A month-long promotional onslaught and the box office triumph of "Barbie," which earned $150 million in its opening weekend, have given director Greta Gerwig and newcomer Mattel Films the biggest start of 2023. The dazzling confetti explosion of all-out war media is as inevitable as a hot pink Abrams tank. It's a relief (if not a surprise, given Gerwig's background) that "Barbie" is so fun and innovative, a nice everyday spark in the mundane work of summer blockbusters. But to a certain segment of Gen X connoisseurs, "The Barbie Movie" will always and forever refer to an entirely different, infamous and rarely seen film.
More than three decades ago, young director Todd Haynes cast an entire cast of Barbies in his short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which chronicled the Nixon-era contralto's healthy rise to fame through the brother of to his Richard and his subsequent descendants. Anorexia, which killed her at the age of thirty-two. "The Barbie show was really appreciated by fans all over the country," Haynes told Newsday in 1990. "Mattel doesn't really recognize that as part of his career, and he's done it very well."
Made in the summer of 1985 while Haynes was attending Bard College in New York, Superstar placed his plastic actors in small, hand-painted sets. We see Karen and Richard performing their soft hits on stage, in the studio and at the White House, as well as at home with their stage mother Agnes and passive father Harold. In setting and filming his dollhouse performance, Haynes (who co-wrote "Superstar" with Cynthia Snyder) borrows from horror movies and sick-of-the-week and intersperses advertising and product labels (especially for older, relaxed and ipecac, A poison that keeps Karen thin), contemporary images, traveling talking heads, and headlines for graduates. ("As we examine the story of Karen Carpenter's life and death, we are confronted with a very vivid picture of the inner experience of the modern woman.")
"Superstar" begins as a humorous farce, then turns, almost imperceptibly, into a surreal internal nightmare and finally into pure tragedy. It was outstanding both in its execution and, perhaps, in its reception. Somehow, this graduate student-directed non-short received rave reviews at the 1988 Toronto International Film Festival and was screened in major North American cities (including San Francisco, where Castro was midnight ) Film ), and won such famous fans as directors Jonathan Demme and John Waters. ("Finally, the hellish movie I've been waiting for," enthused Waters.) But "Superstar" soon faced legal threats from Richard and the Carpenters' label, A&M. Haynes, faced A&M. Haynes refused permission to use it. The Carpenters' songs in the film include such ubiquitous hits as "Close to You," "Rainy Days and Mondays" and the title track. (Mattel also tried to meet with Haynes, but never sued; at least some of the Barbie cast members were off-brand, flea-market items.) "Superstar" was pulled from distribution in 1990; The following year, Haynes' first feature film Poison, which received a post-production grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, drew ire from right-wing groups for its government-promoted homosexual content. The controversy catapulted Haynes to mainstream American television screens through "Entertainment Tonight" and "Larry King Live," where he became one of the most talented directors of guerrilla cinema.
Even though Superstar was pulled from the shelves, in the 90s, if you lived in a big enough city and had a couple thousand dollars, you could find it at your local independent video store. I first saw the film in 1998 when I rented it from Mondo Video in downtown Buffalo, which had a second or third generation jerk behind the counter. The picture was dark and dirty, and the soundtrack sounded like it was recorded on a boombox in a washing machine; I pulled my chair closer to the TV, squinted and leaned back, trying to make out sounds and images. A few years later I was lucky enough to borrow a blank copy printed directly from a friend, but it was worth that disappointing first glance. When you try to get something forbidden, it can feel like your ears are against the wall.
The surviving members of the Carpenter family had little incentive to make Haynes' film widely in any form. Karen and Richard, who rose to fame in the 1970s, silenced the silent majority numbed by the countercultural turmoil of the time: They were white, suburban, and virginal; Lived with his parents; They shot music videos at Disneyland; In the words of President Richard Nixon, they were "new America at its best." But Superstar depicts the core of the Carpenter family as stuffy, Agnes as a sharp wit, and Karen and Richard's partnership as crypto-perversion. The montage, based on the We Just Began wedding, shows the siblings walking into the sunset as newlyweds on a cake; Karen sleeps in the girl's four-poster bed under a picture of her and Richard. Later, when Karen briefly mistakes another man for Richard in a restaurant and is promptly defeated, Haynes resumes editing with a new suitor. There is nothing derogatory in the subtext, only that Karen cannot imagine a creative or personal life without her brother, there is no Karen without Carpenter, who is a puppet for her mother, brother and his label. Karen was an international star and a millionaire when she left Agnes and Harold's home at the age of twenty-five.
The deletion of "Superstar" and the attack on "Poison" gave both acts an exotic cachet. "Superstar" pioneered the revival of Karen Carpenter as a sad muse for cool and progressive artists. Sonic Youth included "Tunic (Song for Karen)" on their 1990 major-label debut Goo, and the band featured the famous name on the Carpenters' 1994 compilation If I Were a Carpenter. Babes in Toyland, Matthew covers 90s alternative rockers including Sweet and Cranberry. In her 2005 novel Veronica, Mary Gaitskill refers to an unidentified singer who could only be Carpenter. "When he locked himself in his closet and starved to death, people were shocked," Gaitskill wrote. "But there was hunger in his voice all the time. It was his touch. A soft voice, locked in a dark place, but fully focused on the small strip of light that passed under the door." Gaitskill reminded me of Ursula K. Le Guin's story, Out of Amelas, about a land where an only child suffers. Infinite happiness depends on it. It is Karen's suffering and their secrets that make the Carpenters' quiet American dream possible.
Todd Haynes once told an interviewer that one of his main interests as a director was "to find and make sense of everything that the film offers the audience". One of the tasks he set himself was "to set up obstacles for the public to overcome". In Safe (1995), for example, the obstacle is the vagueness and passivity of the protagonist, a housewife from the San Fernando Valley who seems to suffer from an allergy to the environment. In Farm From Heaven (2002), Obstacles is the staging, tropes and techniques of Douglas Sirk's 1950s melodrama.
The obstacle in Superstar is of course Barbie. They begin as an isolating effect, but ultimately Haynes' use of rigid puppets with fixed facial expressions only heightens the pathos of his film. The human forces arrayed against the Karen seem more immobile and the Karen themselves more powerless; To reflect the toll of her illness, Haynes literally cut off Karen-Barbie's hands and face. Speaking to The Times in 1987, Haynes called Barbie "a rich cultural icon that represents the fully defined femininity that little girls encounter at a young age." "Superstar" and other sources claim that Karen fell into the trap of eating disorder due to two consequences of her very public and highly regulated life: intense attention to her appearance and a desperate need to control at least an aspect of her life, her being. Barbie doll, with her incredible pneumatic figure that exists to be dressed, posed and moved at will, is the perfect vessel to embody Karen's destiny.
If Gerwig's Barbie has any obstacles, it's Barbie. Ironically, it's part of the fun in acknowledging that this hypersexualized but genderless doll is a reactionary archetype of femininity under a mega-consumer patriarchy. It will promote truths like "Barbie can be anything, women can be anything," but subvert and shake it up to explore the conflicts and situations within it. When Margot Robbie calls the stereotypical Barbie a "fascist," the human doll is confused: "I don't control railroads and commerce," she replies. However, the operator is "control": little girls control their Barbies as a test of all the ways the world will control and control them. ("Superstar," for its part, also includes the F-word in one of its titles: "Anorexia can therefore be seen as an addiction and an abuse of self-control, a fascism about the body in which the victim plays the part. playing also even wounded dictators, with whom he is often compared".)