The Edge of Glory: The Queerness of “Postcards from the Edge”
Performance and parental issues in Carrie Fisher and Mike Nichols’ classic Hollywoody satire
(Author’s Note: This was presented as an introduction to All About Their Mothers at Nitehawk. The series runs from May 7 to May 29.)
I’m genuinely happy, probably for the first time,” Nichols told his therapist. “I love my wife. I love my life. I love my kids — they’re turning out to be great people. I love my work. Why am I still so pissed off? Why hasn’t that gone away?”
“It can’t,” his therapist replied. “That’s who you are.”
– Mike Nichols: A Life by Mark Harris
Carrie Fisher had originally envisioned Postcards — her semi-autobiographical novel from 1987 that effaced herself and the Hollywood mores she grew up around — not as a movie but as a solo performance piece. But when she sent the book to Nichols, he told her he saw it as a movie. And so the work began and Fisher “[threw] the book into the backyard and [set] fire to it”. While working on the screenplay together, Nichols’ note after every draft was “Write more scenes with the mother.”
I’ve been obsessed with mother/gay child dynamics since I was 19, around the time I had come out. And even earlier than that, I could feel the unhinged magnetic attraction and repulsion between myself and my own mother. We have a complicated relationship; after my father’s death in 2009, my once close relationship with my mother imploded. And since then, I’ve been searching for complex mother/gay child relationships in cinema, particularly because it was my mother who cultivated my love of movies. She showed me Bringing Up Baby and To Wong Foo and Chicago by the time I was 7, so sometimes I wonder if she reverse engineered me to be gay.
I understand that perhaps it’s unusual to include Postcards from the Edge in a series of movies ostensibly about queer children with mother issues, when Meryl Streep’s thinly veiled Carrie Fisher cosplay is not textually queer, and director Mike Nichols spent the last years of his life married to Diane Sawyer. But how can you exclude a movie where the director had literally said to his writer, “Write more scenes with the mother”?
And yet, if we liberal arts school expand our ideas of queerness to include a kind of essential other who is faced with a fundamental dissonance between who she is or might be with how the world pays to see her, Postcards fits in (partially because I am awesome at doing intellectual backflips). But seriously: if we understand queerness not only as an aspect who is in bed with us but as a framework for conceptualizing how we make ourselves in the world, Suzanne Vale is in many ways a quintessential example, particularly given the push and pull between the Hollywood industry, her mother, and the audience that has come to see her and this film. Postcards’ is a prismatic poison inked letter to performance and spectatorship, and how those things obviously define the entertainment industry, but more prosaically are inescapable forces in banal everyday life. In both Fisher’s book and Nichols’ adaptation, Suzanne finds herself caught between being sharply aware of how she is performing for people (her mother, producers, directors, etc.) and her inability to relinquish that impulse, when every transgression is viewed as self-destructive.
Reflecting on her delusions in rehab, Suzanne Vale opines in Fisher’s book, “It’s like when I was younger and I used to fall in love with homosexuals, because they had rejected me before they even met me.” But, even if Suzanne isn’t macking up on CCH Pounder or Annette Bening, Postcards is both set in and refracts a world of queer spectatorship. Meryl Streep, Carrie Fisher, and Shirley MacLaine have long been anointed to the pantheon of actresses gay men are obsessed with, the halls of the rehab center are lined with portraits of fellow addict and studio system pawn Judy Garland, and homosexuals clamor to MacLaine’s Debbie Reynolds inspired mother figure. Suzanne regards this fandom as both somewhat worthy of skepticism but also a prize she couldn’t dare to compete for against her mother. (You can see the warped nonfiction reflection of this dynamic in the Grey Gardens-esque HBO doc Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, in which Carrie says, “Far more than I would ever want, I know what my mother feels and wants.”)
From Mike Nichols: A Life by Mark Harris:
When the artist Norman Sunshine, who had been commissioned to create a poster, arrived at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills for a meeting, he recalls, “there was Mike, there was Meryl Streep, there was Ann Roth, and there was Carrie Fisher on the floor, quite stoned and telling us these terrible personal things about Debbie Reynolds, about her wigs and this and that. I was embarrassed.”
Nichols had been drawn to the material partially because of his experiences being addicted to Halcion, an addictive sleep aid, but also because of the parent/child dynamic, a running theme from the beginning of his career doing sketch comedy with Elaine May to his first film Who’s Afraid of Vriginia Woolf? (make believe kid notwithstanding), to his breakout generation defining hit The Graduate. These are relationships that are dysfunctional but not necessarily histrionic; he’s not doing high melodrama like Douglas Sirk or Pedro Almodovar. Rather, not unlike Fisher, his comedic sensibility is punchy and sharp and droll, his observations of mother upstaging daughter, daughter crying out for help via overdose, and their whirlwind talking past one another nerveshredding, not campy.
These streaks of bitter, clenching resentment towards the mother figure, crisscrossed with an Oedipal vibe, seem to be at least somewhat resonant with his early life. The aftermath of his father’s death at the age of 44 in June 1944 spelled doom for his relationship with his now-depressive mother. “Everything wounded her,” he said. “‘I raised you so you could say that to me? Thank you very much, I deserve that.’ It went on for hours, days.”
Harris writes, “For most of his adulthood, he had kept his distance, maintaining their connection, which his brother describes as ‘polite and indulgent.’” Robert continues, “‘Mike suffered the most from our mother’s phobias and neuroses, which were numerous.’”
One of the standout scenes of Postcards features MacLaine atop a piano holding court and singing “I’m Still Here” from Follies, a musical about the ghosts of fame, and the haunting effect a life on the stage can have on people constantly chasing after the ephemerality of celebrity long after it’s disappeared. The original words penned by Stephen Sondheim were meant to invoke Joan Crawford’s life and career. But here, Sondheim tailored new lines to Shirley MacLaine’s public persona. MacLaine’s Debbie-core effortlessly articulates the ease with which she can make all things, including a coming home from rehab party for her daughter, about herself; and Streep’s caramel softness melts in your hand before it hardens and you can see how easily someone can calcify, act out, and leave all that tenderness to be eaten up by others.
Streep — elegant, sophisticated, dripping — is pretty decisively not like Carrie Fisher — coarse, sardonic, cutting — but that Streep is cast in a roll that makes her famous malleability into a liability is what makes Postcards so interesting. This initial discrepancy between their personas or sensibilities is initially what took me a while to come around to the film; but that Streep figures as a kind of opposite or foil to Fisher by playing her presents Streep and her vision of Suzanne as both wish fulfillment (able to reach a pliability that Fisher the actress never found) and nightmare (even if Fisher were the most versatile actor, she would still have Debbie as her mother).
So Postcards presents itself as the fun house mirror this side of Sunset Boulevard, replete with neuroses and jagged portrait of filmmaking not as art but relentless commerce out of which art occasionally springs, and mother/child dynamics not as serene but as an endless competition for the assertion of one’s own self worth in a world ready to commodify that value, and out of which love intermittently emerges and repairs the damage. It is glazed with the glittering sheen of a gold plated statue that would of course catch the attention of gay people. (Streep was nominated for an Oscar, and she and MacLaine were nominated for Golden Globes.) Though he had been an industry player for nearly three decades at this point and had made a habit of plumbing the depths of heterosexual maladjustment, what else was it about straight culture as debilitating performance, and the core wounds that child and mother inflict upon one another, that drew Nichols in as a pet subject?
When the photographer Richard Avedon invited Nichols and May over to his apartment up on Park Avenue, Harris writes that, “something between Nichols and Avedon had been sparked — a charged and complicated kinship that, over the decades, would be tinged with envy, need, and longing.” In Avedon: Something Personal, written by former studio manager Norma Stevens and Steven ML Aronson, the biographers put to paper rumors that had simmered over the years: that Nichols was bisexual and that he and Avedon had been entwined in a long, tumultuous affair. According to Stevens, Avedon is alleged to have said, “At one point we even thought about running away together. Eloping, we called it — leaving our wives and our lives and moving to Gay Paree . . . We chickened out, but we were together for years.”
But while the rumors remain unconfirmed, it’s undeniable the frequency with which the tension between queerness and society, and parent and queer child, persists within his work: not only is it in Postcards, but it’s percolating beneath machismo off of Carnal Knowledge, the lesbian Cher and the dangerous and masculinist factory work in Silkwood, and the Clinton generation gap in The Birdcage. In Nichols’ work, the mother and the queer child elongated to epic, transcendent planes in Angels in America or shrunk to the quotidian guilt tripping of Nichols and Mays’ most loved sketches, literally titled “The Mother and Son”.
Nichols’ movies are suffused with an underlying existential dread about how we move forward while having to live with the mistakes we’ve made, and just as importantly, the ones we’ve inherited. We either cope with the reality that some of us will always have to keep up with what society expects of us, what norms we have to wriggle out from beneath, or we don’t. And amidst that struggle we still try to create art but also ourselves, with our mothers there or otherwise. Suzanne does. And so did Mike. And so did Carrie. That’s who they were.
