Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story

Banned & Censored Cinema

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story

Todd Haynes, USA, 1987, 43 min.

With Barbie dolls as the principal actors, Superstar portrays the life of Karen Carpenter and her battle with anorexia. Haynes never secured the rights to the Carpenters' music he used in the movie, and Richard Carpenter filed an injunction that kept Superstar from public release. Even without Carpenter's court order, the film would probably have been stopped by the notoriously litigious Mattel, the makers of Barbie.
-- Illegal Art: Freedom of Expression in the Corporate Age (VIEW MOVIE ONLINE)

In this scene, Richard Carpenter and the Carpenter's mom convince Karen to begin singing for the band (rather than playing drums). Haynes uses traditional live-action filmmaking techniques such as this low-angle shot to help create the film's uncanny sense of the barbies as "real people."

Karen and Richard in a meeting with the A & M Records manager are about to be propelled to celebrity. Haynes credits the childhood dramatic storytelling games he played with his sister as influencing his future use of light in cinema--as in the implication of a window in this scene.

Hayne's use of the shot/reverse shot emphasizes the scene's spatial contiguity and temporal continuity.

Using Karen Carpenter's affliction with anorexia nervosa as an individual narrative of the disease, Superstar includes shots of the accoutrements of eating disorders--such as this ex-lax box--as well as voice-over narration to espouse a more general theory of the rise of anorexia in America in the 1970s.

Director Todd Haynes is revered as a pioneer of what would come to be called "New Queer Cinema." His first feature, Poison (1991), won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival. The film, which Haynes deemed an ode to French playwright and director Jean Genet (especially his film Un Chant D'Amour), was subsequently slapped with an NC-17 rating and attacked by Reverend Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association for its "explicit porno scenes of homosexuals engaged in anal sex."

REQUIRED READINGS & WEBSITES

• Chuck Stephens, "Gentlemen Prefer Haynes," Film Comment (Vol. 31, No. 4 July/August), course reader and online http://industrycentral.net/director_interviews/TH02.HTM

• Keith Uhlich, "Great Directors: Todd Haynes", Senses of Cinema (July 2002), online
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/haynes.html

• Richard C. Bartone, "Todd Haynes", glbtq, An Encyclopedia Online of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, & Queer Culture (Dec 5, 2002), online http://www.glbtq.com/arts/haynes_t.html