Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987)

The directorial debut and cult classic of art-house director Todd Haynes, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story paints a harrowing portrait of anorexia and the debilitating forces of the American media obsession with appearance and weight. Haynes, the darling of "New Queer Cinema," uses Barbie and Ken dolls - the perfect symbol of the modern indoctrination of an unattainable (and physically impossible) body image - to re-enact the star's descent from the fatal affliction. Joan Hawkins' essay in Jeffrey Sconce's latest book Sleaze Artists: Cinema on the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics outlines the exploitation roots of Haynes oeuvre and contains a particularly enlightening section on Superstar. The film opens like a slasher film, using grainy black-and-white footage to show the Karen's mother discovering her limp body (dead from cardiac arrest caused by an overdose of Ipecac). In the flashback that follows, we see Karen's ascent to stardom, the resulting mental illness over her weight, and the relatively uncooperative family and social environment that failed to act swiftly.

Haynes intercuts stock footage along with interviews about the Carpenters' image to paint both a social and psychic setting. In one particularly menacing sequence, the Carpenters' first record deal is treated in Eisensteinian montage with a steadily encroaching hand and holocaust footage of a woman's corpse falling into a mass grave. The formal style of the film gives insight into the psychic experience of its title character - making Ex-Lax boxes and plates of food take on an entirely different, violent meaning. In these scenes we begin to understand anorexia as a "form of fascism over the body," a point which the film is at pains to make, and is perhaps amplified by the use of dolls as actors. Dolls are anonymous, and we project our own ideas and fantasies onto them, even when they are given a particular name and narrative. The universality of Karen's story and the stark contrast between her sugary voice on the soundtrack and the story we watch unfold bring a sense of urgency to the piece - something drastically hampered by its exhibition history.

After the film aired in 1987 to modest art-house acclaim, Karen Carpenter's father became angry with the portrayal of the family, and - having discovered Haynes did not obtain the rights to use the music - sued Haynes. In 1990, all copies were seized and not allowed to be screened (even if only to clinics and support groups for eating disorders, as Haynes offered). I was elated to find this is on GoogleVideo, and hope it stays up for a long time. It's a triumph of experimental narrative filmmaking and one of the more effective social commentaries I've ever seen.