Mondays: Monday Night 1.20.03 -- Banned Film Series -- "Superstar" by Todd Haynes

January 20, 2003

Monday Night 1.20.03 -- Banned Film Series -- "Superstar" by Todd Haynes

Contents:
1. About this Monday
2. Synopsis
3. Reviews
4. Interviews 1992-2002
5. Norman Bryson text
6. Links

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1. About this Monday

When: 7:00 (Screening will begin 7:30)
What: Video Screening + Discussion
What: "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story" by Todd Haynes

Happy New Year!
Is it really the year of the Goat?

If you have not seen it before, make
every effort to see this hard to get a hold
of video.

As a part of our Banned Film Series, we will be
screening Todd Haynes's classic, but banned film,
"Superstar". It focuses on the life of Karen Carpenter
relying on a cast made of Barbie Dolls and minature sets.

The original version is 44 minutes, our copy
sent in anonymously by one of our subscribers
is cropped by a few minutes, but it is rare
opportunity to see this special video.

The parties involved in banning the film included
Mattel, A&M Records, and the Karen Carpenter Family

Stay tuned for future screenings and
please send questions/suggestions via e-mail.

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2. Synopsis

"SUPERSTAR"
http://www.angelfire.com/movies/oc/superstar.html

DIRECTOR
Todd Haynes

SCREENWRITERS/PRODUCERS
Todd Haynes
Cynthia Schneider

CINEMATOGRAPHER
Barry Ellsworth

MUSIC
The Carpenters

EDITOR
Todd Haynes

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CAST (VOICES)

Merrill Graves (Karen Carpenter)
Michael Edwards (Richard Carpenter)
Melissa Brown (Mom)
Rob LaBelle (Dad/Mr. A&M)

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MPAA rating: None
Running time: 44m
U.S. release: January 10, 1989
Video availability: None officially

One of the more famous suppressed films of recent years is Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, an early work by writer/director Todd Haynes (Safe, Velvet Goldmine, Far from Heaven). Filmed in 1987, the short film -- which relates the rise and fall of Karen Carpenter with a cast of Barbie dolls -- barely got a year's worth of festival time in 1989 before the twin iron boots of A&M Records and Richard Carpenter came down on Haynes. Seems the director hadn't cleared the rights to use the many Carpenters songs in the film. Oops. Not only that, Superstar drew fire from sober-sided feminists who felt it trivialized anorexia (and who blithely ignored the fact that a woman co-wrote and co-produced it) and might've raised the ire of Mattel if it hadn't been yanked out of circulation so fast that Mattel didn't even have time to complain about the use of its dolls.

Threatened with a lawsuit from A&M and Richard Carpenter, Haynes countered with an offer to show the film only at clinics and health classes, the profits going to an anorexia research center founded in Karen's name. Richard didn't go for it. In April 1991, critic Owen Gleiberman wrote an openletter in Entertainment Weekly asking the surviving Carpenter sibling to let people see Haynes' film. Richard didn't go for that, either. Thus Superstar became a legendary verboten film, notorious for being forbidden. For some reason it continues to be shown in college courses, and it pops up at the occasional underground festival, but fifteen years later more people have heard about it than actually viewed it.

So, officially nobody is supposed to see the film. Officially I haven't seen it, never bought it, don't own it; that's my official story and I'm sticking to it. But who wants to be official?

Superstar is one of the most haunting almost-comedies you'll never see. (Well, never say never. There are bootleg tapes around, but I'm not going to get anyone in trouble by saying where. Do some Google-work.) I can see why Haynes felt he needed all those Carpenters songs, with Karen's voice drifting in and out of the misery; I can also see why he didn't bother to go ask Richard if he'd give permission to use the songs, since Richard comes off as a world-class prick here. Was there a reason, besides the built-in kitsch and ready-made found-art cred, for telling this story with Barbie dolls? Yes, and they're used brilliantly. Haynes is saying that Karen herself was reduced to a dress-up doll by her overbearing brother and mother, living in a plastic universe that enforces surface femininity on women without taking into account the psychological price they often pay. For about a minute, you might chuckle at the novelty of seeing Barbie dolls with immobile facial features being moved around to tell a tragic story. But only for a minute.
Haynes fashions a wry send-up of the usual rise-and-fall biopic -- it even begins with a melodramatic black-and-white sequence, not told with the dolls, shot from the POV of Karen's mom as she finds Karen's corpse. But within the structure of this parody, Haynes displays a strong compassion that extends beyond Karen to all women pushed into roles they don't want. The narration lectures us mock-somberly on anorexia, laying the groundwork for our understanding of what Karen suffered. As Haynes tells it, Karen's family essentially tried to badger her back to health, monitoring her eating and weight, while she secretly resorted to Ex-Lax and, later, Ipecac (which reportedly is what killed her). In the film, Richard can't see Karen's illness in any other context but as a threat to their music career -- his career. Karen's visible sickness -- culminating in her collapse onstage -- is bad for the Carpenters' squeaky-clean image, another façade that Haynes suggests was as hollow as Barbie.

The Carpenters are even placed in historical context: They positioned themselves as, and were embraced as, a sunny alternative to the chaos and dissent of the early '70s. Here, finally, were two nice young people -- Barbie and Ken as sister and brother. They didn't demand that we get out of Vietnam, Richard wasn't smashing guitars, and Karen wasn't burning her bra. This was an act that could be -- and were -- invited to Nixon's White House to sing. Did Karen harbor a secret resentment over being shaped into the nation's new angel of complacency? It all seems to take its toll, and as the 44-minute film nears its end, Karen's plastic face becomes deformed. Haynes tried to dig gouges into the Barbie Karen's cheeks to denote emaciation, but that didn't work, so he sculpted new "flesh" over the gouges, and the result looks creepier than anything in most horror movies. If Karen won't rebel against how she's being used, her flesh will do it for her.

Against all odds, too, Superstar restores the power of Karen's voice. If you forget that she's singing her brother's crappy, saccharine compositions, she was a great singer. Soothing yet -- to these ears -- far from cheerful, her singing, heard in the context of a film about her private demons, sounds ineffably mournful. In 1994, A&M Records put out a tribute album, If I Were a Carpenter, on which several hip acts of the day (Sheryl Crow, Shonen Knife, 4 Non Blondes, Babes in Toyland, Matthew Sweet) covered, either ironically or sincerely, fourteen of the Carpenters' greatest hits. Of the bunch, the group that best captured the tension between Karen's genuine emotion and Richard's manufactured glaze was Sonic Youth, in their staticky fuzzbox rendition of "Superstar." Richard may not have known what "Loneliness is such a sad affair" really meant, but Thurston Moore did, and so did Karen.

Hand Held: Superstar
Haynes: "My sister Wendy didn't really have Barbies as a child, but we would spenda lot of time playing with her collection of plastic horses. We'd put a blanket over her bedroom table and use the desklampas a light source, and I'd go nuts creating these ornate stories about a little girl whogot a horse for her birthday, which them got injured and had to be shot - and she'dcry as I'd act these really sad melodramas. And I think Superstar really owes a lotto those years under the table with my sister."

Or you might blame it on Brown, from where Haynes graduated in 1985, gripping aB.A. (with honors) in Art and Semiotics. Steeped in Critical Studies, and fixated onhis close reading of Freud's "A Child Is Being Beaten" (which examines thetransformation of masochism into sadism in the spanking fantasies of the young),Haynes found the subject for his now-infamous 1987 cult treasure, Superstar: TheKaren Carpenter Story (co-written and produced by Cynthia Schneider), on the LiteFM airwaves, when a chance encounter with The Carpenters' "Yesterday OnceMore" sent him into a reverie of preteen life in his native Southern California. "Theearly Seventies had felt like the last moment of pure, popular culture fantasy andfakeness that I shared with my parents, when we were still united in this image ofhappy American famlihood," Haynes would later explain. "And The Carpenters'music seemed especially emblematic of that time."
Further flashbacks ensued. Recalling a promotional film he'd seen on The MickeyMouse Club as a child, in which Barbie and her plastic-perfection wish-fulfillmentswere introduced to a nation of pint-sized consumers, Haynes began to link archaicimages to his current fascinations: the politics of the body and the coercions offame, parental control and poststructuralist chaos, cinema's yin-yang ofidentification and estrangement. Captivated by the cultural implications of KarenCarpenter - "the smooth-voiced girl from Downey, California, who lead a raucousnation smoothly into the Seventies"(per Superstar's "authoritative" voiceover)before succumbing to anorexia at age 32 - Haynes resolved to cast his film withcarefully modified dolls: Malibu Barbie, meet Bertolt Brecht.

Superstar's blend of genre appropriation and dollhouse kitsch is at once giddy andawful. It opens, under the cautionary title "A Dramatization," with a well-wornschlock-horror trope - a murky, handheld search through Karen's spacious condo,shot from the perspective of an unseen Mother Carpenter (who calls in vain for herunresponsive "Carrie"). The initial archness of Haynes's foppishly bewigged andelaborately turtlenecked dolls quickly recedes, and the film wastes no timesearching out harsher truths: Karen's skyrocketing career is countermanded by hercontrolling parents, and her reaction - starvation dieting and an addiction to Ex-Lax- soon reaches epic proportions. Haynes's control of his doll-world escalates aswell, and soon his plastic performers' complexions become scoured and stained,their "flesh" stripped away and "aged." The director's Freudian spanking obsessionalso reveals itself in the assorted rhythmic punctuations of a human hand smackinga tambourine and tweaking a radio dial, and most tellingly in a grainy image fromKaren's dreamlife, as a huge human hand helps Popps Carpenter paddle littleKaren's exposed derrière.

But while Haynes's melo-dioramas and micro-mise-en-scène - an impressive arrayof tracking shots, swish-pans, and up-up-and-away "cranes" through exquisitelyContact-papered minisets - suggest a foray into Lilliputian Sirkiana (or its drained,Eighties equivalent, the Movie of the Week), his darkly associative montage takesoff from the found-footage lessons of Bruce Conner. In one sequence, under thesaccharine strains of "We've Only Just Begun," Haynes asserts the collapse ofhistory as bitter flashback, comprised of Cambodian bombings and concentrationcamp body-dumping, Richard Nixon tinkling the ivories, and assorted catastrophicfragments from The Poseidon Adventure. Elsewhere, the plight of the anorexic(whose "distorted perceptions of their actual body size" Haynes's approach cleverlymimics) is discussed in solemn voiceover, while slow camera cruises throughsuburban neighborhoods underscore postwar America's cultural climate ofsuper(market) abundance.

In October 1989, after scores of successful bookings and enthusiastic reviews, A&MRecords enjoined Haynes against further distribution of the film. Despite his offer"to only show the film in clinics and schools, with all the money going to the KarenCarpenter memorial fund for anorexiaresearch," Superstar remains buried. (Abrisk bootleg-video life is rumored.)

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3. Reviews (circa 1989)
‘Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story’ (NR)By Desson HoweWashington Post Staff WriterJanuary 20, 1989
You might start laughing at Todd Haynes' "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,"a surreal reenactment of the singer's ill-fated career that uses Barbie dolls insteadof real-life actors. But the giggle will soon die in your throat. This 43-minute drama,which initially appears to make campy mockery of the '70s singer, turns out to be acompassionate and deeply affecting treatment of America's easy-listening siren.

Approximately one-third the length of a regular movie, "Superstar" manages tocover more ground and leave a greater resonance than half a dozen rise-and-fallbiographies (a genre that "Superstar" parodies). Countless impressions echothroughout your mind after viewing "Superstar," including strains of the hits youthought you had long since escaped -- but which have aged disturbingly well andwhich, in light of her untimely 1983 death, seem imbued with a deeper, fatalisticquality.

With dolls "playing" the parts of Karen and Richard Carpenter, as well as theirparents, Haynes and cowriter/producer Cynthia Schneider chart the disturbingcourse of the singer's life -- a heady, sweet-natured success, followed by touringpressures and the ultimately fatal battle with anorexia nervosa (she died in herparents' home after a massive ingestion of ipecac syrup). Haynes and Schneidercreate a subjective but stirring sense of her increasing neurosis and, by intercuttingimages of President Nixon, the Vietnam war, the sitcom faces of television andantiwar demonstrations, indicate the troubled times she sang to.

"Superstar" is loaded with other, more grim significances. When the Carpentersperform for Nixon at the White House (in his banner year of 1973), you're clearlysupposed to see the duo as Diet-Rite and doll-perfect fiddlers to a burning America.

The depiction of Carpenter's family is unflattering; they seem ignorant, though notuncaring, about her anguish. Anorexia nervosa is examined as an obsessionalsickness, a denial of femininity; it is called a "fascism over the body in which thesufferer plays both dictator and the emaciated victim."

Karen Carpenter-the-Barbie-doll literally deteriorates before your eyes, her plastic"flesh" scraped away (by Haynes) as her condition worsens. But throughout thesehorrors (including recurring images of a hand slapping a doll's buttocks -- thedisciplinary aspect of anorexia -- and a body plummeting to earth) is a heartfelt,though eerie, eulogy to a tormented woman who died for fame.

Watch "Superstar" while you can. Haynes, who has no rights to the Carpenters'songs, claims to have recently received a letter of warning from Mattel and has yetto hear from the Carpenter family.

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‘Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story’ (NR)By Rita KempleyWashington Post Staff WriterJanuary 26, 1989
Like leisure suits and easy listening, the Carpenters fell from favor when therealities of Watergate and the Asian war made their every "wo-wo-wo-wo" seem aninsidious, syrupy form of mind control. At one with America's suburban lullaby, theybecame the brunt of jokes, seemingly as oblivious as Barbie and Ken.

Today Karen Carpenter is fashionable again, the subject of a recent TV biographyand a far more fascinating 43-minute docudrama, "Superstar," which portrays heras a feminist martyr. Though a straightforward life story, this deadly earnestsociopolitical commentary features a bizarre ensemble of Barbie dolls, uncannilyassembled by artist Todd Haynes, who sees Karen variously as a toy, a productand a role model for little girls. Who could imagine feeling empathy for Barbie orfinding depth in the Carpenters' "Rainy Days and Mondays"? Haynes, a semiologist,achieves both in this postmodern puppet show.

The coarse grain of the film and the rigidity of the Barbies impugn the popsicleoptimism of the Carpenters' soundtrack, just as Karen's anorexia nervosadestroyed her image as the girl in the split-level next door. And beyond all this,Haynes would show us a pop culture of American Clean that cloaked the corruptionof the period. As the Barbie Karen coos "We've Only Just Begun," bombs fall onCambodia on the television news, part of a series of montages interspersed intothe doll docudrama.

The '60s had subsided and the American people had entered the Brave New World,their ideas shaped by television, their meditation aided by Muzak. Women, inparticular, saw that to be loved and accepted they first must be Lite. Men realizedthat thin women would have sex with them if they managed a close shave.

It is this fascism of superficiality, this tyranny of perfection as route to acceptancethat is the core of "Superstar." Haynes and his collaborator Cynthia Schneiderdefine anorexia nervosa as "an abuse of self-control, a fascism over the body" inresponse to "a culture that continues to control women through the {selling} oftheir bodies." They illustrate their point with quick cuts from the Barbie Karen,whose latex is stripped away layer by layer, to footage of concentration campvictims starved to the bone. It's an effective and creepy mix of images: emetics,Ex-Lax packages, emaciated dolls and Hitler's awful human purge.
Obsessed with purification, the anorexic as "both dictator and victim" becomes thefilm's philosophical explanation for the bourgeois white woman's affliction. But"Superstar" also offers the psychological answers to "Why at 32 was thissmooth-voiced girl found dead in her parents' bedroom?" A controlling family, ademanding career, an addiction to limelight killed the underappreciatedoverachiever.

Ma Carpenter, played by a scruffy old Barbie, is seen as the Ma Barker of MOR."You're not going to get big-headed," says Ma to her twentyish kids. "You're bothgoing to continue living at home."

"Great suggestion, Mom, and it's in keeping with our image," says brother Richard,portrayed by a coiffed Ken doll with a frozen grin, molded plastic that manages tobe oleaginous. Moved by wire and unseen hands, these dolls give us the unnervingimpression that children are putting on the show with these antiseptic, asexualgolems.

One critic has written that the Carpenters "recorded the soundtrack for the Reaganera before it started." "Superstar" concurs. Along with its sympathetic treatment ofKaren Carpenter, it provokes frightening conclusions. If Karen were alive today,wouldn't she have sung at the Bush inauguration?

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, at the Biograph through Sunday, is unratedand contains adult material.

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4. Interviews with Todd Haynes (1992-2002)

=================1992 Interview=================

Cinematic/Sexual: An Interview with Todd Haynesby
Justin Wyatt
from Film Quarterly, 1992

Justin Wyatt: Has your academic background had a bearing on your film-makingpractice?

Todd Haynes: In high school I had a teacher named Chris Adams. Chris hadstudied with Beverle Houston at USC and that was really important to her way ofthinking about film. Chris showed a lot of experimental films in her classes, whichwas great. We saw James Benning, Stan Brakhage, Ken Jacobs, Oh Dem Watermelons, even the trash classics of early American avant-garde cinema.I remember that it was a big breakthrough for me when Chris Adams said, basedon Beverle Houston's writings, that film is not reality.
Reality can't be a criterion forjudging the success or failure of a film, or its effect on you. It was a simple, buteye-opening, way of approaching film. You would go to these new Hollywood filmsand you would say, "It wasn't very realistic, that wasn't a very 'real' scene." Thissense of real all the time was pervasive, very easy, and a completely accepted forof critiquing and analyzing what worked and what didn't work. But it wasn't a wayof critiquing at all: it was really a way we represent ourselves. So that approachwas planted in my brain as a way of looking at film as completely constructed, andthen trying to create different criteria for how to look at film.I actually made my first film in high school - with a crew and a big production. It was called The Suicide. We emulated the Hollywood practice of oppression: scriptgirls and all the obligatory hierarchies and stuff. I was the co-producer. I wrote the story for a these exam in high school, and it's a film that actually is very similar to poison in structure: it has all these different voices and intercuts all these differentrealities.
We started to shoot it in tenth grade, and we worked on it for two years.The entire second year was devoted to the sound track. We started in Super-8, butby the end of the year we had blown up all the tracks to 35mm. We were able touse the Samuel Goldwyn studios to do our final mix through film brat kids'connections. We went in and did it right after Barnaby Jones and right before TheLast Waltz. At the end, for our final party, we rented a theater in Westwood andsomebody hired a limo to pick us up and take us to the theater. I was so disgustedwith the whole thing that I vowed to make weird, experimental, personal films, withno sound, for a while. This idea continued to develop and become clearerthroughout college.
At that time I was also very seriously into painting. A lot of people who know mefrom Brown probably think of me more as a painter than as a film-maker. Whilestudying film theory and getting pretty excited about it, I found that there wassomething very different about what could be expressed in film. To me thedifference was societal and political. It was a matter of using images andrepresentation.In a way, I felt that I had acquired a skill about representing things as a child. Iwould practice and practice - I would draw all the time. It was replication of whatrepresentation is. By the time I was in college and painting abstractly, I felt thatthese acquired representations were a weird burden that I carried. Just ignoringthem would be a denial that I thought was important to address. In a way, I wantedto use these emblems, these images of the world that I had perfected: images ofmen, images of women, who look this way and that way, that you can take apart toput on the canvas, and then take apart and discuss. But I kind of hated them. Ihated representation, I hated narrative, and yet I felt that I had to deal with, I hadto. I thought that film was the most appropriate medium for an exploration of that idea.

JW: You've said that one of the reasons you made Superstar was to experimentwith questions of identification and to see whether audiences could becomeemotionally connected to these Barbie dolls. What did you learn from thisexperiment?

TH: I learned that people will identify at the drop of a hat [laughs] at almostanything. I think that it's an essential need when we go to a film, and a reallyexciting need to know about and not simply fulfill. There's this aspect of creatingnarratives in a commercial sense that I hate, and you see it in so many ways inmovies over and over and over again: this need to create a likable centralcharacter with quirks and interesting things to say. It's a horrible mirroring of theneed to affirm who we are through stories and make ourselves big and huge on thescreen. I hate it and yet, at a very basic level of narrative, I think that it happens.So I'm always caught in the dilemma of feeling that it's still absolutely necessary towork with stories, because they are a weird mechanical and emotional hybrid thatwe all react to. There is an incredible potential since people go in with expectations that you can never meet part way, and then alter - because you have them,