Not to make light of Ms. Fisher’s RIP thread, but we still have 3 days left in 2016. Can we get Hollywood to organize some kind of community watch program on our most aged and vulnerable icons so we don’t lose anyone else?! Get someone over to Bill Murray’s place right now. Someone check on John Cleese, Michael Caine and Sean Connery, and for the love of all that’s holy DO NOT let 2016 take Sir Ian McKellen!!
I never read any of Carrie Fisher’s work, though there’s a retrospective of her writing over at A.V. Club that makes me want to. Here’s a passage from one of her books, about a woman who finds out she is pregnant by a man who has just left her:
“The baby tide had come in, leaving her barren beach of a body strewn with one perfect baby shell. Cora put her ear to it and heard her whole life roar.”
Carrie & Debbie on Oprah in 2011:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzjgp2XebwE&feature=youtu.be&t=11m22s
This cinnabon thing shows how PC can go amok. I saw similar situation with Steve Martin who tweeted: “When I was a young man, Carrie Fisher was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. She turned out to be witty and bright as well.”
And then got ripped badly for being sexist and insensitive. He eventually removed the tweet.
Seriously, when did we get so PC that acknowledging beauty is now wrong?
I feel for Steve Martin, I do. I’m sure he didn’t mean it the way it was read by many, but before you jump on the anti-anything PC wagon, I think you need to read and watch more about Carrie’s message, about being more then a beautiful princess and certainly more than a “beautiful creature”. Beautiful creature is such a… weird way of complimenting someone. Has anyone ever called you a beautiful creature?
As best I can tell, some people exist solely for, by, and on rage and its stunted sibling outrage. I avoid social media mostly because of this. But I guess most people would consider that a drastic option.
I feel the same way about that as I did DrDel’s highly inappropriate comment about Carrie Fisher in the other thread. Frankly, there’s a time and place for moral grandstanding, and the immediate mourning period for someone’s death is not it. What Steve Martin wrote was heartfelt and sincere and if it was offensive to someone because they disliked the verbiage, maybe they need to just hold that in for just a wee bit and let the remembrance of Carrie Fisher take the spotlight instead of their overriding need to correct someone. I find this kind of thing is more about the accuser saying “look at how awesome and sensitive I am” as opposed to “let’s commiserate and bond over our feelings for the deceased.”
None of that even addresses the “when I was a young man” part of Martin’s tweet which implies he had to mature enough to see the better qualities of Carrie Fisher.
DrDel attacked Carrie herself. These other individuals went after Steve Martin because he was half a step away from calling Carrie Fiscer a beautiful thing, an object, something she hated being. I am not sure what his actual intentions are but I can assure you this, it is never a compliment to to have someone call a woman a beautiful thing. The only reason we’re talking about it here though is rshetts posted it and is equating it with some sort of PC cause, and I think that’s misplaced. A lot of woman don’t want to be a thing to be remembered, they want to be a person… and more than that, that was one of Carrie’s messages, one of her pursuits.
Carrie Fisher: Youth&BeautyR/NOT ACCOMPLISHMENTS,theyre theTEMPORARY happy/BiProducts/of Time&/or DNA/Dont Hold yourBreath4either/ifUmust holdAir/takeGarys
OK. I’m not going to keep rehashing it because I really do find this sort of argument tasteless in a remembrance discussion. I’m just pointing out that the binary misogynist/SJW interpretation of the issue misses some nuance that includes Steve Martin not being a terrible person.
I’m celebrating Carrie Fisher as more than a princess on Star Wars. She had a distinct message about women in hollywood and women in general. And if someone is going to post something polar to that position in her RIP topic and politicize it, then I think Carrie would want someone to point out what her message actually was.
Hey you’re entitled to your opinion on the matter, but look at it this way: setting aside Steve Martin’s word choice, do you really think he viewed Carrie Fisher as an object and not a human being?
Maybe not, but maybe we should give the people who took his literal word choice to heart even half the benefit of the doubt as we’re Steve Martin’s unknown thoughts and feelings about it. His word choice of creature created doubt, and that’s not an anti-PC or PC position; it’s just a poorly chosen word that could be read as a man grieving without the perfect word or one of the problems in hollywood Carrie talked about so frequently.
I disagree, at least with the actions of those involved. These individuals are choosing to parse a grieving individual’s word choice in the most unfavorable light and then attacking. At best that’s going off half-cocked and making someone’s bad day even worse, and for what purpose?
I wonder how many of them even know who Steve Martin is? My little sister doesn’t know him. I suppose he has a verified account, but that can be for any kind of celebrity. I know he’s an actor, and I remember watching him as a kid, so just assume he knew Carrie. He’s old, very old, and that kind of language was probably okay once but not now… to be clear, according to what’s being reported, he didn’t call her beautiful woman, beautiful soul, a beautiful star or actress, or even just beautiful; he said creature, beautiful creature.
To be clear, I’m not angry with him. I think he chose his words poorly, but this everything that stirs the internet has to be some sort of weird PC mantra is just ridiculous. It’s humans being humans misunderstanding each other. People are going to grieve in different ways, and one of those ways is anger and strong protectionism for what you think the person who died stood for.
I think the woman who told the story of how a fan told her “I’ve thought about you every day from when I was 12 to 20. Every day? Well, 4 times a day…” (something like this) would probably be okay with Steve Martin’s words. But what do I know?
Yeah but that’s my point, if you don’t know who Steve Martin is why blow up at him? I totally get that it’s a misunderstanding and there are hurt feelings. I get the whole “background radiation” thing that makes women’s lives tougher than they should be, online and off. It’s where things went from there that seems so crazy to me. You’re not angry at Steve Martin but a whole hell of a lot of people seem to be. But this could have been sorted out relatively easily. I don’t know that it’s Twitter’s fault, but it seems to make it so hard to relate to someone else as a human being, which, again, is mainly why I avoid it.
Social Media doesn’t allow us to convey feelings or meaning very well. He may very well have tried to compliment her, and the people that went after her probably felt they were protecting not just her image but her message. Twitter is especially hard since it has so few characters. So they clashed, but now this PC vs anti-PC approach just makes everyone enemies of each other; a world at war.
It’s extremely hard to remember all humans are not perfect. I’ve been kind of amazed myself with how many people viewed Carrie Fisher as their first action actress, first strong female character role model which I assume is because I am not a 70s baby, I’m an 80s… which means Sigourney Weaver sticks out to me more for that as did Grace Jones and to some degree Linda Hamilton. So I’ve been appreciating the stories others have been sharing of Carrie in that regard.
As I mentioned above, I’m developing an appreciation for her way with words. I think I’m going to look into her books - from what I’ve been hearing they’re really good. Seems like the best way to try to celebrate her life. On an unrelated note, I’ve been listening to a fair bit of George Michael songs this week, as I’d kind of forgotten he existed.
I remember him pretty much once a year because Wham’s big Christmas song is always on my playlist. So many losses this year… and not of the 80/90 year old variety either.
And yeah, Carrie Fisher has one book I never got around to The Princess Diarist… I enjoy Star Wars on a surface level, and I was kind of afraid it might ruin my perception of the series a bit. Sometimes the untold stories just darken things I thought were magical even though as an adult I can already see how unmagical some of these things were/are.