Zach Vasquez
Throughout the long rollout for Warner Bros and director Greta Gerwig’s massively-anticipated new Barbie movie, much has been made about the film’s metatextual qualities. Going by the film’s trailers, ads, and promotional campaign, it’s clear that Gerwig and co. sought to make a work of pop art specifically about what the world’s most iconic and popular toy represents—especially when it comes to gender roles and beauty standards.
Having not yet watched Barbie, I can’t speak to how successful they are in their aims, but there’s one thing I can guarantee: no matter how satirical or socially conscious, the film—which sees Margot Robbie’s blonde bombshell venture out from Barbie Land into the “real world”—will undoubtedly give its hero a happy ending.
If you want a movie about Barbie dolls that is not only actually subversive, but truly transgressive, you won’t find it at the multiplex. Instead, you’ll have to take more illicit measures. Look no further than Todd Haynes’s Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987).
Shot on Super 8 over the course of 10 days while getting his MFA at Bard College, the 43-minute, mixed-media experimental film covers the final 17 years in the life of its namesake pop idol, vocalist for the immensely popular ‘70s soft-rock duo The Carpenters (alongside her brother Richard). The story mainly focuses on Carpenter’s struggles with anorexia nervosa, which would ultimately lead to her death in 1983 of cardiac arrest (the result of her reliance on the expectorant drug syrup of ipecac) at the age of 33.
A period-set musical biopic is an ambitious undertaking for a studio production, let alone a student short, but Haynes—along with co-writer/producer Cynthia Schneider—brilliantly stages the main action with (knock-off) Barbie dolls, while also including documentary interviews and archival footage. The end result falls somewhere between a work of puppetry and an essay film (while also serving as an effective parody of PSAs and sensationalist television newsmagazine programs). Yet, for as cerebral (and short) as it is, Superstar carries the dramatic heft and emotive power of full-length features with double the run-time and a thousand times the budget.
That’s because Haynes’ use of dolls is more than just a clever workaround. Nor is it some cheap gimmick. Instead, it is a brilliant, and intentionally disturbing, metaphor for the sadly doomed Carpenter. Within the film, Karen’s battles against her debilitating disease are shown to have been greatly exacerbated by the control exerted over her by her family—her outwardly benevolent, but actually sinister parents and especially her domineering brother. The world outside of her cloistered suburban household is just as manipulative and controlling: the seemingly clean-cut, wholesome Carpenters were seen by many as an answer to the turbulent, revolutionary and decadent ethos of late ‘60s rock and roll, so much so that they once (happily) performed at the White House at the invitation of the Nixon administration. Haynes’ film zeroes in on the ways in which the Carpenters served as political puppets for reactionary conservatism, even as it recognizes her undeniable talent as a musician and artist.
The use of dolls works beyond just this metaphor, putting in sharp relief the way Carpenter’s intentionally plastic image was commodified alongside her body. While Mattel and fellow toymakers have made efforts to diversify their products by releasing figurines of varying racial and ethnic identities, socioeconomic standings, and body type, the image of Barbie that will always come first to mind is of the impossibly happy, impossibly perfect all-American beauty. Blame for Carpenter’s fatal struggles with her body and body image can’t be laid on any one thing, let alone a toy—and at no point does Superstar make such a claim—but it’s all of a piece.
At the same time, the use of dolls captures and conveys two of the key aspects that would go on to define Haynes’s work: kitsch and dread.
One of the vanguards of the New Queer Cinema, Haynes very much followed in the footsteps of John Waters in his ability to, as Denis Lim wrote in his essay for the Criterion release of Haynes’s sophomore feature, Safe (1995), “Us[e] the vernacular of mass culture against itself…” Haynes’s movies, including and perhaps especially Superstar, “are queer not necessarily in content but certainly in form.”
It’s no mere coincidence that Carpenter’s physical deterioration—which Haynes achieved by whittling down the dolls used to represent her—greatly resembles those that affected AIDS patients at the time in which the film was made. Superstar can be read partly as an AIDS allegory. But it’s not just that.
In many ways Superstar feels like a dry run for Safe—probably Haynes’s greatest masterpiece, although it has stiff competition—in which Julianne Moore’s Barbie-like homemaker undergoes a drastic and terrifying physical and mental collapse when she’s beset by “environmental illness,” an implacable (and possibly entirely psychosomatic) condition that, like Carpenter’s anorexia, turns her body into a prison for which there may be no key. In Safe, Moore’s porcelain beauty journeys from a dreamhouse mansion in the San Fernando Valley suburbs to an igloo-like bunker not much larger than the closet in which Carpenter’s body is discovered in the harrowing scenes that bookend Superstar.
Like Safe, as well as Haynes’s recent environmental legal thriller Dark Waters, Superstar plays like a full-on horror movie at times, with the syndrome at its center—which is borne from a cruel off-hand remark about Carpenter’s figure in a random showbiz news article—bestowed with a numinous and at times seemingly sentient power. Haynes’s films have always contained a strange force moving under and beyond the immediate frame; in these cases it tips towards a sense of cosmic horror that in Superstar is exacerbated by the uncanny effect produced by its use of figurines.
(More than just a student thesis film, Superstar is one of the all-time great artistic thesis films. Per Lim, Haynes once boiled his postmodern spin on the Sirkian melodrama down to “stories about women in houses.” That starts with Superstar, as does the other major motif that would run throughout his career: the unauthorized, speculative music biopic, which he would apply to the likes of David Bowie and Iggy Pop in 1998’s Velvet Goldmine and Bob Dylan in 2007’s I’m Not There.)
Superstar proved instantly notorious upon debut, playing at various festivals to great acclaim. However, it also attracted the negative attention that would ultimately lead to its suppression. According to producer Christie Vachon (who receives a special thanks in the movie’s credits), representatives from Mattel paid Haynes a visit after getting wind of the film. However, he managed to dodge any legal trouble from them by proving that the dolls he used—all of which he bought at yard sales—were not official Barbies, but cheap, off-brand imitations.
Haynes proved less successful in the fight brought to him by Richard Carpenter, who was infuriated by the film’s portrayal of him as an insensitive bully and, it’s heavily implied, a closeted homosexual. He successfully sued on copyright grounds—Haynes didn’t get permission to use any of the band’s songs used in the film’s soundtrack—and managed to get Superstar pulled from circulation…or so he thought. A true blue example of a cult film, underground copies of Superstar circulated on VHS for years, all while its reputation grew. Today, it’s incredibly easy to find online, including on a certain video sharing platform that rhymes with Boob Toob.
Haynes, meanwhile, seems confident that his movie will get a proper release sooner rather than later, thanks to a recent restoration undertaken by UCLA and Sundance. Superstar is a clear case of something that falls under the fair use doctrine and it deserves to be seen in a way its director approves of.
That said, I find that the shoddiness of the transfer available online adds to the overall experience, and not only because it reminds you that you’re watching something you’re not supposed to be watching. The deterioration of the movie mirrors the deterioration of its subject and its “star”, reminding the viewer that all Barbie dolls eventually erode.
