Everybody is a Star..

Ending out a unit in which a few families were presented and studied in various ways, Superstar: the Karen Carpenter Story does much the same, but the reluctant subject idea is kind of different, if not gone. It is a total re-telling of a young and successful singer in the 1970s who overdosed on ipecac syrup. Karen Carpenter had a problem with her weight image and the last decade of her life she battled anorexia.

The only re-enactment shot with actors is at the beginning. It is a very shakey walk through the home, with the mother Carpenter looking for Karen and finding her dead in the bathroom. The mother lets out a shrill scream that was made worse by UC-1’s sketchy volume setting. The rest of the film is a rather in depth look into the home and private life of the Carpenters – namely Karen – made with Barbie Dolls. At first I was annoyed that I had to imagine a doll being lightly wagged forward and back as its dialogue, but you get used to it.

Transitional sequences in the movie show a television screen of various events in the late 60s and 70s, accompanied by background music. I believe it’s Karen Carpenter singing all the time, her popular songs, like Rainy Days, Mondays, but I definitely got feeling a little eerily about these sequences. Spiked by intense zooms on laxative pills and dizzy accounts of dialogue spoken through the movie, the non-Barbie scenes did a lot to me.

I think overall it’s an important movie. Just speaking on the times now, it seems female celebrities that are in trouble are in much more boisterous and deservingly hot water. They make terrible decisions and, yes, end up in rehab. I think Haynes (in the 80s) did a good job telling the story differently, almost scarily, that it was a part of the times. I remember being younger and watching some tv shows and thinking.. wow one girl in ever different show goes through some eating disorder.. I knew all about bulimia and anorexia before high school health class, and I guess that’s a good thing.

Karen Carpenter’s story is really quite a sad one. Haynes makes it clear real early, apart from the dramatization of her death, but also when signing the deal with A&M. The doll hand slowly sliding over to Karen, the music getting more devious, the record exec saying “Put me in your hands.” Not knowing anything yet, I thought that this would be a profile of a girl sexually abused and abusive to drugs thereafter… I guess that just says a bit about the present day superstars I know of.