On Todd Haynes' Superstar: The Original Barbie Movie
Degradation of the Digital Body
One of the more potent images in Todd Haynes’ short, unauthorized biopic on the ill-fated life of Karen Carpenter, is a smudgy close-up of the American singer as a block of nearly unreadable text obscures her Barbie doll face. It is the scene where Carpenter, dramatized by all the Mattel company’s most famous icon, and voiced by Merrill Gruver, performs at the White House for President Nixon. Reading the text exactly was impossible on the bootleg version which I found on the free streaming platform DailyMotion, though it roughly says something about how Nixon’s Watergate scandal would coincide with the Carpenters peak in popularity. I could not provide you with an exact quote.
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1988), a forty-three minute exploitation of the television crime documentary, has evolved to become as much about its grainy, pixelated, strangely colorized mutation in its online, illegal circulation as its original intent. Focusing on her brother Richard’s, family’s and the music industry’s control over her, the film patently refuses to be hagiographic, subverting the biopic genre with every shot. Filmed on 16mm film and using Barbie dolls as stand-ins for human beings, Haynes zeroes in on Carpenter’s famed struggle with anorexia nervosa by using the iconographic toy as a conduit for a larger conversation about the imposition of impossible beauty standards on women and celebrities. But the dolls also serve to highlight the plasticity of American suburbia in the years after the peak of the Civil Rights era, a period of regressive politics emphasized by Nixon and the imperialist destruction of Cambodia and Vietnam. This extremely complex imbrication of thematic elements is further compounded by the way the film has since been received and circulated, its unconventional production mirrored by decades of VHS warbling and uploading. Though the film is relatively easy to find nowadays through sites like YouTube, Vimeo & DailyMotion, the variety of quality is significant, and the treasure hunt-style requirement of a viewer allows for an even deeper relationship to the film’s challenging material; just as the truth behind Carpenter’s tragic demise remains elusive, so too does the full extent of Haynes intent. Both the roguishness of the film’s construction and the digital decay of its imagery in the years since account for an erosion of the mythology of Karen Carpenter’s death, the facade of conservative White America and the canonization of the American dream.
Last week, for Slant Magazine, I reviewed Greta Gerwig’s film Barbie. Though I deeply admire Gerwig’s fourth directorial feature (in part for its surprising streak of subversiveness), it does, I must concede, ultimately feel impossible to separate from Mattel’s hand in creation. But, seeing as how both films induce an engagement with the doll’s rubbery yet robotic movements in a mutual investigation of how women are persistently saddled with a prison-like set of standards, it has become natural to connect Haynes and Gerwig - albeit on opposite ends of a relationship to capitalist oversight.
Haynes' film begins with a sensationalist reconstruction of the moment Karen Carpenter’s dead body is found. Her mother’s wails (“Karen… oh GOD! HARRY! It’s Karen. HARRY!”) puncture the stillness of the frame, which blacks out into a gravitas-filled narration that promises to take us back to the moment and the place where this horror all began: the white-picket fences and manicured lawns of suburban California. The titular song fades in to replace the narration as Barry Ellsworth’s camera tracks alongside the neighborhoods of Downey, and we are thrust into the origins and pitfalls of the Carpenters as they amble through a fastly-exploding pop music career.
Haynes frames the whole film like a television special, with a couple inescapable diversions: one, that all of the characters are played by Mattel dolls, and two, that much of Karen’s creative success is recontextualized as tortured products of a woman slowly dying from the inside out. As the film goes on, the presence of the Barbie dolls becomes so normalized that it is the inclusion of the human body that feels so intrusive: the pillaging of Cambodia, Nixon’s press conferences, extreme close-ups of mouths and eyes. At one point the film segues into a quick, antiquated breakdown of what constitutes anorexia, framing it as the relentless desire for beauty and not, in fact, a need for control. Haynes thus simultaneously plays in the sandbox of the genre tropes and destroys them, implicating the viewer in the systematic destruction of the female form. Haynes and Cynthia Schneider, who co-wrote the screenplay, also indulge in a deliberately hackneyed and expository form of dialogue, as in an early scene where Karen’s mother and brother discuss his music and are surprised to hear the beauty of Karen’s voice emanating from the floor above; by utilizing the antiquatedness of both form and content, the film deconstructs the mythology and canon around several American icons at once, asking us to interrogate our value system as the site of some of our most potent victims, namely female artists and foreign bodies.
Superstar was not Haynes first film but it was certainly the one “that authorized him as a promising director of alternative cinema,” as Mary R. Dejardins argues. Shot while he was still an MFA candidate at Bard College in New York, the film quickly became something of a cult object thanks to its relative illegality. The film received several cease-and-desist letters from the Carpenter estate over the use of Karen’s music, with Mattel swiftly joining in; but the film has persisted nonetheless, “via bootleg videotapes, semi-secret screenings, and eventually DVD-Rs and downloadable mpegs.” Now that the film has entered the online era, there is the further passing on through VHS tape transference, a process that accentuates the strange amateurishness of Haynes construction. There is also, therefore, a consolidation of audience; where once the passing down of the film was done through semi-secret screenings and backroom introductions, now the same happens on free streaming sites that are too slow to take down the uploads on claims of copyright infringement. The film pops up regardless, like a massive game of virtual Whac-a-Mole. “The truth will out,” as Shylock says in Act II, Scene 2 of The Merchant of Venice. Except the truth here is entangled in a mess of audiovisual degradation, legal issues and the desperate attempts of a family to keep their child’s death mired in mystery: Todd Haynes points out that her legacy is still being “controlled” and that the reasons behind her anorexia are explained away with a shrug. And it very well may be to the film’s benefit. Instead of being legitimized in traditional circles, the film’s orphan status allows it to be interpreted and digested by a wider range of erstwhile cinephiles. It can be seen as a skewering of Hollywood mythmaking, as a rescuing of Karen Carpenter’s legacy or as massive queer subtext.
Within the world of film studies, the term “orphan” film is notoriously elusive, but if we consider Paolo Cherchi Usai’s assertion that “an orphan film is a film outside commercial preservation programs and newsreels, silent films, avant-garde works, documentaries and others,” Haynes’ film more than fits into a history of unclaimed work. Usai historicizes film distribution by pointing out that post-1908, “you could get the print from the production company or from the distributor. You could show the film, but the film was supposed to go back home to their parents.” Dan Streible defines orphan films even more broadly, asserting that “the universe of orphan films includes nearly every category of motion picture outside of commercial theatrical movies.” While the debate rages on about what is considered an orphan film and what is not, it seems abundantly clear that Superstar’s cult status is thanks, in large part, to its off-kilter do-it-yourself distribution system. The film exists in a strange nebulous zone wherein its artistic ownership is clear but the passing of it has descended into a spider-web of artistic circles and rooms for education.
There is, of course, a double-edged sword to this: it can be processed and received in any manner of interpretation, yet it cannot be officially recognized as the masterpiece it is in any institutional manner. But really its greatest power is in its refusal to canonize its subject matter. Because Haynes has cut down Karen’s life and professional success (and downfall) to a mere forty-three minutes, he avoids any trappings of more typical Hollywood biographical fare, and in so doing removes any possibility of hagiography. Where instead we might get scenes of artistic inspiration and markers of career ascendancy, Haynes focuses on her short-lived marriage to Tom Burris, a brief stint in rehab, and a handful of markers of patriarchal capitalism. Thus, Karen’s story is presented to us with all of its real-life brevity, and, in a strange bit of irony, the brevity of the film’s presence in legitimate circles. Superstar lasted about as long in the public eye as did its central star, relegated forever to its orphan status, its elusivity ironically part of its permanence.
It is in the film’s queer reading that the film has enjoyed some of its most lasting effectiveness. Thirty minutes into the film, after Karen’s reliance on Ex-Lax to perpetuate her weight obsession is outed, her brother Richard finds another box on her coffee table. The two get into an argument, with Karen resorting to blackmail to prevent her brother from revealing her relapse to their parents. “If you [tell them], I’ll tell them about you and your private life.” The insinuation is clear here; though Haynes admitted to having “no evidence” of Richard’s supposed closeted homosexuality, the open-endedness of the threat could also allude to Richard’s confirmed public Quaalude addiction. Either way, Karen Tongson argues that this scene might resonate with “others who might also feel fearful of making mistakes in such a master-planned scenario,” a type of walking on pins and needles especially present for queer audiences. But it isn’t just the dialogical suggestion of queerness, its in the film’s subsequent undergroundedness that further marks it as such. Though the film is remarkably available now, the film still exists in a clouded substratum of controversy, passed along mostly in arthouses, classrooms and word of mouth. This “peer-to-peer” information highway, says Ernest Mathijs, when considered in conjunction with the film’s politics of interpersonal control, repressed sexuality and body horror, gives it a distinctly queer edge.
It is further not hard to imagine how Superstar can be seen as a transgender text. Haynes transfers Karen’s bodily rebelliousness into the cage of an ossified and tortured Barbie doll, an object that is easily handled but stiff and immovable nonetheless. There is a veritable limit to what she can do to change the way her body looks and is perceived, and so is resigned to destroying it for want of something new. Tongson argues that the Carpenters’ “aberrant normalcy” is inherently queer, a sort of cat-eating-its-own-tail version of The Brady Bunch that digs a hole so deep into the cookie-cutter version of suburbia it eventually reaches the other side.
The queer aspect of the film exists on the margins of a film that exists itself on the margins, a layering of secrecy and shame also found in the sociopolitical climate of the peak of the Carpenters’ success. Haynes frames their timing on the music scene in ironic terms at the start, when the narrator says this “smooth-voiced girl… led a raucous nation smoothly into the seventies.” The Carpenters’ music exemplifies a relaxed Californian stereotype and is a solid metonym for Haynes and Schneider, in service of a critique of a reactionary era of politics that saw the destruction of Southeast Asia, a zombified continuation of Reagan Economics and the marginalization of the gay community. This overtly leftist framing of the Carpenters era of dominance is expressly only possible because of the film’s outside status. Haynes and Schneider accomplish this partly through the montage which depicts the Carpenters rapid ascendance, capped off by a coveted singing engagement at the White House for President Nixon. Framing it as such suggests that the Carpenters could be part of Nixon’s broad campaign to silence the subversion of capitalism and militarism rampant in the sixties and seventies, especially because the song that Karen is shown singing is “Sing,” which, even for the duo’s cheery standards, exudes a platitudinous plasticity. “Sing a song of good, not bad” is a tremendously surface-level lyric as bombs rain down on Vietnam. Haynes inputs images of destruction abroad over images of Karen and Richard singing in spotlit venues, an Eisenstein-esque editing sequence that posits their music was an instrument in the apparatus to quiet dissent, or, at least, to distract from imperialist violence.
There is further the lack of discussion that the film counterintuitively highlights, as in the notable exception of HIV/AIDS from public discourse even as the disease raged onwards. The lack of political attention being paid to the epidemic has become a lasting legacy for President Ronald Reagan, but it is also the “segregation by Mattel of Barbie from discourses of sex,” says Glyn Davis, that subtextually informs much of the film’s action (in Gerwig’s film, Simu Liu and Ryan Gosling are consistently engaging in a clueless and hilarious ping-pong of non-sexual, yet explicit banter). Yet, Davis also argues, the Barbie doll is emblematic of two strands of mainstream conservatism: simultaneous sexual repression and “compulsory heterosexuality.” We can think of Superstar as being an ironic revealing of the messy underbelly underneath the suburbs, but it is also in Mattel’s and the Carpenter’s relentless control over the subject that only undergirds the messiness that lies therein.
In addition to Haynes infamous use of the doll in an otherwise live-action film is a substantial amount of irony and Brechtian distanciation. Part of this is done through a deliberate indulgence in outmoded principles of filmmaking, and this is utilized no more effectively than in the aforementioned foray into an eyewitness-style explanation of anorexia. In the film’s current, kaleidoscopic format, throngs of women appear as nebulous masses while a clinical female voice explains the affliction. “Sufferers desperately want to be thin,” she robotically says, as Ellsworth zooms in on a faded medical textbook. Human bystanders on the street pose infantile questions directly to the camera like “do anorexics ever get hungry?” as Haynes, who also edited the film, montages several shots of a variety of foods, which, in the movie’s dilapidated digital status appear as monochrome goops and blobs. This inadvertent morphology of the image ironically helps to bolster Karen’s point-of-view and that of any anorexic, further engendering an identification with the subject. Because of this, “there is a subjective as well as a corporeal erosion,” as Rob White argues, which “makes space for these rattling fragments of other people’s opinions, taunts, and demands.” In this way, the film’s evolution from production to circulation to cultish found object creates an even deeper relationality than would otherwise have been possible. Instead of receiving the information on anorexia as a pat explanation for Karen’s sickness, we skeptically wonder if everything - including the medical establishment - is in some sort of collusion to bury Karen’s life and career.
Watching this period of pacified turmoil get turned into a garbled soup of pixels and mangled Mattel dolls makes it all the more disorienting. The doll's consistency as an icon of the American toy industry is subverted at every turn, here a metonym for a slow eating-away of the female body, there for those on foreign soil. A lot of this is only compounded by the image degradation, as is its legal status as a banned object. Despite the Carpenters and Mattel’s best efforts to silence the film out of existence, it persists like a housefly that never saw the point in leaving. And as it gets passed down and the quality worsens even more, the same only deepens its cultural status as “an illicit object,” as Lucas Hildebrand states, “a forbidden pleasure watched and shared and loved to exhaustion.” Perhaps the same can be said of Karen Carpenter herself, passed along callously between family members, brief love affairs, industry executives, conservative politicians and the audience willing to project all manner of attitude onto a woman with an exceptional voice and an unchallenging musical array. Haynes represents this barrage of attention and desire through multiple, strained montages, so she is “eaten away audiovisually,” says White, “these invading images… recur to increase the impression of trauma and fracture.” How fitting, then, that the fracture is amplified by a continuous process of copy and paste, reducing this story of abuse to its barest elements.
Rumors of a restoration for Superstar have persisted for a long time. In 2016, an anonymous organizer launched a Kickstarter campaign to do such a thing (along with films by Superstar’s cinematographer, Barry Ellsworth, and Christine Vachon, a longtime collaborator), and further rumors subsist that a recent Orphan Film Symposium included a secret, coveted restoration as a finale. The suggestion of its existence is tantalizing for obvious reasons. At its barest level, being able to see blocks of text and images in focus with correct colorization could bring out an entire new level of reception that hasn’t existed since the film’s premiere nearly thirty-five years ago. What would it be like to see the images of food in their harrowing detail, for example, or the emaciated details on Karen’s face as the film continues on? The elusivity of the film ironically being one of its major calling cards, it is further easy to wonder what might be lost if the film was more readily available and seen more widely in a restored form. The restraining order that Richard Carpenter and the Mattel Corporation have on the film are unlikely to go away anytime soon, but imagining a world where it does is simultaneously exciting and disappointing. What if the New York Film Festival aired it as part of their annual restoration programming? Would a suped-up, institutionalized version of Superstar have a diminished impact? As it is, finding the film on back channels and in such mutated forms echoes a marginalization of its content: Karen pushed to the brink, to the outskirts of daily life, as a panoply of patriarchal systems restrict her to her prescribed functions. Perhaps the long awaited restored version would take away a key element of the film’s reception, erasing an audience of people on the margins themselves, looking for their own bit of representation in the back alleys of the internet.
That is, after all, where Karen Carpenter’s legacy seems to want to be.
Works Cited
Geller, Theresa L., et al. “The Incredible Shrinking Star: Todd Haynes and the Case History of Karen Carpenter.” Reframing Todd Haynes: Feminism's Indelible Mark, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2022, pp. 256–257.
Haynes, Todd, et al. “Karen Carpenter: Getting to the Bare Bones of Todd Haynes’s Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.” Todd Haynes: Interviews, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 2016, pp. 26–27.
Hildebrand, Lucas. Inherent Vice: Access, Aesthetics, and Videotape Bootlegging, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2006
Mathijs, Ernest, and Xavier Mendik. “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.” 100 Cult Films, British Film Institute, London, UK, 2019, p. 190.
Newman, Nick. “Help Restore Early Films from Todd Haynes, Christine Vachon, and Others.” The Film Stage, 23 June 2016, https://thefilmstage.com/help-restore-early-films-from-todd-haynes-christine-vachon-and-others/.
Streible, Dan "Saving, Studying, and Screening: A History of the Orphan Film Symposium," in Film Festival Yearbook 5: Archival Film Festivals, ed. Alex Marlow-Mann (St. Andrews Film Studies, 2013), 163.
Tongson, Karen. “Whiteness and Promises.” Why Karen Carpenter Matters, Faber & Faber, London, UK, 2022, pp. 15–16.
Usai, Paolo Cherchi. “What Is an Orphan Film? Definition, Rationale and Controversy.’” Orphan Film Symposium. Orphan Film Symposium, 23 Sept. 1999, Columbia, University of South Carolina.
White, Rob. Todd Haynes. University of Illinois Press, 2013