Revisit Debbie Reynolds’s 1980s exercise video, a wacky item of cultural ephemera that reflects the way so many women felt about their bodies at the time.
sporting a metal bikini that she’d made famous, as Princess Leia, in the “Star Wars” films. Twenty-six years old at the time, she looked footloose and fancy-free, sitting on a beach towel with one leg thrust into the air, her arms thrown out wide to grasp the paws of a snuggly Ewok standing behind her. In reality, she was terribly uncomfortable. Inpublished a decade and a half later, Fisher wrote that the iron negligee was “what supermodels will eventually wear in the seventh ring of hell.
It is clear from the outset that Reynolds does not take her special too seriously. In some introductory remarks, she talks about trying to watch other celebrity tapes and not being able to keep up. This is a workout for, by which she means older broads who might appreciate occasional low-impact leg lifts. “No matter what shape you are, no matter what age you are, we can still look better,” Reynolds tells the camera. “We can feel better.
Still, the real star of the video is Reynolds’s longtime friend Shelley Winters. Once a studio-system regular herself, Winters decided to leave the strictures of contract work behind in order to return to New York and focus on method acting. By the nineteen-eighties, she was a famously irascible character, unabashedly herself at all times.
Reynolds seems both exasperated by these antics—Winters could at least join in for the shoulder shrugs, she says—and delighted by them. To the viewer, Winters’s refusal comes across as a break in the fourth wall of the entire exercise-video genre: all of the pressures on women are a sham, she seems to say, and I am here to prove it. The sparkly pink set is, in the end, made of cardboard and held together by glue, like so many things in Hollywood.
is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She has covered Hollywood, style, and other cultural subjects since 2012.
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