Superstar:
The Karen Carpenter Story |
DIRECTOR
Todd Haynes
SCREENWRITERS/PRODUCERS
Todd Haynes
Cynthia Schneider
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Barry Ellsworth
MUSIC
The Carpenters
EDITOR
Todd Haynes
CAST (VOICES)
Merrill Graves (Karen Carpenter)
Michael Edwards (Richard Carpenter)
Melissa Brown (Mom)
Rob LaBelle (Dad/Mr. A&M)
MPAA rating: None
Running
time: 44m
U.S. release: January 10, 1989
Video availability: None officially
Other Todd
Haynes films
reviewed on this website:
- Far
from Heaven
- Safe
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One of the more famous suppressed
films of recent years is Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,
an early work by writer/director Todd Haynes (Safe,
Velvet Goldmine, Far
from Heaven). Filmed in 1987, the short film -- which
relates the rise and fall of Karen Carpenter with a cast of Barbie
dolls -- barely got a year's worth of festival time in 1989 before
the twin iron boots of A&M Records and Richard Carpenter
came down on Haynes. Seems the director hadn't cleared the rights
to use the many Carpenters songs in the film. Oops. Not only
that, Superstar drew fire from sober-sided feminists who
felt it trivialized anorexia (and who blithely ignored the fact
that a woman co-wrote and co-produced it) and might've raised
the ire of Mattel if it hadn't been yanked out of circulation
so fast that Mattel didn't even have time to complain about the
use of its dolls.
Threatened with a lawsuit from
A&M and Richard Carpenter, Haynes countered with an offer
to show the film only at clinics and health classes, the profits
going to an anorexia research center founded in Karen's name.
Richard didn't go for it. In April 1991, critic Owen Gleiberman
wrote an open letter in Entertainment Weekly asking the
surviving Carpenter sibling to let people see Haynes' film. Richard
didn't go for that, either. Thus Superstar became a legendary
verboten film, notorious for being forbidden. For some
reason it continues to be shown in college courses, and it pops
up at the occasional underground festival, but fifteen years
later more people have heard about it than actually viewed it.
So, officially nobody
is supposed to see the film. Officially I haven't seen
it, never bought it, don't own it; that's my official
story and I'm sticking to it. But who wants to be official?
Superstar is one of the most haunting almost-comedies
you'll never see. (Well, never say never. There are bootleg tapes
around, but I'm not going to get anyone in trouble by saying
where. Do some Google-work.) I can see why Haynes felt he needed
all those Carpenters songs, with Karen's voice drifting in and
out of the misery; I can also see why he didn't bother to go
ask Richard if he'd give permission to use the songs, since Richard
comes off as a world-class prick here. Was there a reason, besides
the built-in kitsch and ready-made found-art cred, for telling
this story with Barbie dolls? Yes, and they're used brilliantly.
Haynes is saying that Karen herself was reduced to a dress-up
doll by her overbearing brother and mother, living in a plastic
universe that enforces surface femininity on women without taking
into account the psychological price they often pay. For about
a minute, you might chuckle at the novelty of seeing Barbie dolls
with immobile facial features being moved around to tell a tragic
story. But only for a minute.
Haynes fashions a wry send-up
of the usual rise-and-fall biopic -- it even begins with a melodramatic
black-and-white sequence, not told with the dolls, shot from
the POV of Karen's mom as she finds Karen's corpse. But within
the structure of this parody, Haynes displays a strong compassion
that extends beyond Karen to all women pushed into roles they
don't want. The narration lectures us mock-somberly on anorexia,
laying the groundwork for our understanding of what Karen suffered.
As Haynes tells it, Karen's family essentially tried to badger
her back to health, monitoring her eating and weight, while she
secretly resorted to Ex-Lax and, later, Ipecac (which reportedly
is what killed her). In the film, Richard can't see Karen's illness
in any other context but as a threat to their music career --
his career. Karen's visible sickness -- culminating in
her collapse onstage -- is bad for the Carpenters' squeaky-clean
image, another façade that Haynes suggests was as hollow
as Barbie.
The Carpenters are even placed
in historical context: They positioned themselves as, and were
embraced as, a sunny alternative to the chaos and dissent of
the early '70s. Here, finally, were two nice young people
-- Barbie and Ken as sister and brother. They didn't
demand that we get out of Vietnam, Richard wasn't smashing guitars,
and Karen wasn't burning her bra. This was an act that could
be -- and were -- invited to Nixon's White House
to sing. Did Karen harbor a secret resentment over being shaped
into the nation's new angel of complacency? It all seems to take
its toll, and as the 44-minute film nears its end, Karen's plastic
face becomes deformed. Haynes tried to dig gouges into the Barbie
Karen's cheeks to denote emaciation, but that didn't work, so
he sculpted new "flesh" over the gouges, and the result
looks creepier than anything in most horror movies. If Karen
won't rebel against how she's being used, her flesh will do it
for her.
Against all odds, too, Superstar
restores the power of Karen's voice. If you forget that she's
singing her brother's crappy, saccharine compositions, she was
a great singer. Soothing yet -- to these ears -- far from cheerful,
her singing, heard in the context of a film about her private
demons, sounds ineffably mournful. In 1994, A&M Records put
out a tribute album, If I Were a Carpenter, on which several
hip acts of the day (Sheryl Crow, Shonen Knife, 4 Non Blondes,
Babes in Toyland, Matthew Sweet) covered, either ironically or
sincerely, fourteen of the Carpenters' greatest hits. Of the
bunch, the group that best captured the tension between Karen's
genuine emotion and Richard's manufactured glaze was Sonic Youth,
in their staticky fuzzbox rendition of "Superstar."
Richard may not have known what "Loneliness is such a sad
affair" really meant, but Thurston Moore did, and so did
Karen.
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