Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987)

A part of this was originally posted on AD Forums on June 23, 2012. Spoilers are marked with bold text.

Very rarely anymore do we see films that dare to challenge our per-conceived notions about the realities of a given time frame. Nostalgia is its own curse, and whitewashes the unpleasant from our minds as we hone in and focus on only what we care to remember. This whitewashing and blurring is a focus of Todd Hayne's controversial film 'Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story', a forty-five minute exploration into the forces that killed one of America's brightest stars far too early. It's easy to see why this film is controversial: for starters, the whole movie is acted out by Barbie dolls, a sentence that sounds incredibly tasteless without any context. There's plenty of unlicensed music floating through the movie. Probably most importantly, this film portrays the Carpenter family as extremely controlling, abusive, and dysfunctional towards its most innocent member, and this portrayal is likely what kept this film from the public eye for years. It's now available, in its entirety, on YouTube, and actually seeing the movie not only sheds some light on how the controversial elements of the film are handled, but has instantly converted me into an incredible fan.

The use of dolls to play the characters does sound tasteless at first, especially given that this is the story of a woman who died trying to fit into an unrealistic standard that the media has forced on women for years. Barbie is, after all, a traditionally anti-feminist symbol, focusing entirely on a person's outer beauty to determine worth. To portray a story of a woman so thoroughly chained to society's unrealistic standards, the Barbie works spectacularly as a tool of satire and a tool of caution. What really makes this decision work is both the relative interchangeability of each doll - something that works especially well in comparing Karen's troubled relationships with both Richard and her eventual husband - and the fact that the dolls become extremely malleable under the narrative's force. Karen is literally whittled into a bony, misshapen toy to accentuate the horrors of her disease.

The craft of the film is unbelievable. Even watching the horrible print I was watching, where images were blurred and fuzzed together with age (if only this film hadn't been attacked by the Carpenter family and we could get a nice shiny Criterion print - I'd bust open the savings account for that one, even), it's impossible to deny the amount of thought put into each image in each montage. The supermarket clips, with voice-over detailing the wealth of food now available post-WWII, combined with the placards detailing the dark details of anorexia, is a perfect juxtaposition (even though I had to pause to read some of the cards, thanks to quality issues). It even raises questions of its own - with all this food available, it insidiously suggests, is it any wonder that a woman would grow to pathologically fear what food will do to her physique? The ending is also a well-done masterstroke - the vague image of being spanked comes to the forefront of an emotionally shattered Karen, not to mention the horrifying yet pathetic sight of Karen eating mashed potatoes before traveling to a live-action sequence where SPOILER you realize that anorexia - the huge enemy of the entire film -wasn't the only pathological demon, and that Karen is also swigging Ipecac, and is also bulimic. SPOILER END The ending is incredibly powerful, even if you know Karen's full story, because of how it weaves together some of the disparate images Haynes has bombarded the audience with, finally giving them a psychological context.

When the film was made, the slightly out-of-focused images were intentional on the part of Haynes, and I think that, going back to the comments on nostalgia, it's intended to lure us into a false sense of dreaminess. The surreal is often at play in The Karen Carpenter Story, and treating Karen's life as a dreamy segue from her public persona as an angel of music is oddly appropriate, for a film that is simultaneously satirizing and condemning 

The only problem I have with the movie is the fact that Richard is fairly two-dimensional. The overall force of "the family" works well as an antagonist, because each member embodies a different type of control - Richard is an egomaniac, Karen's mother is smothering in the extreme, and Karen's father is simply dismissive of her interests. Karen's sickness works in tandem with these pressures. But separated from each other, they become exponentially weaker adversaries for her. The scene where Richard and Karen yell at each other doesn't work quite as well as other disagreement scenes because of the separations from the other antagonistic functions.

My parents raised me on the Carpenters' music, and I've actually been employed, through my school's work program, at the performing arts center that bears Karen's name on my college campus. I guess that makes her story more powerful to me, no matter how it's presented. Before the monitor in our lobby broke, I could sit in the lobby and watch Karen waste away before me, and wonder how such a beautiful, talented woman could ever think she wasn't good enough. This movie makes it a bit easier to understand.