Walt Disney's mbti

Hi all, so... I'm thinking of writing a utopia (think fully automated luxury communism) in which Walt Disney awakes from a cryogenic chamber into the future, utopian world, Walt in Utopia. I realise the frozen at death story is completely apocryphal in the most untrue of all untrue senses, but I think it would be a fun premise to mix classic utopian themes with Americana retrofuturism and explore things like Disney's McCarthyism and more regressive ideas in contrast with his fondness for the stories he promoted about overcoming circumstances, hero's quests, etc. I'm starting my research with an extensive and authorised biography of the man, but, does anyone here have opinions about his likely mbti type?

 

Thank you @Asa @Lady Jolanda and @Wyote

ENTP does make sense, and I could see how an Ne-dom would make a great protagonist for a traveler to utopia narrative, so it works for me.

 

Absolutely, I think I and S can be easily ruled out.

In terms of the possibility of ENFP, I don't get a strong Fi vibe from him. And ENFJ would make him an Fe-dom, which doesn't feel right either. In terms of ENTJ, that's possible, but Te-Ni seems to describe his process less well than Ne-Ti—that is, starting with multiple possibilities and evaluating them deductively. Not 100% certain about any of this though.

 

I'm hoping to learn more from his biography, but yes, by all accounts, he was quite bullying, driven, slow to complement, quick to criticise, feared, etc. In at least some of his functions, he must have been low functioning, which always complicates typing and especially typing at a distance. He also had many prejudices (most notoriously and heinously, antisemitism, but also a deep hatred of the political left). On the flip side, he clearly believed strongly in the value of his stories and medium, and from what I've seen it was not only about the profit for him. He seems to have had a very harsh childhood with an overbearing father, which he never considered malign, and a very strong sense of his own vision.

 

Absolutely, Disney's views on the left were very much informed by disputes with trade unions and McCarthyism that formed a backdrop to the politics of the times, sadly culminating with him giving names to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. I definitely want to research this in-depth, but it won't overtake the more central theme of the novel, which will be about different ways of aesthetically conceiving a better society and how aesthetics interact with politics.

The AS is hard to comment on directly; since it comes mostly from an unfortunate scene in one movie that was removed and a lot of very unpleasant associations, and it is not easy to say how much it was heartfelt or whether it was long-lived. But I might bring up AS as a way to illustrate how it has been a part of different political economies (that is, its transmission from the late medieval period into early modernity). And there are broader issues that could be mentioned in terms of Disney's handling of race in his films, which was often less than exemplary.

No, I liked theme parks as a kid, mostly for the haunted houses and more theatrical rides, but something like Disney World doesn't interest me much beyond its cultural meanings. I would probably have more fun sitting in a cafe with a novel.

 

Absolutely, retrofuturism is a fascinating thing, and the ideas behind it deserve a careful dissection since they are full of fruitful contradictions. Moreover, retrofuturism constantly evolves—so, we have the futurism of the past; the imagined futurism of the past, and the satirical mix of futurism and nostalgia, all of which are deployed for different contemporary purposes. For the British left, for example, nostalgia about the postwar consensus is a major point of aesthetic and popular unity. However, this is uneasily coupled with the left's social liberalism, which is a tension that mirrors the fact that a lot of the popularism the left wishes to capture is socially reactionary as well as economically left-wing. Whereas, for the conservative right, you see a nostalgia for a social cohesion and traditionalism that was destroyed, not by socialism, but by the very economics conservatives advance. In this way, a retreat into retrofuturism allows the left and the right to differently avoid tensions in their ideas. It's interesting to me how utopianism can navigate nostalgia as a concept, especially when it is so attractive as an alternative to a more rootless utopianism, and all the more so during times of turbulent politics and economy.