than improving autistic people’s lives) both a growing body of data and anecdotal reports within the autistic community suggest a correlation between the two. In one report, Katherine E. Reuben MPH and Ayden Parish relate:

Reuben et al. (2021) surveyed 687 autistic adults and found that 94% had at least one clinically elevated scale on the multiscale dissociation inventory. Emotional disengagement was the most commonly endorsed symptom, affecting 85% of participants. This was followed by depersonalization (72%), emotional constriction (60%), derealization (59%), and memory-related dissociation (53%). Identity disturbances were least common but still endorsed by 26% of participants. Additionally, 32% of participants scored above 35 on the 20-item somatoform dissociation questionnaire.

As Reuben points out, this correlation is strengthened by the fact that autistics experience heightened rates of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, of which dissociation is a key diagnostic trait. One study found 60% of autistic adult participants to have experienced PTSD symptoms at some point in their lives. So, if somebody is autistic, they more likely than not experience either diagnosable or subclinical trauma symptoms. And while dissociation is not part of the diagnostic criteria for autism, it is very much an autistic experience.

Traumatized or not, in some ways autistic brains feel primed for dissociation because our neurotype gives us access to deeper, longer periods of focus than allistic brains. How easily can the pleasurable flow state of engaging with our favorite story become a dissociative experience? Where is the line between one and the other? An autistic reading of Labyrinth explores these exact questions. I read the film as a story about a young autistic woman battling to regain control over her own dissociative coping mechanism.

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Labyrinth follows a familiar fantasy template of an ordinary girl traveling to a fantasy world— what those in the biz call “portal fantasy”. The portal world usually takes one of two forms: the “it was all a dream” portal world that is entirely a figment of the protagonist’s imagination (e.g. the film version of The Wizard of Oz) and the portal world that exists as its own very real alternate dimension, plane of reality, or secret location (the original Oz books.) The former type, frankly,  is rarely used in an interesting way and in my opinion usually serves as a narrative cop-out that robs the story of wonder.

Labyrinth never clarifies which type of world its portal universe is (or even gives it a proper name), and I want to make it clear that as I describe the story as being about dissociation, I’m not suggesting that Sarah’s adventure must be reduced entirely to a vivid dissociative episode. I think it’s entirely possible that the Goblin Kingdom is its own dimension, while still borne from and serving as a metaphor for dissociation. It could be a portal world that changes to suit the desires of humans that enter it (such as The Neverending Story’s Fantastica) or one that an outside entity tailors to the humans it wants to ensnare there (the carefully-baited trap of Coraline’s Other World.) It could even be that Sarah’s imagination and belief are powerful enough to bring a world into being, the way that Peter Pan’s fairies draw life from children’s belief in them and perish without it. But whatever the case, as I’ll explain, it’s clear that the goblin world is one built directly from the protagonist’s fantasies, interests, and desires.

When we meet Sarah, she’s grappling with a series of dramatic life changes. Her mother is gone for unspecified reasons, meaning she’s endured the trauma of death, divorce, or some other abandonment. Her father has remarried, and assuming that he and his new wife had baby Toby soon after (or even before), this is a fairly recent development. It’s no wonder, then, that Sarah has begun relying heavily on her special interests and the fantasies they bring her. As my therapist often reminds me, dissociation is not an inherently bad thing. It’s an evolutionary tool that allows our brain to create a sense of safety where there is none, so that we can continue to function under threat. But when our brain understands a change to our living situation as a threat– normal for teenagers and further intensified by a routine-loving autistic brain– the brain never gets a chance to escape the threat, and we get locked out of our bodies. By the start of the story, Sarah’s time spent escaping into fantasy has begun to interfere with mundane responsibilities like babysitting Toby, and her relationship with her stepmother is hampered by her struggle to understand social interaction outside of the narrative tropes she’s obsessed with.

After her conflict with her parents, Sarah retreats into her elaborately-decorated room, which is littered with objects foreshadowing elements of the goblin world. It’s from this bit of visual storytelling that we can gather just how much of the portal world uses Sarah’s special interests as a blueprint, from the M.C. Escher drawing replicated in a climactic set piece, to a Jareth-like figurine situated on her desk. By entering Jareth’s kingdom, Sarah fulfills her desire to take the place of the portal fantasy heroines she’s lived vicariously through; her process of collecting traveling companions mirrors Dorothy’s journey in The Wizard of Oz (featured prominently on Sarah’s bookshelf) and several shots of her falling through space mirror the imagery of Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole. Even the film’s structure as a musical is prescribed by her interest in musical theatre, evidenced by the Evita and CATS posters in her room.

Reading the portal world as directly patterned from her psyche also makes the adult Goblin King’s romantic interest in her more palatable. He is a construction of Sarah’s mind, and like many a 1980s teenager, she fantasizes about being swept away by the sensual-but-safely-unattainable David Bowie. He is not an independent being with his own will, but is merely following the instructions of his creator. In fact, Jareth admits as much during the final confrontation of the film— more on that later.

Unlike in many portal fantasies, Sarah’s journey has no clear threshold marking her entrance to the other world. There is no wardrobe door to open or rabbit hole to lean into. The camera closes in on her while she speaks to Jareth in her bedroom, and then with a simple pan, she and Jareth are in the wilderness overlooking the Goblin City. For a person to be able to notice the signs that they are beginning to dissociate, and willingly enter or reject that state, takes years of therapy. Sarah’s imperceptible shift into another world mirrors this lack of agency and awareness. Dissociation is not a linear journey, but a collapsing of time and space— a theme Labyrinth continuously plays with. Sarah moves above and below ground, backtracks and takes shortcuts through a geography both she and the audience find impossible to keep track of, all to a ticking clock that varies wildly in its relationship to onscreen time.

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Dissociation offers a mental escape from trauma and perceived danger, but it offers no solution for the bodies still stuck in their current time and place. While it’s not uncommon for dissociated people to spend long periods sitting still, staring into space, eventually that body has to be tended to and has to go through the basic motions of life. Several times in the story, Sarah is offered an opportunity real-life autistics don’t get: the choice to completely, permanently disappear into her portal world.

The first comes when Sarah takes a bite of the enchanted peach offered to her by Hoggle under Jareth’s orders. This brings on an intense hallucination leading to the iconic ballroom scene set to Bowie’s “As The World Falls Down.” It’s a fairytale romance sequence straight out of a young girl’s dreams of adulthood: an opulent ball where our heroine, dressed in an enormous, sparkly, breathtakingly-detailed gown, finds her bedazzled prince Jareth across the dancefloor and waltzes with him to the sound of a synthpop love song. Jareth’s goal in creating this fantasy-within-a-fantasy is to distract Sarah from her quest so that she will run out of time to save Toby. While throughout the movie he has tried to impede her and make the journey as difficult for her as possible, here his tactic is wish fulfillment. He creates a setting and story so luxurious and beautiful that nobody would want to leave it for the challenges of the labyrinth. He’s only thwarted by the dreamer’s growing discomfort with the dream– even in a hallucination, Sarah’s anxieties about maturity break through, and she subconsciously rejects the adult situation and romance he’s placed her in.

Sarah wakes from her enchantment to find herself in her bedroom. When she opens the door and discovers that this is actually a facsimile inside the junkyard outside the Goblin City, a goblin woman forces her back inside and proceeds to physically smother Sarah with her own childhood toys. This sequence is its own wish fulfillment fantasy, an illusion of the one place in the human world where she felt comfortable. If she stays here and accepts the illusion, she will presumably be able to spend the rest of her life in the comfort of her special interests, acting out the stories she loves so much without ever having to return to the mundanities and responsibilities of life outside her bedroom door. It is perhaps the life Sarah assumed she would gain when she asked Jareth to take away her brother, or the life she had before her mother’s disappearance. But just like a romanticized adulthood, this romanticized vision of childhood is incomplete, ill-fitting, and ultimately rejected.

The third and final temptation comes during her final confrontation with Jareth. Having failed to stop Sarah from reaching her goal, he now tries to stop her from leaving with Toby. He pivots from antagonist to seducer, reframing their relationship in a speech that reveals the most we ever learn about the “rules” of the portal world:

Everything that you wanted I have done. You asked that the child be taken. I took him. You cowered before me, I was frightening. I have reordered time. I have turned the world upside down, and I have done it all for you! I am exhausted from living up to your expectations.

Jareth hasn’t been working against Sarah, he’s been working for her, giving her the escape she desperately wanted and needed. Time after time, he has offered her heart’s desire: the chance to forever leave her unhappy home life behind, to sink into her fantasy and never resurface. He understands her more deeply than anyone else, because he is part of her, and just as the state of dissociation plays a protective role in the psyche, he has been trying to help her with her stressful home life in the only way he knows how. The Goblin King makes one last offer: “Just fear me. Love me. Do as I say, and I will be your slave.” Stop being pulled between your brain and body.

One wonders what would happen if Sarah had accepted this offer to rule as Jareth’s queen, or had accepted the fantasies proffered to her along the way. If we accept the goblin world as a physical location, it may have played out like the stage version of Peter Pan, in which the Darling children are gone for so much real-world time that their parents go into mourning. The Williamses would come home to find both of their children vanished, presumed dead, with no explanation to ever be found. If we consider the portal world as a purely psychological experience, the Williamses would come home to find their daughter a dissociated shell. The person they know as Sarah would be gone, and what was left of her would struggle to respond and converse, get locked into place for long periods, struggle to form memories, and over time might be replaced with another personality entirely.

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Watching Sarah confront the Goblin King, I saw myself staring in the face of my own history of dissociation. I found myself mourning the immense amount of time that dissociation has stolen from me, the way it has stolen me from my own body, and the way that all of this has been brought on by my autistic brain’s overwhelm and isolation. I have hated my autism and hated what it has caused me to miss out on. But like Jareth, neither my autism nor the dissociation associated with it were ever meant to be my adversaries. They are part of me as he is part of Sarah. What has come across throughout the film as an uncomfortable, predatory romantic subtext is perhaps a different kind of love entirely: the love of a body-mind for itself, as it tries to keep itself alive.

The White Bear Problem is the psychological principle that the more you try not to think of something, the more prone you are to thinking of it. Accepting and acknowledging the thought, however, allows it to pass. This is counterintuitive, as we typically think of acceptance as submission. We expect that accepting the thought will cause us to be even more bent to its power. But I’ve found this radical acceptance to be instrumental in my own life as I cope with my continuing dissociation. Recently, I found myself minorly dissociating during a service at my synagogue, a practice which is very important to me and that I wanted to be present for. I spent the first half of the service frustrated and disappointed in myself for succumbing, or else angry at my brain for taking away from my experience. But then, as we rose for silent prayer and I had a chance to be alone with my thoughts, a different strategy occurred to me.

Hi there, trauma, I thought to myself. My therapist has been coaching me on this type of self-talk, helping me develop the ability to name the parts of my psyche. I know you’ve been triggered by something in this synagogue, and I know you’re trying to protect me. I want you to know we’re safe right now, and I don’t need the help you’re offering. You can take a break. Thank you so much.

Soon after this conversation with myself, I was back in my body and able to fully experience the rest of the night. Rather than running, fighting, or blaming, it was the offering of love and acceptance that allowed me to break through. Sarah does the same thing to Jareth, the symbol of her dissociation, isolation, and autism.

Sarah’s acceptance of Jareth, and all that he symbolizes, does not come in accepting his offer and surrendering to unreality. Rather, it is in this moment that Sarah realizes that because Jareth is part of her, she has agency over him. Recognizing him for who and what he is, rather than running from him or fighting him as she has throughout the story, puts power over her own mind back into her hands. Sarah finally remembers the play line she’s been trying to recall for the entire movie: “You have no power over me!” And with that declaration, the spell is broken and Sarah finds herself in her room– for real, this time.

Many portal fantasies end with a sense of separation and loss. The Pevensie children can never regain the lives they lived in Narnia, and when they eventually return, everyone they once knew is dead. Wendy Darling grows up. In some cases, such as Spirited Away, the protagonist no longer even remembers their adventure. Labyrinth looks like it’s going to end on this note, with Sarah soberly accepting a disenchanted reality and approaching adulthood. If one reads fantasy as her special interest, it may even be heading towards the toxic message that autistic people must give up their “childish” tendencies and interests in order to function in the neurotypical world.

And then in the last minutes of the film, as Sarah is tearfully saying farewell to her friends from the labyrinth, she says to a disappearing Hoggle, “I don’t know why, but, every now and again in my life, for no reason at all, I need you– all of you.” Hoggle’s response is a simple, “Well, why didn’t you say so?” and immediately Sarah’s room bursts to life with goblins having a party.

For no reason at all is the phrase I find most striking here. Sarah doesn’t need to explain away or justify why she loves fairytales or musicals, why she has trouble associating with other kids, or why she sometimes needs the comfort of her own inner world. After a movie spent presenting the protagonist and her autistic traits as immaturities to be outgrown, and emphasizing the destructive effect that her autistic dissociation has had on her life, the text finally comes to give Sarah– all of her– the same acceptance she has learned to give herself. Finally, Sarah’s autism isn’t an affliction. It’s just another part of her that can help and hurt, that contains both the danger of the labyrinth and its wonder.

I still love escaping into fantasy. I probably always will. My creativity saved me as a kid, even as it consumed me. But I am not the powerless child I was then. I have a diagnosis, a therapist, a thriving support system of autistic adults I relate to. And I have the power to use my creativity not as an alternative to reality, but as a medium for engaging with it. I create art and work on plays with friends and colleagues. I read their writing, and they read mine. I send my work out to publications, to connect with a wide base of readers. When I want the power to speak without the mediation of a publisher, I write this blog. And, I still give myself the time to dream on my own when I need it– though I’ve found I don’t always need it as much, or for the same things. I am finding acceptance for myself, even the parts of my brain that scare or alienate me, and that acceptance opens a portal to a new possible way of being.