2016 sees the loss of a lot of iconic figures in the entertainment business. I was telling a friend that when people you knew as a kid and saw them as icon or idols or people you looked up to are dropping off like flies, you know you are really growing old.
One of the latest casualty was Carrie Fisher, the world’s beloved Princess Leia from the Star Wars series. Even with the success of the latest ‘The Force Awaken’, the original Star Wars series is still seen by a lot of people, especially the generation X, or the “X’ers” as the token and best of the whole saga. I personally have watched it countless number of times, and at one stage it was my cheer up movie when I was down, although can’t really say ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ was cheering in any sense. But at least they made me feel I had something to hold on to.
With Carrie Fisher’s passing, it suddenly created a void in this perfection of the Star Wars universe that was once a big part of me. One of the things I admired about Carrie Fisher is that she did not try to maintain the princess visage to maintain a perfect image. She is brave enough to admit her follies and how hard she worked to try to amend them. The courage that was seen in her book ‘Postcard from the Edges’ was something that inspired me that there is nothing too scary to face if you truly want to meet the challenges of your life. Not that I would want to dabble in drugs or alcohol addiction or any kind of such things but the courage to face them and tried to tackle them is a courage I personally feel that I should have if I want to face the obstacles in my life. It gave me the energy I needed to summon when I am in a bad situation in my life.
Carrie Fisher also did not shy away from talking about misogyny and sexism in the entertainment industry. What she said still exists but her views had been very frank – from her unwillingly and unwittingly compliance to what the industry regarded as standards for actresses’ looks and how they should behave; to how wrong she felt and how she did not like that she had compromised to perpetuate this in the industry. She once talked about how her iconic Princess Leia hairstyle came by because “her face were considered as too chubby for the screen so they created two big buns to contain her face to make her look less chubby”. It was funny now but it must be extremely hurtful when people talked about that in her face at that time when she was merely 19.
I still remembered how I could not understand as a kid that why Princess Leia needed to wear that golden bikini in ‘Return of the Jedi’ when she was supposed to be a kick ass heroine. Not that she did not look pretty, she looked extremely hot in it in fact, but as a kid I just couldn’t make sense of that outfit and how it fit into all the other things that she was doing at that time. It did not necessarily destroyed my view on the character but it was one of the unsolved riddles for me as a kid until Carrie Fisher talked about it candidly much much later. This also helped me understood how our society cannot irrevocably accept strong women and heroines and must at some point sexualise them so that they, even as strong women, have a place in a man’s world. This is the sad world that we are living in.
Carrie Fisher’s passing burnt a hole in me in a way that it created a strange sense inside me about losing someone I never knew in person but yet extremely integral to me in most of my life. I never felt such kind of loss as I did with Carrie Fisher because no matter what happened in real life, she would always be the strong, quick wit and sharp tongued Princess Leia, golden bikini cladding or not. She is not a side kick to any men in Star Wars but a strategist and diplomat that no men in the whole saga was able to become, lightsabre wielding or not.
Star Wars will never mean the same to me, but Star Wars will also remain the same for me as I am not going to let this precious memory of an icon and role model to depart from me simply because of Carrie Fisher’s passing. She will always be the Princess Leia whom I respect and look up to.
