Carrie Fisher (1956-Dec 27th, 2016) and Debbie Reynolds (1932-Dec 28th, 2016)
I write about those days at a great distance – not only in terms of time. I cannot feel close to the young woman who went about with my name long ago … she is often strange to me, sometimes antipathetic, now and then, but for the self-conviction that stares at me from the printed page. There too I am at odds with her — Elizabeth Robins, suffragette-actress, who left an autobiography
I am the custodian of Princess Leia — Carrie Fisher off-the-cuff at a signing event
Friends and readers,
Not everyone coming here will recall that for a while I was writing a series of blogs on actresses, most of them 18th century, but my idea was to focus fairly on the profession of the actress, its history, and individuals. If Debbie Reynolds, and Carrie Fisher were not actresses, where are actresses to be found? I wrote about them on my Sylvia blog a few days after Carrie Fisher died of a massive heart attack, and her mother, Debbie Reynolds, the next day of deleterious heart event given the non-technical name, “broken-heart syndrome” (a kind of stroke), in other words, intense grief at the loss of her daughter.
My daughters seemed to feel about Carrie Fisher’s death the way I felt about Jenny Diski’s death from cancer this year. As a mother to daughters, I felt so touched over how the mother died, her grief too strong for her strained heart to sustain. Since then my (temporary) identification, interest in actresses, and curiosity has led to me to read about them, and feel empathy and much respect for both.
I didn’t realize the photo I found (and now prefaces this blog) came from Reynolds’s last appearance to pick up a much-merited reward for a life-time of performance from the Screen Actors Guild in January of 2015. Both American white sweethearts at age 19 (that was Reynolds’s age when she famously starred in Singin’ in the Rain): there is something about their particular permutation of the white gene pool — the round face, wide-apart eyes, uplifted nose, blue eye, blonde hair — and the way they presented themselves that lent themselves to this. It was easy to find out this kind of thing and much about both their careers and Carrie Fisher’s writing over the next few days. No less than 5 articles in the Washington Post appeared the day after Fisher and Reynolds’s deaths, one of them on the front page and continuing in the front section. There was an obituary in the New York Times.
But the way my younger daughter talked of Fisher, I began to realize she was famous for her writing and what I’ll call her “solo performances” on select stages beyond her roles in the original two Star Wars films (1970s), it sequel (1983) and (very recently, much older) its prequel (2015). These made Carrie Fisher, like her mother before her, an icon for a version of white America’s sweetheart. After this, Fisher became a screenplay writer, wrote fictional versions of her life and relationship with her mother, most notably Postcards from the Edge, made into a film (which won awards that year) with Meryl Streep as Carrie, and Shirley MacLaine as Debbie: how’s that for four icons all at once? But important as these were, partly because Fisher was so candid about her private life (sex and marriage), her depression and drug problems, perhaps the solo performances were the most striking reason for her following.
In the several histories of actresses and the rise of respectability of actresses (see my blog review of Sandra Richards’ The Rise of the English Actress), I concluded that central to the growth of respectability for actresses was the actress-autobiography (a sub-genre of autobiography one might say). The writing legitimized the actress, she was seen as a serious person; the earliest ones were in the 19th century, but some of these were also by women who also got up on the stage alone and did monologue, solo performances. Why is this important: in these they regularly broke out of the conventional roles they were pushed into in films and stage plays. We are familiar with this under cover of the stand-up comic: Joan Rivers did it with pizzazz, and electrified audiences by breaking tabooes in her talk about sex.
What Carrie (using just her first name as so many do) did was to tie these monologues openly to her life, and include in the monologue people she worked in the industry with (say George Lukacs, the first director of Star Wars). She’d do it unexpectedly and at awards ceremony where the person named and at moments bitterly satirized would be sitting. I noticed she’d quickly turn the talk into more compliment, and by the end seem to buy back into the values of the crowd, but everyone had heard the mordant take on the realities of the movie industry and women’s lives. Married briefly to the thoughtful song-writer and good musician, Paul Simon, with other disappointed love affairs (known) with a daughter too, Billie Lourd (a minor actress), Carrie evolved a character in public, much of it frankly her which girls in the later 20th century could identify with and find solace. She capped it off (so to speak) by dying relatively young.
Carrie at American Film Institute
I’m writing because I don’t see her “act” talked about in this way: we are told her quips (good one-liners) and ceaselessly it’s repeated how she openly talked of her “drug problem” and “bi-polar” (a cant word nowadays) state. It is still daring to present your sex life as she did openly (see my blog-review of Kristin Pullen’s Actresses and Whores.) She is presented as a Dorothy Parker manque: but Parker never acted, did monologues on stage, and her writing was much much stronger, far more consistent, genuinely reaching tragedy (the story, “Big Blonde”), and she was brilliant in verse. This is not to knock Carrie Fisher but say she broke out of stereotypes and was able to talk about what it is to be woman as an “actress” in front of audiences. As far as I can her other two novels were much weaker and her autobiographical books (3 of them) weaker yet: they are put-together anecdotes meant to make money and promote herself to get more opportunities for stage solos and participation in movies. She had a TV show, was in dozens of movies, three worth mentioning as serious (where real acting was called for).
Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher — many years ago, when Carrie was still singing as part of her mother’s nightclub act
Carrie also from a very young age, worked with her mother, Debbie Reynolds, on stage. The mother was grooming her to become a singer and nightclub entertainer. In the film, Bright Lights (see right below), we hear Carrie sing twice and she’s very good — a hard yet mellow resonant register like Judy Garland’s. In the film too, one of Reynolds’s rare remarks about herself and her daughter is repeated twice: she is deeply disappointed Carrie did not go in for a career as a singer; Reynolds attributes this to the source (as Reynolds sees this) of her talent, her relationship with her father, Eddie Fisher.
Which brings me to the crucial background out of which Carrie’s career, character, personal fulfillment and crises came: Debbie is not so much Princess Leia’s mother as Carrie is the daughter of the woman Eddie Fisher deserted for that vamp, Elizabeth Taylor. Anyone alive in the later 1950s and ’60s who doesn’t remember the extraordinary publicity Reynolds manipulated on her own behalf to make herself the ultimate victim probably never read a newspaper or watched the news or went to a movie. I admit there too I had a lot to learn over the past couple of days. As I thought the extent of Carrie Fisher’s significance was as this skewed icon — America’s sweetheart no longer the girl next door, but first some bizarre fantastic innocent girl who is made the victim of a sadist — remember the metallic outfit and a chain around her neck, and then a general. (To this in our fascist militarized culture are actresses reduced who want to be seen as strong miscalled feminism sometimes: they need to be as violent as American macho heroes at vital moments. Princess Leia strangles the fat [naturally] monster who is imprisoning her with the very chain holding her down.)
So I thought Debbie Reynolds had made a career out of enacting 1950s unexamined American ideals: the unsinkable Molly Brown. She was the all-American mother and wife in the honeymoon-like Bundle of Joy. Donna Reed type. After Eddie Fisher left her, Reynolds had married twice badly (I had read somewhere), both times seeking glamorous men with money, and both times the relationship ended badly. The second husband, millionaire businessman, Harry Karl, turned out to be an addictive gambler, who lied to and bankrupted Reynolds. The third a very wealthy real estate developer. From what is said in newspapers I had the impression of someone ambitious, determined, and capable: she re-made herself each time through working in nightclubs and more popular movies. Like Ginger Rogers, she was hired for her looks, not her skill as a dancer, and like Rogers, Reynolds made herself superb. For “Good morning” she is said to have endured bleeding feet (recalling Hans Christian Anderson’s poor mermaid). She sang songs one of which became as great a hit as any of Eddie Fisher’s: Tammy from Tammy and the Bachelor.
But as with her daughter, the popular perception of her is inadequate: though not as badly. She had a career on the stage (won a Tony), could really act, especially in comedies (she’d win Emmys for TV shows) and developed her own act and material. She too did solo performances, but here the resemblance ends. She stayed doll-like all her life, at the edges of her monologues making fun lightly here and there of American values, and in her later years referring to her daughter and herself, but never telling much, much less anything untoward. From what I read it seems that part of the conflicts between mother and daughter were precisely the mother pressuring her to be intensely conventional. She was the kind of actress most familiar since actresses were allowed to be respectable, only instead of enacting on-stage female stereotypes, she kept to them off-stage too. Not that I’d knock this: she was ultimately supremely successful from a financial standpoint, and in the film Bright Lights we can see that both Carrie and Todd are comfortable due to her efforts. Her act has become grotesque at moments, especially when with her body she tries to enact the old coquettery, the kind word is gallant.
Bright Lights, which, while I regret to say is a weak film, can end my portrait of these two apparently admired and well-known actresses because more is revealed there than was intended certainly by Reynolds, and perhaps by Fisher.
There is a good recap of the film by John Boone at Entertainment Tonight. I watched the film on HBO at the appointed time (both rare acts for me: I didn’t even know what channel HBO occupied) fully expecting to weep as I had felt emotional over the imagined relationship of a supportive mother-and-daughter. I also thought the new perspective or new context of their shared death would affect me and the material.
I remained dry-eyed throughout. Like Fisher’s solo performances, finally it was not that deeply revealing of Carrie Fisher, though the suggestions that were made by Carrie about her character and history were frank, believable, had an honesty not common: she was throughout presented as when all is said and done, the obedient daughter, taking every care of her mother, good-hearted, well-meaning, forgiving her bastard of a father at the end (“reaching out” it’s called). No hard truths beyond the citing of her “bipolar” problems — we learned how she has had to lose weight for the coming Star Wars roles. Nor was it admitted that Reynolds preferred to live the naive life, and pretend to not examine anything, unless called upon for some explanation of something really bothering her (like her daughter did not take up the career of a singer).
By contrast Joan Rivers’s bio-pic of herself, A Piece of Work, is multi-faceted, novelistic, and Rivers presented many unpleasant, suposedly unadmirable aspects of herself; she asked interesting questions about values underlying celebrity careers, showed us the cost of ambition itself, which was to end up alone, except for her loving daughter, Melissa Rivers, whose career she fostered. Rivers was glad she had re-vamped herself to display ideals of gorgeousness as long as she could. We also saw her kindness to the vulnerable, unlucky in small ways (she collected street people she knew for Thanksgiving), her real philanthropic activities, and good working relationships with those who helped her keep her career up. Nothing like this is in Bright Lights.
I’ve just cited some of what’s revealed. We also see that in the last couple of years Debbie Reynolds had become senile and very frail. It’s often said how they lived next door to one another for years, in semi-bohemian (but very luxurious) compound in Hollywood. We see Carrie taking her mother food; reminding her to eat; immediate memory loss is bad. Reynolds’s last appearances in nightclubs (where everyone in the audience is very old) required the help of many people (and a scooter); and the picking up of that last award was engineered by both Carrie and her son, Todd. For that last they got her dressed, got her to get into the car, up the stairs, onto the stage. Carrie was next to her mother because she needed to be. Carrie talked of how good a time they had had, but they were hardly there at all; upon receiving the award, the Carrie and her brother drove the mother safely home, and then had dinner, drinks, and good talk (and singing) with a couple of close friends.
So one reason Debbie wanted (as she said in her last words as recorded by her son) to “be with Carrie,” is cagey to the last, she knew without her daughter she could have no independence. The two women film-makers had given no sense of this, of what the woman was under the mask. I envied her the day she died because I too have experienced “broken heart syndrome:” about 5 months after Jim died, the faux heart-attack, but I recovered. I am now weak on the right side. I am not as strong in my need and determination as she. There is a real person beneath that mask — we could have seen it daily in her daughter and her relationship.
As Boone says, Eddie Fisher’s is the absent-presence, appearing in clips from his career, one of him interviewed later on TV saying he had not been a father “there” for his children, and one recent film of him near death looking terrible, hardly able to do more than agree with the aging daughter sitting near him and talking and making gestures of love. If both children knew much psychological distress and apparently opted out of full careers (having money enough from their steely finally successful mother), this was not just a function of being the children of an hard-working actress who demanded conformity of herself on stage and probably off. He disappeared, he deserted them and their mother too. It was traumatic. Again we are told Carrie had a voice, could have been a successful, belting out sorrowful songs; Todd sings for couple of minutes, showing he too inherited, in his case the light tenor that underlay Eddie Fisher’s voice. But as if they had been stung by an adder, they turned away — both at times to drugs to get through. His career was not destroyed until after Taylor left him for Richard Burton, another marriage, and his inability to adapt to the somewhat changed mores in the mainstream by the later 1960s. Which Debbie managed, just. He couldn’t act it seems.
The content was mostly the slightest of story-lines: the two women are preparing to go to collect Debbie’s last award; by the end they have achieved this feat, are home again, and Carrie belts out a song, partly to please her mother. Before their death it might have felt celebratory. Now it came across as nostalgia, melancholy. Along this is strung home-movies taken by Todd Fisher or Debbie. Todd, her son by Eddie Fisher, came in about half-way through, and we see his devotion to the mother too, and his candor. He too has had drug problems; he did not have near the career his sister has made; he was frank that the source of his core money is his mother’s legacy. Boone omitted the clips from the movie, Postcards from the Edge, as the relationship of its matter to Carrie and her mother was not gone into. One could see that Carrie Fisher was aware of how she when much younger enacted the worst grotesqueries of the hegemonic male culture as it imprints itself on women and that from around the 1990s she refused to do.
By the time my brief foray into this pair of women was done I was no longer sentimental over them, no more identifying than I did for Joan Rivers. Better than this I saw and see in them the difficulties of being an actress in the 21st century remain similar to those actresses had from the later 17th century. How they survived was similar. Where they suffered — from the relationships with men sexually that on the screen they had to control to draw audiences to them. I would not claim for Carrie Fisher anything like the original work and political vision behind the careers of say Helen Mirren, Harriet Walter, Emma Thompson (to cite familiar names) or the many women from the 19th through 20th century who wrote, worked as soloists, directed. But she belongs to their honorable group.
Carrie Fisher not far from her Princess Leia role: note how Debbie’s smile never changes
There is lurking in my findings an possible essay on the mother-daughter relationships in acting where both mother and daughter are fellow supportive players. I liked this joke in one of the many articles to have appeared: by Ann Hornaday:
If St Peter is waiting, one can’t hep but imagine him a bit intimidated by Fisher — coolly observing the scene and taking notes for mordant future reference — and Reynolds, adjusting her hair and makeup one last time before wowing him with a showstopper of an opening number.
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
The background and good essays behind this blog may be found in Maggie B. Gale andJohn Stokes’s The Cambridge Companion to the Actress, especially David Mayer, “The Actress as photographic icon: from early photography to early film;” Viv Gardner, “By Herself: the actress and autobiography, 1755-1939;” and Maggie B. Gales’ “Going Solo: an historical perspective on the actress and the monologue.” For those who’ve read my blog on Hollow Crown</em, Sophie Okonedo is discussed in Lynette Goddard’s “Side door and service elevators: racial constraints for actresses of colour.” The sad trajectory in the book is that apparently in the 21st century there has been a loss in progress: less unconventional roles for women, women enacting and “mirroring men,” fewer actresses daring to break out, even the Shakespearean actresses have had to enact the retrograde directors — though not so in the recent Hollow Crown.
Diana Birchall:
I saw the documentary, Bright Lights, last night – absolutely excellent, a must see for you, Ellen, if you haven’t seen it already! Oh – never mind, I see by your blog that you have. Oh, we do think differently about it. I thought it was so real. Will comment more when I’ve read what you say ….
Later: Read your excellent post and now see we don’t disagree at all. I only thought so because I noticed you called it a “weak film,” but the rest of your essay powerfully shows that’s not what you mean at all. Before seeing the film, you had seen Debbie & Carrie sentimentally, imagining a drama of mother/daughter devotion (perhaps because you have daughters) and a tearful ending; but that is not what the documentary showed to you (or me): it showed truth and reality, just so, and that is why it is so strong. Not Joan Rivers strong, not to be compared to anything else (despite overtones of Grey Gardens). It’s just a mirror, a prism, and lets us dispassionately see these two women as they were, their home, their relationship, and their history, and make up our own minds. It is compulsively fascinating and I will watch it again – my friend (who is ironically a girl-next-door movie star’s daughter) has taped it. You noted all the points that I did: your description of Carrie’s and Todd’s individual singing talents is exactly right; I like your sardonic calling Carrie “no Dorothy Parker”. The two women were limited, pathetic, shaped by the industry, by men, by each other, by ambition and self-absorption, but with flashes of startling talent and rueful honesty buried in tawdry trash, decay, and dysfunction. Oh, yes indeed you do watch this dry-eyed with a tinge of horror, as at pulling off paint or scabs.
Couple more things, Ellen. It’s revealing the filmmaker says he wanted it to be about Hollywood – and it is. It’s as much about the effect of the values of Hollywood, as about the mother/daughter relationship. Interesting too that you mention Debbie deliberately made an industry of playing the victim after Eddie left her for Liz. I have to think about that. I remember those events vividly too, of course!
Lastly, have you thought, has anybody thought, about the the heavy stress Carrie was under that must have contributed to killing her prematurely? At first I thought she might have been flying around the world so compulsively selling her book and herself, in a “manic” state. But the filmmaker makes clear that Debbie deteriorated very quickly into senility during the actual making of his film (and we can see it). This makes me conclude that Carrie was partly killed by the heavy stress on the caretaker. Which had extra resonance for her because she had mental illness issues, and must have been devastated by seeing her mother losing her own mind. Stress hurts the heart. If Debbie’s grief when Carrie died contributed to her own death, Debbie’s illness surely was a contributory cause of Carrie’s death.”
Me in reply: Well I still think it’s a weak film: I catalogued a number of important lacks: the not delving into Reynolds (which she probably would not permit) so we didn’t see the “other” dark side of the two women’s relationship. It matters (I did not bring this up so I’m glad of these comments and will put them on the blog) the slight story and lack of structure. Rivers’s film has a real story-line; so too another strong film, a bio-pic documentary of Serena and Venus Williams. It was made before they died, and probably in line with Carrie’s autobiographical works, meant to promote too. I hope another is made but probably not.
You make a good point though that I did not bring up: how much the stress of her mother’s deterioration contributed to Carrie’s massive heart attack. Watching her mother lose her capability; her mother had been her emotional mainstay. She was though also trying to make a movie comeback and I wonder how much that contributed too. The “trainer” (I find that word so revealing and would not succumb to that kind of enforced conformity, not let another person get that close to my body voluntarily); we see her exercising, being weighed. Not that is awful. What she had satirized she was back doing: a general in these allegorical science fiction films. She was pushing herself there, and for what? did she need the money? she does go to signings. What happened when she was in the UK? (say to bother her mind and heart both in feeling and organ). Did you see how she continued smoking and never without a coca-cola in her hand.
I went back and have now added that I envied Reynolds that day she died, that I too experienced “broken-heart syndrome” (it is a real physiological condition straining the heart), but no stroke afterward: my identification was more than sentimental. Together in life, they shared death. I was not able to do that.
Thank you for all these wonderful comments: I see the two struck a chord with you too. I suspect other women born in the 1940s, paying attention by the 1950s were moved too. Both of us respond to Jane Austen in some similar ways. I feel the badness of recent Austen criticism is a direct function of the return to the worst stereotypes of the 1950s in new permutations. Serious substantial Austen criticism was hardly extant before D.W.Harding and Marvin Mudrick. The books and essays which gain attention have turned back to hagiography, grotesque and outrageous theses and presentations about Austen (she is become an embarrassment again: “virgin or vixen”). The best usual rehearse historical context. So I can add that here on this Austen reveries blog too.
A sad story that represents many others in America. Jane
“My object now is to make my book known.” —April 3, 1862 http://www.FrancesRolleston.com
That’a right. A very sad story and if you think about the types Carrie embodied you realize why she made such sardonic speeches: only when I grew older did I realize Barbie dolls were used sadistically — and by girls. The Princess Leia doll was a Barbie. The mother found her one true relationship with her daughter.
I have your introduction on my desktop. I shall try to read it this afternoon. Sorry for being so tardy. I’ve not forgotten
Diana again: Yes indeed Ellen it did strike a similar chord; with my neighbor too, with her movie star background, it must have had added resonance. We watched it together and talked about it
We watched it together and talked about it. I might agree it’s a weak film by fiction drama standards, but not by documentaries of this gritty realistic sort. Just randomly thinking of examples, Crumb, not about a dramatic narrative story but it’s searing to watch. You might say it’s slice-of-life; no imposed artificial dramatic structure, more real that way. Anyway, it sure worked for me. I still think you may have been looking for emotion and narrative and were disappointed in the lack of them, but that only made it much better for me.
It isn’t a “bio-pic,” doesn’t conform to genre standards. I watched that interview with the filmmaker and he specifically says Reynolds would not let him see her real self. Carrie did, and he became close to her; but Debbie was trained to feel that there was a camera she had to be immaculate, smiling, pretending. On days when she was ill and looked awful, she would not allow cameras. That was training ingrained into her, from her era, the studio system; what you see in this documentary is all the filmmaker could get: the cracks.
To me the horror is that it is documenting her very rapid descent into senility. I don’t think we had to see the “dark side” of the women’s relationship. It was palpably there, just out of sight, just offstage the whole time looming and painful and heartbreaking. This was their patched-up, shored-up reaching out to each other in spite of it all. All this showed very clearly, to me. And besides, how could a documentary show such terrible episodes? It wasn’t acting. The doc was created out of the vast collection of videos Debbie herself took. She didn’t film the fight scenes. But you know they happened and this is the tattered remains of the survivors.
All those other “bio-pics” you cite were of women who came out on top and were in control and could impose a “story line,” false or not. These two women, lauded so ridiculously in the press as “strong women,” were both tattered wrecks, Debbie fading and clinging to her makeup, Carrie staggering around watching her mother die and being so loudly open because her reality was such a car wreck appearances didn’t matter. Carrie struggled, Debbie paid the check really. I don’t know why anybody would envy either or both of them, this was not a happy ending, it was a painful and ugly ending as most endings are.
Oh, as for Carrie’s stress – yes panic at her mother’s deterioration, and stress of the huge physical efforts for her comeback. That’s what I saw in videos of her flying back and forth to and from the UK and elsewhere doing promotions – hard to imagine anything more stressful than that. She must have had a pre-existing and undiagnosed heart problem. A friend whose coronary artery was so blocked there was only a thread left open, was saved by stent surgery (the same sort Peter had, but at a much worse stage). She mentioned to the doctor that she’d been about to fly to New York that day, and it might have happened there. “Oh no,” he said, “You would never have got there. Landing and take-off are the worst stress on hearts, and most people who die on planes (and there are plenty of them) do so on take-off or landing.” Carrie died in the last 15 minutes of the flight. Blocked arteries and stress. She pushed herself too hard, manically, on top of her stress about her mother. She was in a bad way.
To Diana, maybe I’m using the genre word differently than you. The best documentaries show the terrible sides of life, and a bio-pic is a form of documentary. Both non-fiction genre. As to all you say I liked the film for all that. I said I regarded Reynolds as gallant (even though her behavior in say bowing looked so grotesque, a parody of false feminine behaviors foisted on women which she obeyed all her life to make money and she made a lot of it).
I saw the daughter as misguided finally: the weakness of her autobiographies and the end of her speech was that in the end she bought into this culture, she then bowed down before it. Did she need the money:? we were not told. Rivers shows us why and how her came to kill himself; the viciousness of Johnny Carson and by the way the foulness of The Apprentice. But she was absolutely clear that she bought into this culture: what I wrote in my blog on her movie was it was marvelous to me how I came to like and admire a person I’d usually regard as enacting anathema roles.
And we must not lean too hard on genres: the crap movie which led to two actors getting best actor and best actress for the most stereotypical of roles. Izzy and I ruined our Xmas day by going to that film. What do we find there? a re-enactiment of Debbie Reynolds’s types in the 1950s. La-La-Land is the false side of Trump’s America, the lies. This documentary was the true side. So not sad but glad to see this brought out frankly, courageously too.
Michele Cusack: I’m sure the amount of cigarettes she smoked didn’t help. A very sad little film.
My reply is the same as to Diana: if you think about the types often Carrie embodied you realize why she made such sardonic speeches: only when I grew older did I realize Barbie dolls were used sadistically — and by girls. The Princess Leia doll was a Barbie. The mother found her one true relationship with her daughter. So not sad but glad for them and even a bit envious of the closeness. Yes.
Michelle again: Ellen, I was an admirer of Carrie’s writing (and sardonic often self lacerating wit) as well as of Debbie Reynolds as an iconic performer. (And like you, I almost never watch TV shows when they are aired, but managed to tune into the documentary on HBO Saturday night.) I was avid for those peeks behind the scene… but the film left me very depressed. Of course, it was good that they were close and that Debbie had Carrie to help her in those declining years. But I don’t think Debbie would have wanted to be shown like that publically if she really understood what was going on. And at times Carrie seemed like a parody of herself – neither as over the top nor as original or interesting as she thought she was. I guess it was very real, and certainly full of pathos, but not sure it should ever have been brought to the screen.
In reply: On I agree Reynolds would never want us to see behind her frozen mask. I hoped I conveyed what I thought of that. I don’t want to blame anyone but you lead me to say that the frozen mask, insistence on these stereotypes as what one must live wounded her daughter centrally. I’m with the Carolyn Heilburn school of feminist thought: to break the stereotypes, false images, unreal desires behind which such cruelty and betrayal can hide (as both women experienced with men) we must tell the truth.
My complaint about the film is it didn’t go far enough: it didn’t try to make sense of what we were seeing and Joan Rivers (who made the film herself) did. As I said it was made without any expectation they ‘d be dead. It was meant to be something to make a splash, to forward an image of herself Carrie Fisher wanted us to have: she didn’t want to be seen as a general or princess Leia, but just what we saw as representative of all of us, as what Hollywood can do to women and how they survive.
I wasn’t exhilarated, but I was energized to write a blog correcting the way Carrie is seen as breaking the taboos by her writing: rather it was the solo performances.
Michele: It did feel almost punitive to Debbie. And very sad that Carrie, in spite of her great successes, many truths revealed in her writing and performing, and no doubt a massive amount of therapy, never healed from her childhood wounds.
Me in reply again: I felt it to be deeply compassionate towards Reynolds. So we disagree there. She was blamed for nothing; no explicit criticism, all the words admiration and concern. Of course a picture and what she did and said in the film presented her. Some of Fisher’s solo performances were as calculated as her mother’s life-long self-presentation; nowadays therapies are often useless (cognitive behavior for example). I’d say many people never “get over” what happened to them in childhood; it’s part of them and, like her mother, she was probably again wounded in all sorts of ways across her career. It’s every women’s story — except as a Hollywood example. Carrie Fisher was luckier than most: got to be a big star, met and lived with gifted intelligent people, was loved. Healing is in my view an overused word (like celebration).
Another friend: “Given the various opinions, I am now interested in seeing Bright Lights. I remember a time when all the popular magazines contrasted Lucille Ball as the “good” mother–ie, strict– to Debbie Reynolds as the “bad” mother, spoiling her children. It’s interesting that Reynolds doesn’t seem to have been such a bad parent after all.”
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