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When I first heard about Hollywood legend Debbie Reynolds dying within a day of her daughter Carrie Fisher, it reminded me of folk tales and fairy tales about couples who loved each other so much that death could not part them. That might seem a wee bit sentimental on my part, and yet, the new HBO documentary Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds seems to only add more glitter to this myth. The film is a sweet ode to the pair’s complicated relationship with Hollywood and a love letter to their intertwined lives.
HBO might have rushed the release of Bright Lights to help fans pay “tribute” to the fallen duo — and that could be seen as a macabre move to capitalize on the recent tragedy — but the film actually does carry with it an eerie sense of foreboding. Even as we’re watching the two women dazzle on stage or crack jokes, there are odd moments that seem to predict their recent deaths. Reynolds is fighting with her health throughout the film. There’s a grisly fall that leaves her with a purple jaw and she’s far from lucid for her big night accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award. When discussing what it means to her, her kids, Carrie and Todd, tease her about future honors and she says she’ll be beyond. Fisher also has a moment or two where she makes a wisecrack about meeting her maker.
Still, Bright Lights is about life. Early on in the film, Fisher explains about her mother: “Performing gives her life. It feeds her in a way family cannot. That’s why I think we’ve always been frustrating. People aren’t cooperative. Audiences are – when you’re her, they are.”
The relationship that the two try to establish for the camera is one of the pristine movie star who wanted to groom her daughter to follow in her footsteps. Fisher says, “My mother would say, ‘Do drugs, do whatever you need to do, but why don’t you sing?’” The irony is that even as Fisher rebelled against her mother’s “stage mom” designs, she stumbled into everlasting fame with Star Wars. And so, what we have is an odd look at two odd lives: Reynolds and Fisher are women who have found themselves and lost themselves on screen. Their anchors? One another.
There is a specific type of mother-daughter relationship that is symbiotic in scope. It’s not just about parent and child, but two beings so intertwined that they mirror each other’s best and worst attributes. At best, this plays out like the idealized relationship on Gilmore Girls and at worst it reaches the grisly nadir of Grey Gardens. In reality — and I say this as someone who herself is a little too tight with her own widowed mother — it looks more like Reynolds and Fisher’s relationship in Bright Lights.
The two women are like yin and yang. Reynolds is a chipper pleaser whose personality was crafted by the studio system. For all her heartbreaks and all her frailty, she still feels a need to put on the wig and glitter and get on stage. Hiding in her act is where she feels most like herself. So it should almost come as no surprise that she’s head over heels for her daughter Carrie Fisher, an artist defined by her blunt, darkly hilarious honesty. Fisher’s struggles are always on the surface and bleed into her art. Her manic depressive disorder splits her personality into two characters — but she never hides either. She excavates them for the camera and makes comedy out of them.
To contrast that with her mother, there’s a devastating scene where Debbie is recuperating from an emotionally harrowing day. She had to auction off the last of her beloved Hollywood memorabilia — which included pieces she had a personal attachment to — and then attempt to conduct an interview while everything falls apart around her. She’s literally bruised under her heavy makeup. She holds her face together in a pristine mask, but her eyes keep losing their light.
After seeing Bright Lights, it didn’t seem surprising at all to me that the ailing Reynolds immediately followed her daughter in death. The two lived side-by-side in a gated compound and were co-dependent to the extreme. Fisher was constantly fretting over her mother’s physical health while Reynolds was aware that she needed to keep up spirits for Fisher’s mental health. Reynolds tearfully explains to the camera that Fisher needs constant reassurance that she’s loved to help fight off the demons; The same could be said for Reynolds, but she needed the love of the audience.
For better or worse, Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher lived their lives as twin stars spiraling in orbit with one another. Carrie’s quirky brother Todd and luminous daughter Billie Lourd bop in and out of their path, but really, the two women were as bound together in life as they now are in death. Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds is an exploration of this unusual relationship and a celebration of the beautiful lives left behind.
