Not A Princess, but Always a Custodian of Hope

I don’t usually get upset over celebrity deaths.  It isn’t that they don’t matter, it’s just it seems selfish and presumptive to mourn someone you don’t really know, when they have actual friends and family who will miss them on a day-to-day basis.  We just watch them perform and act like we know them, when in truth we don’t.  Often we don’t know much about them at all, and that’s as it should be.

So it’s strange to me, how deeply the death of Carrie Fisher has touched me, today.  But then again, it isn’t really that strange at all.  In 1977, with the release of “Star Wars,” retroactively sub-titled “Episode IV: A New Hope,” Ms. Fisher, along with her co-stars Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill, became not only household names but unavoidable faces almost overnight.  People my age grew up with those three faces, and names, on our walls, on our shirts, on our TV’s, on our lunchboxes.  We had action figures modeled after them.  They literally were part of the everyday stuff in our lives.

For a lot of people my age, Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia represents a first crush, but to reduce the character to that does her a disservice; she was one of the first examples I can recall of how strong and brave a woman can be, and that more than anything is the true legacy of the character Princess Leia Organa.

It’s a common thing, when a beloved celebrity dies, to canonize them, to talk about how great they were and when we do that it’s obviously done out of a desire to celebrate the legacy of their work, and their public persona.  This is, after all, what they leave behind.  I won’t try to canonize Carrie Fisher.  I don’t believe she’d have much use for that sort of thing anyway.  You can’t gloss over all her problems, because to do so is to undermine much of what she accomplished in her life.

Ms. Fisher struggled with mental illness and addiction.  She and Harrison Ford had an affair during the filming of the original Star Wars: I could be wrong, not yet having read “The Princess Diarist,” but I suspect on some level she was looking to get hurt when that happened.  Three years later, the two were drinking buddies during the filming of The Empire Strikes Back, and were pretty much permanently hungover during working hours.

By the time they were making Return of the Jedi, she was a full-blown coke addict.  When you know it, you can see it all over her.  Her glow is gone, her eyes dull and flat.  She’s much more subdued than in previous films, barely present at all.  Very little of her trademark wit and strength are to be found here.  And indeed, in the previous two, Leia’s smartassery is due to Fisher herself reworking dialogue — a role she would take on for a great number of Hollywood films throughout her career.  She was in high demand as a script doctor, and was a successful author of novels and autobiographies — a line that is often blurred as her novels were mostly thinly-veiled autobiographies themselves.

The thing is, in writing about her struggles, she was able to not only take them on directly, but in doing so she was also shining a light on some awful things that a huge number of people deal with on a daily basis.  She was able to advocate for people struggling with mental illness, she was able to lead conversations about addiction.  That took real courage, and strength.  It shows that while the heroic Princess Leia Organa may have just been a role she played, Carrie Fisher could be heroic, too.  Her struggles were real and she was real in how she talked about them and dealt with them.

So, while I cannot say that I knew Carrie Fisher, I can absolutely say that I think she deserves credit for fighting the good fight, and for being an advocate for the everyday people who deal with issues just like hers. Carrie Fisher’s wit, humility, and strength are the things I will always remember her by.