Thursday, May 8, 2008
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.
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2 comments:
I haven't seen the film and the fact that a lot of pretentious self-important arthouse snobs were suitably impressed with themselves when they watched it is no great endorsement in my opinion. Anorexia is a mental illness and almost always it starts in someone who has become overweight and then dieted in order to lose wieght. I think excessive weight is repugnant in comparison with a slender physique. What anorexics really need is a medicine to enable them to maintain a healthy and slim weight without having to constantly starve themselves. I think the majority of them would indeed quickly recover if they knew for sure that they could eat what they liked without risk of excess weight gain, and more to the point the illness would never start in someone who had never any cause to diet in the first place. Anyone who has ever been on a diet knows that it's almost impossible to lose weight without extreme measures. I totally sympathise with people who get into this mess. I can understand it very well.
Karen Carpenter is slagged off all oiver the place and all this is suc hypocrasy when you consider that the sort of men who do it are sitting on millions of dollars: they soon abandon their utopia ideals and archy once they themselves become the establisment. And they have the gall to slag off Karen Carpenter because she was a naive, conscientious fool who sung a lot of pretty songs. She was a lot like the women most of these guys marry. Guys don't won't Madonna for a wife, they want the girl next door. We want a sweet innocent fool for a girl not some dragon.
I'm not sure what you mean by "slagged off." This film (if you watched it all the way through) paints Karen Carpenter as a tragic victim and celebrity as the machine which drove her into this illness. The film also came out at a time when very few people talked about or knew of the psychological seriousness of eating disorders.
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