ABSTRACT

The 2014 film Still Alice depicts the prominent linguistics professor Alice Howland who at the age of 50 is diagnosed with early onset familial Alzheimer’s Disease (hereafter AD). The film follows Alice from her first experiences of disorientation and forgetting of words through the progression of her condition that eventually leaves her unable to care for herself. It depicts how Alice’s mode of being and interacting with others gradually changes, how these changes unfold, affect, and are affected by her intimate social relations, and how her lived situation as a whole helps shape and delimit her as a subject. Alice is happily married to John, an equally successful physician and researcher, with whom she has three grown children. Together they are portrayed as the poster family of (rationality and) success, with the only exception of the youngest daughter Lydia whose career path as a struggling actress is pictured as irresponsible and incomprehensible in the eyes of her mother and older sister Anna.