Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story

A marvelous film made by Todd Haynes, a Brown University student at the time, later the director of "Poison" and the brilliant, hypnotic "Safe" (1995), "Superstar" details the rise and fall of Karen Carpenter entirely through an inspired formal devise: Carpenter, her brother Richard, family, and friends are all "portrayed" by Barbie dolls. The film is not merely about fame or anorexia (the disease of which Carpenter died), but conjures the suburban California of the 1970's, indeed the whole plastic experience of America and American pop culture (of which, of course, The Carpenters and Barbie dolls are most certainly a part). The sincere lite-rock of The Carpenters is juxtaposed with the emptiness and powerful sorrow of these "people"; the film isn't merely a satire--it's deeply touching in a way that many "human stories" fail to be. Upon its appearance, the film became a minor cause celebre in hip, arty New York circles; unfortunately, when Richard Carpenter, proprietor of The Carpenters' music (who doesn't exactly come across as a hero in the film), got wind of it, he called his lawyers. The fact of the matter is that Haynes and his producers never cleared the use of the music--the film was never intended to be shown for profit. Simply, though, there is no film without the music. The still-standing cease-and-desist order prevents the film from being distributed in any form; I saw a third- or fourth-generation copy on video, and it was still better than virtually anything I saw that year. "Superstar" is worth seeking out; it's genuinely (and I rarely use this word) inspiring.

Part 1: An important film by one of the few AIDS-awareness directors. All of Todd Haynes' films/stories symbolize the alienation, decay, and whenever possible, rebirth, of the gay man vis-a-vis AIDS. We've lost so many to AIDS, and although today the horror slumbers often, the story here is just as gripping. Combining the details of Karen Carpenter's existence with his motif/approach, Haynes tells us a lot about the suffering, solitude, and emotional blackmail that comes with that yearn for success. I am amused that most film critics stuck to the surface story and paid lip service to Karen Carpenter's ordeal as a girl in a nuclear family bubble. Civil sympathy is a bit of a bore.

Richard and Mattel, the creators of Barbie, have blocked the film's availability; all prints are legally supposed to have been destroyed. Richard blocks it because of the usage of the Carpenters' music, which ought to be public domain anyway!. Mattel blocks it because of the usage of Barbie dolls for all the characters and the overt implication that plastic existence has drastic consequences.

It's amusing and then gripping the overlays of text, music upon music, narrative, darkness, and camera pans that punctuate the film. But the surface story -- Karen lost in her own world of hopeless perfection as envisioned by her domineering mother, Agnes Carpenter -- is a fine one as it depicts a cultural shift from Vietnam's horror to Nixon's false-father stability. (The Carpenters were invited to perform for the President at the White House.) Wholesomeness, in Haynes' tale, requires grit, profanity, endless self-subterfuge and a propensity for collapse. That A&M Records is seen to be malevolent cannot be Karen's reason for self-starvation. That the rest of the rock world is living it up while Carpenters sweat it out in the studio cannot be the reason either. And yet the reason for her illness, like the bird attacks in Hitchcock's 1963 thriller, is never disclosed -- as if it could be, and Haynes shows us his chains of reasoning and events and all we can do is marvel at the Edgar Allen Poe Barbie Dolls and Karen's gradual transformation into Munch visual madness.

Todd Haynes takes liberties with what happened, but usually only as a convenience; it all comes through and through regardless: the family's accidental discovery that Karen could sing like nobody else; the switch from laxatives to syrup of ipecac and vomiting; the allegations that Richard Carpenter has always been homosexual.

Word-of-mouth will get you a copy of the film, which only benefits from the acres of great music the duo produced. Karen Carpenter is dead, like so many other against illness and massive ignorance. Haynes' paean to her strength and helplessness, her soulful gloom and snatches of love, transforms the viewer, who is pressed to create his or her own Barbie-format epic!

There's a certain brilliance behind the idea of using Barbie dolls to recount the story of singer Karen Carpenter, and the exchange of one plastic all-American icon with another results in an oddly respectful (if suitably macabre) show-biz biography, flirting at times with campy irreverence without ever becoming vulgar. By reducing Carpenter's tragic life to dollhouse proportions the film transforms it into a miniature image of the American Dream gone sour, carrying all the morbid fascination of a tabloid celebrity exposé. But this isn't a memorial to (or a mockery of) the singer's life and musical career; it's an artfully made, near-satirical reflection of how numb and destructive American values had become during the 1970s.

I was lucky to catch a rare theatrical screening (at the York Theater in San Francisco) in the summer of 1988, three years before the film was banned for its unauthorized use of copyrighted music.

Unexplainably brilliant. You have to see it to believe it, really.

Understandably suppressed by Richard--I won't spoil it for you--it is at turns hiariously bitchy, grotesque, tender, and cruel. At the same time, it elevates the subject matter, leaving this viewer with a much deeper sense of appreciation for the Karen. I laughed at them, and it made my like both of them more.

The story is dramatized through carefully and minutely constructed sets populated by Barbie dolls clothed in carefully crafted period clothes. Karen's descent into anorexia is represented through whittling down the face and arms of the Barbie doll that portrays her, which has an effect both hilarious and disturbing.

All in all, it feels so much like a "real" documentary, I can't tell you that it isn't. It's treatment of the subject of annorexia and it's effect on Karen's life is at once silly and serious.

I saw it on DVD. The box had next to nothing printed on it. It was obviously bootlegged from somewhere, but the print I saw had good quality audio and visual.

I found out about this movie in the 50 greatest cult films issue of Entertainment Weekly. It sounded like a funny, semi-serious biography of Karen Carpenter, whose music I do happen to enjoy. When I finally watched it, I realized that the movie was a very serious and in depth look at anorexia. It's haunting, brilliant, moving, and touching. I had never seen the life of an anorexic person played out so well as by that barbie doll. It's a shame that this film has not been widely distributed, because it's a darn fine movie that is very educational.