Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [107]
The film opens with the voice of the doll portraying Mrs. Carpenter. "Nearly quarter-after and Saks is jammed by eleven," she chirps. When Karen doesn't respond, she walks to Karen's bedroom and finds Karen in a closet, sprawled dead—a victim, we later learn, of an overdose of ipecac, a drug that induces vomiting.
The Mom doll's face, modified by Haynes, is almost as scary as the Mom doll's behavior. Mom makes Karen wear hip-huggers that Karen believes make her look fat. Mom won't let Karen or her brother Richard move out."No matter how famous you all get," Mom says ominously, "you're going to keep living at home."
Home is Downey, California—a grid of houses that resemble the Barbie doll's fold-up dwellings. As poignantly tacky as Karen's songs, Downey's matchbox mansions are an emblem of the postwar prosperity that changed the relationship of middle-class consumers to their food. After Haynes's camera has panned down a suburban block, it sweeps down a supermarket aisle—visually equating prefab houses with packaged foods—while a voiceover explains how, after World War II, food became more convenient, varied, and plentiful. But in defiance of this bounty, teenage girls began, in increasing numbers, to starve themselves.
Haynes makes an ironic connection between anorexia's symptoms and the content of the Carpenters' lyrics. After explaining the "high" that some anorexics get from constant hunger, Haynes cuts to the voice of Karen singing, "I'm on the top of the world looking down on creation . . . " And during Karen's short-lived marriage, the soundtrack plays "Lost in the Masquerade."
Yet even when Haynes uses the Carpenters for social commentary—they crooned their escapist lyrics at the White House the year Richard Nixon ordered the Christmas bombing of Cambodia—he never lets the political overwhelm the personal. Superstar contains many frightening images: shots of bombs falling and a red, white, and blue Ex-Lax box that flashes across the screen like a malignant American flag. But by far the scariest shot is filmed from the Karen doll's point of view. It shows her family hovering over her as she wakes up after fainting from malnutrition. "You're going to be under Mom's constant care," the Richard doll says, his face whittled into a malevolent grimace. "She's going to fatten you up."
Like puppets in a performance piece, Superstars dolls are never intended to be seen as anything other than dolls. The film is innocent of slick special effects. "This work is part of a tradition of independent, antimainstream, anticommercial filmmaking," explained John G. Hanhardt, curator of film and video at the Whitney Museum of American Art. "It's made by an individual with a limited budget. And rather than that becoming a problem, it's the aesthetic of the piece.
"These dolls are sold as representing a way of looking, a way of appearing, a way of dressing, and a way of living," Hanhardt continued. And what Haynes does is rupture the seamlessness of that appearance. "He shows the complexity of the Carpenters as people," Hanhardt said, "and how they had to remake themselves into these popular icons—these things to sell."
Psychotherapist Laura Kogel remembers that the movie gave her chills. "They had to do with Karen not being seen as a person," she said. "And consequently she didn't see herself that way. You come to see yourself as a person through the eyes of those who raise you."
But the endorsement of critics and therapists was not enough to keep Superstar in circulation. "When the film came out, we had many rentals to clinics and classes that dealt with eating disorders," said Christine Vachon, a producer at Apparatus, the film company Haynes founded. "Everybody felt the subject was treated respectfully. It moved many people to tears." Because Haynes hoped the Carpenter family would allow