For the last twenty-six hours, or thereabouts, I have been repeating this to myself every so often just in case I forget (I won't) and to make it more real.
Other folks have written eloquently about Carrie - nobody moreso than herself - so I'm not going to even try and have a crack.
I've spent a lot of today mucking around on the internet and taking some joy in the never-ending - if occasionally horrifying - creativity of fans. Lots of memes. I mean, LOTS OF THEM.
Spoiler Warning: There are references to features of Rogue One behind the jump.
My first reaction to Miss Fisher's death can be summed up with a thoroughly relevant clip:
The fans have been mostly awesome. Her mental health activism was brought up as quickly as that bloody bikini. Her script doctor work came up, along with mentions of Gary The Dog. And OH THE MEMES.
In particular, I've seen two things that stand in complete opposition to each other.
One was a picture meme on Twitter that I now can't find. It basically said: Dear Disney, Please don't kill off Princess Leia. Use CGI etc and let her survive the saga. Let us know that she's still out there...
That kind of thing. Never mind that this is all taking place a long time ago...
The other was a Cracked.Com article: Dear Star Wars, Please Let Carrie Fisher rest in peace.
I agree with both for entirely different reasons.
I agree with the first because I don't want Leia to die. I really don't. Even in fanfic (of which I read far too much), I hate it when she dies. It's as if the woman suffered so much AND PREVAILED that the least we can give her is a long life, lived off screen.
One of the things I heartily disliked about The Force Awakens - which I broadly enjoyed very much, and which led me to finally embrace the truth of my SW fan self - was that it robbed Leia of her Happily Ever After with her scruffy-looking nerf herder.
I agreed with it on an intellectual, storytelling basis. There's no way in any galaxy that Leia Organa and Han Solo actually lived happily ever after, at least not in the straightforward way we're told to believe in. No way they lived serenely. Perhaps less horribly if Ben Solo had gone a different route (hello again, fanfic)... but not serenely. Not happily ever after. But I wished they could've. If we'd left them alone, we'd never have to face the truth of their failures.
The Return of the Jedi allows us to ignore the question "What do you do with your revolution once you have it?", a question beautifully asked in the 1967 documentary Rocky Road to Dublin.
The Force Awakens requires us to face the question and the answers we don't really want. There was no happily ever after. Fascists don't go away just because you win. They go to Argentina, or they join UKIP or they repurpose the Republican party, or they head out into remote parts of the galaxy to regroup.
In the same way, I want to agree with the plea to keep Leia alive. I do agree, in that part of my heart held for sentimental, oft-nostalgic things, like Chas n Dave records, Disney movies and Star Wars itself.
I don't agree otherwise. I really did like Rogue One and my sentimental self loved seeing Peter Cushing. Really loved it. I didn't even mind that the FX aren't quite up to scratch and the Uncanny Valley is unnerving. Seeing Tarkin? Cool! Seeing an actor I admire "return" to us? Yay! Next, Errol Flynn, I hope? (Yes, my sentimental self is where I have to keep the problematic stuff).
However, my sentimental self is not my entire self, and I don't love the Cushing stuff, not really. While I think the story of Rogue One would be less-than without Tarkin's character, fundamental as he is, I'm not sure "bringing him back" is right or absolutely necessary. Krennic could've been a perfectly good villain. Perhaps more of that Vader chap?
It was not Peter Cushing. Guy Henry, who provided the motion capture, is a fine actor in his own right. This performance was not Peter Cushing. It lacked the real subtleties of a great performance, even if you forgive the not-quite-real appearance of the face.
Cushing's finest ever performance
I even enjoyed Tarkin on Star Wars: Rebels, the animated show which is far better than I expected, but... it's not the same as bringing someone back from the dead to perform for you.
The Independent published an article about the ethics a while back, and so did the Guardian. It's hard to deny that there are real issues around the possible uses of such tech, and a lot of the innovations currently emerging, but that's for another day and for an actual expert.
There's been all sorts of progressions with live action, performance capture and digital effects over the years. Gollum is a work of collaborative art between actor and animators, Avatar was a beautiful remake of Dances With Wolves, and I loved Maz Kanata in TFA (even though it's another example of 'making a black women into anything other than a black woman' yet again).
As it happens, I hated the way Rogue One ended and wish heartily it had ended a few seconds earlier, with the mere glimpse of her back. The effects just didn't work, at least for me. Fanservice can only take us so far, surely? Anything they can do will pale in comparison to the real life Carrie Fisher.
If the prequels proved nothing else, it's that no amount of special effects can quite trick the brain into believing something is there when it isn't. Tarkin's resurrection says the same of people, even though we've got another decade of amazing technological progress behind us now.What makes me pause most of all is this: anything will leave us feeling hollow and cheated.
I'm a Doors fan. I bounded to Wembley Arena some years ago to see 'the Doors', with Ian Astbury taking Morrison's place. I left so angry that my best friend Rachel was worried I'd punch someone. I'm a Thin Lizzy fan. I trooped to a bunch of venues until finally, in Finsbury Park, I left before the end of their set, unable to ignore the Lynott-shaped hole in the middle any longer. The only experience that came even close was a resurrected 'lost' album: Notes from San Francisco by Rory Gallagher. Even then, it was still him, still his music, and there was something not quite about it. He wouldn't have produced the album as it now exists; Freddie Mercury wouldn't have let Made in Heaven go out as it did.
We can't have our heroes back once they're gone, no more than I can spend a final five minutes with my Granddad. I would sell a kidney for that, but it won't happen, and if it did, I would probably feel worse at 05:01 than I do right now.
We want to see Carrie again, as we want to see David Bowie and Prince and the rest of the Grim Reaper's 2016 Greatest Hits. There's a reason we wish Elvis faked his death. We don't want to live in a world without them. They're our heroes, for better or worse, and their mortality feels unjust, unfair.
We can't have them back, and Death is still the last great leveller, the one certainty on which we can all depend (many seem to have avoided taxes, after all). Yet, reanimation is not a solution.
Fundamental to each and every human being is our autonomy. Our freedom to do with ourselves as we wish. Each human's right to do with themselves as they choose. To act, speak, think, feel, do and be as they choose - rightly/wrongly/wisely/foolishly/dangerously/epically - is fundamental. To bring someone back to perfom again, however and wherever and for whatever reason, is to take that away from them.
That is why this sort of thing will always be, ultimately, a bad and unfulfilling idea.
Technology may mean that we can, but the human soul means that we probably shouldn't.
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