Postcards From the Edge

“We’re designed more for public than for private.”

This reminds me of professional wrestling. The thing about wrestling is that for decades people were satisfied to take it mostly at face value. Not so much that the audience believed it to be real but that they enjoyed it for the stage show production that it was. 

A simple morality play, more or less, about a little guy (like you) who stands up and usually defeats a bully. 

But in the 1990s real life and the internet intruded into the proceedings and the audiences and the performers started co-existing in a different way. With winks and nods from the performers fans were asked to believe that while other parts of the show were fake this storyline was real. 

Stone Cold was fighting his real life boss (Vince McMahon really did own the WWE) and backstage politics really were holding some of the wrestlers at WCW back. 

This played out in major storylines that purported to be real. 

Of course, the thing about wrestling watching a wrestling show, a movie or reality TV is that it’s all a work. It’s all fake and even the stuff that has a kernel of truth is just grist for the mill. 

It was a thought that never left me as I watched Postcards From The Edge.  The movie is based on a novel written by Carrie Fisher, about her life as a movie star and a drug addict. The film centers on Fisher’s relationship with her famous mother, Debbie Reynolds. 

Here’s a key line: 

“You don’t want me to be a singer. You’re the singer. You’re the performer. I can’t possibly compete with you. What if somebody won?”

So the movie purports to show us life as a Hollywood actress with an overbearing movie star mom. Much of this, I didn’t really believe. 

Some of it, surely, comes from real life events and conversations. The mom being accosted by fans while trying to visit the daughter in rehab has got to be a true story. Right? 

However, drug addiction has never seemed so mild and alcoholism so controlled. OD’s don’t usually look that good when they arrive at the hospital. 

Fisher’s love life is a disaster and her mother is crazy but at the end everyone comes to an understanding and there is a handsome doctor waiting in the wings. 

It has this sheen of being too cute. Some scenes feel like they are required by the rules of screenwriting, the executive producer or the test audience. 

Which, again, is nonsense. Because I have no idea what’s real and what isn’t. It’s just that some of it feels real and some of it doesn’t. 

One little fact I enjoy is that Fisher’s book, apparently, hardly featured her famous mom at all. 

And yet, Debbie Reynolds — movie star — would not be denied.