Best Lead Actress of 2014, Julianne Moore
INFJ, the Counselor, the Defender, the Seer
From Julianne Moore’s acceptance speech:
“So many people with this disease feel isolated and marginalized, and one of the wonderful things about movies is that it makes us feel seen and not alone. And people with Alzheimer’s deserve to be seen so that we can find a cure.”
People tend to lose their personality when Alzheimer’s strikes. They become almost unrecognizable from the persons they used to be. As someone who watched his grandmother deteriorate from the disease in her final years (she lived to be 93!), I would add to Julianne Moore’s speech that people with Alzheimer’s deserve to be seen so that they can still be recognized as human beings.
It may be a long time—if ever—till we can cure Alzheimer’s, but in the meantime it’s important to remember and respect the persons underneath the symptoms.
Alice Howland transforms dramatically from the first moment we meet her to the final scene of the film Still Alice, but holding up under all those changes is the core person she’s always been.
Dominant Function: Introverted Intuition (Ni), “Anticipate the Experience”
Alice is a linguistics professor who’s fascinated with the way we communicate, a common field for Intuitives who enjoy parsing symbolism and meaning. She’s led an ambitious and goal-oriented life—professor at a prestigious university, author of a respected textbook on the subject, and mother of three great kids. She’s intelligent and insightful, and even picks up on bits of knowledge from the medical field thanks to her son and husband, both doctors.
Her diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s threatens her life trajectory, and even as the symptoms progress, she remains resolute that there are still things she’s going to do with her life.
When her daughter Lydia asks her what living with her disease is like, Alice paints an imaginative picture of all the words she used to know hanging in front of her, each of them dropping away and being lost forever. Alice also wears a butterfly charm on a necklace, a reminder of something she learned as a little girl—that butterflies only live a short time. Butterflies make her think of the brevity of life, and she even names a special folder on her computer “Butterfly.”
This folder is part of Alice’s long-term plan to deal with her disease in its late stages. She visits a nursing home (pretending to look into it for a parent), and sees what her life will look like very soon. So while she still has her faculties, she records a video on her computer with careful instructions to a later, more bewildered Alice. It’s part of a complex, but thoughtful plan to lead herself carefully through a gentle suicide.
Fortunately, fate intervenes and trips up the plan.
In the final scene of the movie, her actress daughter Lydia reads her a symbolism-laden scene from the play Angels in America. Though Alice has lost most of her ability to comprehend words or to express herself clearly, she understands the bigger meaning of the passage: “Love,” she says.
Auxiliary Function: Extraverted Feeling (Fe), “Relate to the Experience”
Alice often plays referee with her family, keeping the peace when arguments arise—especially between her headstrong, bickering daughters. She’s a skilled hostess at holiday dinners, and an engaging speaker at lectures—handy when she loses her notes at a presentation to the Alzheimer’s Assocation, where she’s able to charm the audience while finding her place.
Alice keeps a professional, appropriate air about her at all times, and as her disease progresses, she begins brushing off social commitments to avoid making a public scene of herself.
When she first suspects she’s having some sort of mental difficulty, she keeps it to herself so as not to bother anyone. As the evidence mounts that there’s something seriously wrong with her, she finally wakes her husband up in the middle of the night. He dismisses her concerns at first, and she explodes at him, desperate for the relief of expressing her fears and having them taken seriously.
Later, when she learns that her oldest daughter Anna has tested positive for the gene that caused Alice’s early-onset version of Alzheimer’s, she’s wracked with guilt and offers to drop everything to go be with her.
At one point, Alice uses her disease as emotional leverage to get her youngest daughter Lydia to consider another line of work besides acting, so that she can see her succeed before she’s gone. It’s not a pretty moment, and Lydia calls her out on her unfairness. They have yet another argument when Alice invades Lydia’s privacy by reading her diary. The next day, she forgets what happened, but still feels the tension between them, and asks Lydia’s forgiveness for whatever it was she did.
Tertiary Function: Introverted Thinking (Ti), “Analyze the Experience”
In her career as a linguistics professor, Alice’s skill at analysis allows her to examine the parts that make up words and develop her theories on how human communication develops.
Once she’s struck with Alzheimer’s, Alice devises all sorts of clever schemes to help herself—memory games and lists of questions and such. She keeps a highlighter with her when she reads, running it over the words so she doesn’t go back over them. She clings tenaciously to her intelligence, and laments later to her husband that people tell her she used to be smart.
Inferior Function: Extraverted Sensing (Se), “Experience the Experience”
In a movie about Alzheimer’s, I expected the lead character to be Si-dom. Indeed, Alice might be typed as an ISFJ early on. She calls her memories her “most prized possessions.”
As the story continued, and I saw Alice’s gift for symbolism, I moved to Ni-dom, and changed her to INFJ. And if you listen to her, you can tell that though she remembers things sharply, her memories are not the basis for her life trajectory. She even admits to not being close to her father, as well as never introducing her husband to her mother and sister.
Alice’s memories are objects that she holds like her butterfly necklace. Precious, but not subjective, like they would be for an Si-dom. She lists off milestone moments in her life—birth of her children, publication of her textbook, honeymoon with her husband—without delving deeply into the experience of them. And she knows that one by one, they will soon slip through her fingers.
In a stirring speech to the Alzheimer’s Association, Alice declares that although she is losing her past, she is learning to live in the moment. The moment is all she can experience right now, so she enjoys it while she can. Even in the depths of her disease, Alice finds a way to grow and thrive.
Heroes & Villains of MBTI 