clock menu more-arrow no yes mobile

Filed under:

Carrie Fisher dead at 60, strangled by own bra (is the obituary Carrie Fisher wanted)

Here’s how Fisher would’ve reported her own death.

Star Wars Celebration 2016 Photo by Ben A. Pruchnie/Getty Images for Walt Disney Studios
Alex Abad-Santos is a senior correspondent who explains what society obsesses over, from Marvel and movies to fitness and skin care. He came to Vox in 2014. Prior to that, he worked at the Atlantic.

On Tuesday, December 27, legendary actress Carrie Fisher, 60, was found dead, drowned in silver moonlight and strangled by her own brassiere.

That’s what Carrie Fisher wanted her obituary to say.

Fisher will always be known for playing Star Wars’ Princess Leia — now known as General Leia, as of the film franchise’s latest crop of movies. But that role paled in comparison to the person Fisher was offscreen: a fearless advocate for mental health, someone with a supernatural ability to make us smile, a gifted writer brimming with honesty and wit, and someone who wanted to be known for dying via underwear strangulation.

Star Wars was lucky to have Leia, and the world was lucky to have Fisher.

In her 2009 memoir Wishful Drinking, Fisher wrote about her difficult relationship with the Star Wars franchise. More specifically, she detailed Star Wars director George Lucas’s strange and perhaps sexist world building. Apparently in galaxies far, far, away, there was no such thing as female underwear:

George comes up to me the first day of filming and he takes one look at the dress and says, "You can't wear a bra under that dress."

So, I say, "Okay, I'll bite. Why?"

And he says, "Because ... there's no underwear in space."

I promise you this is true, and he says it with such conviction too! Like he had been to space and looked around and didn’t see any bras or panties or briefs.

Lucas, she continues, eventually expanded on the idea (though it remains unclear why, if there’s no underwear in space, Leia only wears underwear when she’s on Tatooine, where she’s seen in the infamous “Slave Leia” gold bikini).

What happens is you go to space and you become weightless. So far so good, right? But then your body expands??? But your bra doesn't — so you get strangled by your own bra.

Lucas’s justification gave Fisher her own gleeful glorious idea, and the rest was history.

Now I think that this would make for a fantastic obit — so I tell my younger friends that no matter how I go, I want it reported that I drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra.

So fuck this heart attack. Here lies legendary actress, writer, and feminist Carrie Fisher, drowned in moonlight, strangled by her own bra.

Sign up for the newsletter Sign up for Vox Recommends

Get curated picks of the best Vox journalism to read, watch, and listen to every week, from our editors.