Carrie Fisher Was the Inconvenient Narrator We Needed

David Cronenberg’s 2014 Hollywood noir, Maps to the Stars, begins with a young woman (Mia Wasikowska) getting into a taxi at LAX, telling the driver that she’s moved to Los Angeles because she made friends with Carrie Fisher on Twitter. There’s something clearly off about this young woman, so her claim seems sketchy at best: Is she a deluded stalker? An unhinged fabulist? By the way her taxi driver responds, in any case, it’s clear that it’s not the first time he’s heard a story like hers.

But without giving away too much of the weird, unsettling truth about the young woman, it turns out her story was true: Shortly after, Carrie Fisher shows up as herself, advising the aging ingenue Havana (Julianne Moore) to hire the odd but driven young women she’s befriended on Twitter. In what ends up being the only refreshing moment in a slice of Tinseltown life that gets uglier and more twisted by the minute, Havana asks Fisher how she’s doing and, in response, hears “When I get in touch with myself, I’ll let you know.”

The line might be a parody of Hollywood self-absorption, or a callback to the metaphysical musings of Shirley MacLaine, who played Fisher’s famous mother in Postcards From the Edge. But in a largely humorless film, it was a moment that stood out because it contrasted so perfectly with Fisher’s well-earned reputation for uncomfortable—even, sometimes, unwelcome—truths, underscoring what so endeared Fisher to audiences in both her fictional and nonfictional roles.

Fisher’s indelible portrayal of When Harry Met Sally’s Marie, Sally’s best friend and no-nonsense matchmaker, set the tone for such roles. A romantic Cassandra with wash-and-wear hair, Marie carries a dog-eared Rolodex of available men and delivers decrees like “The right man for you might be out there right now. And if you don’t grab him, someone else will, and you’ll have to spend the rest of your life knowing that someone else is married to your husband.” That Marie begins the film embroiled in her own go-nowhere affair with a married man (“You’re right, you’re right, I know you’re right”) doesn’t matter; her single-minded purpose and impatience with Sally’s stutter-step romances make for some of the best rom-com tough love ever.

Then there was Fisher’s cameo in a 2000, L.A.–set episode of Sex and the City, in which she realizes that her housesitter (Vince Vaughn) has been masquerading as a high-flying talent agent to score points with an unwitting Carrie Bradshaw. “I thought you were an agent!” exclaims Carrie B., scrambling out of bed. “Please,” scoffs Carrie F., adding, “I wish I could get my agent to water my plants.” When East Coast Carrie tries to bond over writing (“I’m Carrie. You’re Carrie. You write. I write!”) the withering look she gets in response—bitch, please—scorches right through the screen.

But perhaps the best and most poignant example of Fisher as inconvenient truth-teller came in 2007’s 30 Rock episode “Rosemary’s Baby,” in which she plays Liz Lemon’s comedy role model Rosemary Howard, a former powerhouse of subversive television-comedy writing who ends up getting a little too real for Liz’s bourgeois taste. But Rosemary’s assertion that “women become obsolete in this business when there’s no one left that wants to see them naked” was a truth bomb that reverberated into Hollywood’s burgeoning feminist consciousness. (Fey expanded on it a few years later when she opined in The New Yorker that “The definition of ‘crazy’ in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore,” and it’s evident in the likes of comedy sketches like Inside Amy Schumer’s “Last Fuckable Day.”)

Many of us hailed Fisher’s most recent spate of unvarnished truths, delivered on the press junket for 2015’s The Force Awakens with almost palpable boredom and punctuated by cameras cutting away to her beloved service dog, Gary, as brave acts of rebellion against the Hollywood-industrial complex. But cutting off dumb questions on Good Morning America or pushing back on ridiculous tweets about her weight was, in so many ways, business as usual for Fisher. The audiences just needed time to catch up—and now that we have, losing her lodestar is that much sadder.