Instant gratification takes too long."
Meryl Streep popularized that brilliant one-liner in the essential showbiz comedy Postcards from the Edge (1990) but the line pre-dates the film, having emerged from the actress/writer Carrie Fisher's sharp pen (or was it tongue?) some time earlier. The line is so good it ended up on t-shirts. Fisher's best lines in print (multiple books, my personal favorite being "Surrender the Pink") or on the screen (Postcards from the Edge plus much script-doctoring) often sound exactly like things she may have uttered spontaneously in real life first with that unmistakably frank, darting, and mischievous wit. The showbiz icon passed away this morning after a heart attack aboard a plane this past Friday but her work and her influence will live on.
The irony of her delicious and beloved quip above isn't hard to miss...
For all of Carrie Fisher's bold alchemizing of the insatiable now of drug addiction and mental illness into comedy, her greatest gift to the world and to popular culture was in the long game: her endurance, her recovery, and her embrace of her full self as an aging woman. She'd play the little Hollywood games and banal chatter to promote the revival of the Star Wars franchises (this moment discussing weight loss is just sublimely Carrie), but never without broad gestural side-eye and bracing 'isn't this stupid?' honesty.
Like most little kids from my generation I first fell in love with Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia Organa in the Star Wars movies. That Leia-centric fandom peaked with the gold bikini (plastered all over my bedroom wall in the house I grew up in (with a little Luke Skywalker on the side - crushing on both twins is not required but wise) but sometimes, looking around the internet, I fear that nobody else grew out of their Leia fetishization. If that's all Carrie Fisher remained to them, they only hurt themselves, missing out on countless endearing and sometimes brilliant contributions to culture.
After falling for Leia, I personally went backwards discovering her perfect foul-mouthed breakthrough in Shampoo opposite Warren Beatty and even further back to learning more about Debbie Reynolds's movies. Carrie often pointed the way there, too, always by her mother's side in the end despite their bickering and making Debbie's own story, Carrie's "origin story" after all, into great comedy as in her Wishful Drinking stage show).
wishful drinking - Carrie's one woman show
Chief among Fisher's triumphs was Postcards from the Edge (1990), her absolutely essential book/movie/autobiographical exorcism of showbiz demons. With Postcards as with her wonderful mental health advocacy, Carrie Fisher was always turning her personal pain into either audience pleasure... or actual lifelines for those with similar ailments.
That's a gift that really can't be overvalued since it's so rare. The more common human impulse is of course to lash out, misery loving company most of all. But that's for lesser mortals, and Carrie Fisher was a true great offscreen whether fighting to destigmatize mental illness, or puncturing the patriarchy with her grey haired matronly sassiness in her final years as a global celebrity.
Meryl Streep & Shirley Maclaine with the people they sorta played in "Postcards," Debbie Reynolds & Carrie Fisher
Her onscreen career outside of General Leia (and what a fitting promotion that was in A Force Awakens) was never quite as radically brilliant as her offscreen wit and humanity, but it, too, had significant peaks entirely outside of those that happened in that galaxy far far away. For your viewing pleasure... and we do very much mean pleasure... please make time for her pushy "April" in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), her wisecracking married bestie in When Harry Met Sally (1989) and that horny casting director of Soapdish (1990).
Related Articles
Why I Love Carrie Fisher - by Kyle Stevens, the author of Mike Nichols
Twins: Luke & Leia - another personal story of Nathaniel's fandom