1Superstar: The Karen Carpenter’s story (directed by Todd Haynes, and co-written by Haynes and Cynthia Schneider, 1986) portrays characteristic moments in the life of Karen Carpenter, the singer of the 1970’s famous pop group The Carpenters. The film is about her relationship with her family, her rise to fame and achievements as a star, and her struggle with anorexia nervosa, from which she died in 1983, at the age of 32. These fragments are combined and juxtaposed with songs of the group, found footage from various fiction and documentary sources, and a number of alarming and sinister noises and voice-overs, in an experimental mode, which is further enhanced by several kinds of audio-visual distortion, decomposition and disintegration, to suggest and parallel Karen’s bodily emaciation and collapse. Above all, the use of Barbie-like dolls instead of actors, and of a doll house and furniture for sets, is the most discussed formal choice made by Haynes to represent Karen and her family and professional life. Regardless of their specific function within the film’s thematic concerns, which will be discussed later, these dolls are themselves subjected to manipulation and distortion, with their faces occasionally burned or carved over, to suggest menace and age (in the case of Agnes, Karen’s mother) and emaciation (in the case of Karen).
- 1 Lucas Hilderbrand, Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright (Durham (NC): Duke U (...)
2After its removal from distribution in 1989 for unauthorized use of The Carpenters’ songs, the film’s survival through bootleg circulation put it into multiple consecutive cycles of corrosion and degradation, given that, as Lucas Hilderbrand writes, “the typical transfer format – NTSC VHS – ranks among the lowest-fidelity commercial tape stocks, and VHS-to-VHS dubs reveal steep resolution loss from generation to generation”1. Most lately, the film became massively accessible through Internet, but in this case loss of fidelity and originality did not only come from inside the film – as the version of Superstar watched online may happen to be the original one – but also from the degraded nature of the viewing experience itself. As Rob White puts it:
- 2 Rob White, Contemporary Film Directors: Todd Haynes (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013) (...)
miniaturized in a browser window […] surrounded – dolled up – by all the Web-page paraphernalia of controller, logos, search boxes, links to other videos […], encased in a plasticky white border decorated with corporate badges, Superstar suffers a fate worse than degradation and bootlegging: it becomes almost banal.2
We should however note that the banality which White refers to is only one facet of the viewing experience of Superstar under these circumstances, because the distance it establishes between the film and the spectators is counterbalanced by the latters’ active, affective and tactile participation in playing, copying, reproducing and circulating a videocassette or an uploaded or downloaded internet file.
3In fact, Superstar is a film that bears upon the senses in multiple contradictory and dialectic ways. Furthermore, Haynes’s aesthetic strategies of editing, frame arrangement and mise-en-scène implicitly suggest questions of visibility, and correlatively of proximity and distance to the spectators’ gaze, as factors related to Karen’s health risks and to our propensity to understand and identify with her character. In the following, I will try to address the ways in which every viewing experience of Superstar brings into play a complex dialectics of distance and nearness, of presence and absence, of embodiment and disembodiment, in which the idea of material degeneration, which provides the film’s thematic and stylistic concerns, plays a crucial role. Key to my reading of the film will be Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura, and the philosopher’s project of exploring through it new modes of experience in mass-mediated modernity, of which the film is a textbook case.
- 3 Benjamin, Walter. “Little History of Photography,” in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technologic (...)
4One of the most common understandings of the concept of aura is based on the following definition, which Benjamin gives in Little History of Photography3 and in the Work of Art essay:
- 4 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” in The Work of (...)
A strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be. To follow with the eye – while resting on a summer afternoon – a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountains, of that branch4.
- 5 Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 24-26.
- 6 Yvonne SHerratt, “Adorno’s Aesthetic Concept of Aura,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 33, no. 2 (200 (...)
- 7 Yvonne SHerratt, “Adorno’s Aesthetic Concept of Aura,” 167.
5This definition makes clear that for Benjamin the aura is not a quality restricted to a work of art, but one that is virtually present in all objects. Another quality of the aura, as suggested by this definition, is that it involves a type of distance: the object of senses is invested with distance however physically close it is to the viewer. To put it differently, despite its theoretically oppositional relation to distance, nearness, in empirical-metaphysical terms, does not prevent distance from appearing in the auratic object, even when this object is manipulated, touched and felt by the viewer’s body. If in this context distance and nearness are not spatial relationships between parts of a scene or between an image and a viewer, the question that arises is how they can be perceived and experienced outside the realm of representation. We can glean an answer to this question from the Work of Art essay, where Benjamin describes the aura as bound up with ceremony or ritual5, thus having similar properties with a spiritual experience, like indeterminacy of meaning and pattern, which block the capacity to interpret and clearly discern the forms that appear to the human gaze. However, the auratic object’s impenetrability for the common senses differs from the passivity that characterizes the Subject in the spiritual experience. Exploring the similarities between Benjamin’s and Adorno’s understanding of the concept of aura, Yvonne Sherratt6 underlines the importance that has for both philosophers the category of receptivity by which an aesthetic experience, contrary to the ceremonial calm and passivity, becomes active, intense engagement with the auratic object: “It must always be remembered that receptivity in aura is an act of engagement. That is, it has the features of being both an act and of being directed towards an Object”7.
- 8 Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Pe (...)
- 9 Benjamin, “Surrealism,” 191-192.
- 10 “The collective is a body, too. And the physis that is being organized for it in technology can, th (...)
6This type of engagement has political implications. Benjamin has coined the term “profane illumination”8, along with the terms “body sphere” and “image sphere”9 in order to describe the interpenetration of the individual and collective body and of their images of the world in the conditions of transgressive revolutionary action. Profane illumination concerns the auratic experience to the degree that it involves a loss of the ego as a structure, that is, a loss of the boundary around the self, an immersion in the auratic object, whereby the Subject is unified with the Object10. This unification between Subject and Object, the immersion of one’s self into the object, can now be understood as a kind of proximity, which explains why for Benjamin’s dialectic thinking, distance and closeness are not exactly antagonistic aspects.
- 11 Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 22.
- 12 Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 22.
- 13 Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 276-278.
7However, there is something that differentiates the experience of profane illumination from the auratic experience per se. This difference is suggested by the adjective profane. Benjamin distinguishes between two types of aura: the first, which characterizes the pre-modern bourgeois society’s conception of works of art, is one in which distance endows them with singularity and authenticity, authority and historical testimony11. For Benjamin, this mode of being of traditional works of art withers with the development of new technologies of reproduction and the increasing significance of the masses in modern life12. But, at the same time, the withering of traditional aura creates the possibility for a new type of auratic experience, through profane illumination, which is indispensable for a productive, revolutionary engagement with modern forms of alienation. In order to understand the way in which Benjamin imagines a secularized version of the aura in the age of technological reproducibility, we must take into account two other qualities that are common to, say, both versions of the aura. The first one is the auratic object’s quality of the trace, and the second one is the object’s capacity to return the gaze of the beholder. These two qualities can be seen in several texts by Benjamin to have interrelated functions. Miriam Bratu Hansen explores them on the occasion of one of Benjamin’s most discussed passages from Little History of Photography13, concerning the 1857’s self-portrait of the photographer Karl Dauthendey with his fiancée, whom he would later – after the birth of their sixth child – find lying in the bedroom of his Moscow house with her veins slashed. Hansen writes with regards to the communication of gazes through time:
- 14 Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura,” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 2 (2008): 341.
The futurity that has seared the photographic image in the chance moment of exposure does not simply derive from circumstantial knowledge of its posthistory or that of its subject; it emerges in the field of the beholder’s compulsively searching gaze. The spark that leaps across time is a profoundly unsettling and disjunctive one, triggered by the young woman’s gaze off, past the camera and past her fiancée, absorbed in an ‘ominous distance’. It speaks to the beholder, and the later reader of the passage, not simply of photography’s constitutive relation to death but more insistently of a particular form of death – suicide – that links the fate of the photographed subject to the writer’s own future death.14
- 15 Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura,” 343.
- 16 We have begun with a scene from the repertoire of romantic poetry and landscape painting and now we (...)
According to Hansen, the Dauthendey portrait retains the qualities of the mountains’ auratic scene, such as the proximity through distance and the spiritualist connotations, but it refracts them through a technological medium of perception, that is the photographic lens15. However, the feeling produced to the observer of a photograph is not one of a beautiful semblance to nature, as it is in the view of the mountain range, but of an ominous encounter with death, projected through time upon the observer’s own temporality16.
- 17 Benjamin, “The Work of Art”, 32.
8On the other hand, the linkage of aura with trace is produced when the observer, immersed as he/she is in the distance that separates him/her from the object, becomes capable of feeling the historical-material conditions of the object’s past, which, thanks to this very distance, is connected to the observer’s present and to its own historical-material conditions. Thus, in the concept of trace historic space becomes the topos of a unified experience of time. It is for this reason that rather than incompatible with Benjamin’s aura, technology in mass-mediated culture can virtually reactivate the aura’s moribund potentials of perception and put them at the service of a revolutionary transformation, which will prevent future catastrophes. This is what Benjamin means when he writes that “the representation of human beings by means of an apparatus has made possible a highly productive use of human being’s self-alienation”17. As Miriam Hansen puts it, Benjamin’s quest is:
- 18 Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura,” 366.
to theorize something like a transgenerational memory in modernity – a memory that would allow new images, that is, images of an industrially transformed collective physis to be assimilated nondestructively “into the image stock of humanity18.
- 19 Slavoj Žižek draws similar philosophical aporias from Alfred Hitchcock’s scenes in which the gaze f (...)
Superstar can be considered a secularized and revolutionary version of the auratic object, for three interrelated reasons: first, it lays bare and criticizes the genuine aura’s dependency on bourgeois cultural values; second, it aligns itself with the process of genuine aura’s liquidation in the modern age; and third, it restores some of the genuine aura’s undead remnants, like the dialectics between distance and proximity, by substituting for the object’s inability to return the gaze, an ability to return the absence of gaze19. In this way it confronts the viewer with his/her own alienated existence in modernity, and through the mass-mediated conditions of film circulation, with the alienated existence of a whole community.
9To all appearances, the Carpenters’ songs, which form part of the film’s soundtrack, lack the uniqueness and originality of the genuine auratic object.
- 20 Eric Lott, “Perfect is Dead: Karen Carpenter, Theodor Adorno, and the Radio: Or, if Hooks Could Kil (...)
The brother-sister duo looked almost freakishly alike, their visages on album covers and in photo shoots frozen into the same rictus of compulsory cheerfulness. This aura of sibling sameness is often represented pictorially and musically as a marriage of true talents, an endogamous involution that further resists the incursion of difference. The motivating product behind – or consequence of – this imaginary is a series of hit songs overdetermined by repetition, calculation, sameness20.
- 21 Frank H. Lieberman, “The Carpenters: Soft Rock and 14 Gold Records,” Yesterday Once More: The Carpe (...)
10The Carpenters’ sound has often been characterized as the epitome of white American middle-class values21, and it is of no coincidence that Richard Nixon invited the group to perform at the White House during a state visit by the chancellor of West Germany in 1973. Announced by Agnes during a family gathering, near the end of the film’s first half, the event is illustrated by shots of a singing doll in front of a White House image, intercut with flickering images of Nixon’s famous piano concerto, in lieu of accompaniment to Karen’s voice. In the following shots the sweetness, purity and reactionism of the Carpenters’ music along with Karen’s vocal range and phrasing are debated by a number of fictional characters, including a DJ named Todd Donovan and played by Haynes himself, as they are interviewed in medium close-ups.
11However, a closer analysis of the group’s music and lyrics reveals important aspects of the genuine aura lurking under their surface of calculation and sameness. Most importantly, these songs revolve around themes that are central in the ritual-bound experience of the traditional aura, like unconditional freedom and love, dreams and childhood memories of wholeness and living in harmony, only that, again conforming to Benjamin’s note that the admiration in the auratic object is always a retrospective one, they inscribe them at a temporal and spatial distance, marking their objects as already and irrevocably lost. For example, the song “Superstar” playing at the opening title sequence over a travelling shot of a suburban neighborhood (emblematic of American middle-class whiteness), is about a girl who, many years after the night she has spent with a guitar player, hears him singing on the radio: "Long ago, and, oh, so far away / I fell in love with you before the second show. / Your guitar, it sounds so sweet and clear. / But you're not really here, it's just the radio.” The evocation of absence and longing by the song’s lyrics is reflected on the level of music as well:
- 22 White, Contemporary Film Directors, 5-6.
[I]n the song’s intro (oboe, strings, French horns) and the way Karen sings the plaintive first verse, a profound desolation and sorrow can be heard, without any trace of euphoria or dutifulness, the exhausted sadness of someone who has drifted far out to sea and can only look in despair at the faint lights of human habitation on shore that she will never get back to22.
Thematizing the absence and longing of their very objects, The Carpenters’ songs are imbued with the auratic quality of beautiful semblance. In his essay On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, Benjamin relates this quality with the concept of trace, by seeing in it an appeal to join what earlier generations have admired in the object:
- 23 Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Ba (...)
“semblance of beauty” means that the identical object which admiration is courting cannot be found in the work. This admiration gleans what earlier generations admired in it.23
- 24 Lott, “Perfect is Dead,” 228.
As Lott argues, the Carpenters in their nostalgic-for-better-days songs unintentionally provide an immanent critique of the mass-mediated culture that they had so embraced. Citing Adorno, he traces this critique in the songs’ negative embodiment of harmony by means of unresolved contradictions: on the one hand, the horizon of abundance and pleasure, and the striving for perfection, and on the other, the disillusion of loss, distance and denial. Even anorexia nervosa, the film’s central thematic and representational concern, is approached by Lott in a similar dialectical fashion. It is an extreme measure taken by Karen to abolish the distance, to attain the perfection that her songs mourned as irrevocably lost, as much as to overcome the voice/body split, or in Benjamin’s terms, the aura/trace split, that her mass-mediated exposure through radio and recording had entailed24. In a key scene from Superstar, Karen and Richard are recording their version of Burt Bacharach’s “Close to You”, in the lyrics of which we find once again the group’s recurrent preoccupation with ideals and uncoverable distances: “Why do birds suddenly appear / every time you are near? / Just like me, they long to be / close to you”. However, at the moment when Karen should begin singing the first verse, she has a coughing fit, for which she apologizes, by saying to her brother: “I just wanted to be perfect”.
- 25 Mary Ann Doane, “Pathos and Pathology: The Cinema of Todd Haynes,” Camera Obscura 19, no. 3 (2004); (...)
12A handheld black-and-white shot, assuming the point-of-view of Karen’s mother, takes us through several rooms of what appears to be an upper middle-class house, while we listen to her repeatedly calling Karen to remind her of some social obligation. Mrs. Carpenter’s calls to her daughter remain unanswered. As she moves through Karen’s room, a tone of music enters and builds ominously. When Mrs. Carpenter opens Karen’s wardrobe closet, she founds her lying on the floor. Cut to a long shot of a house façade, the entrance dominated on both sides by two symmetrically placed and manicured trees. The voice-over that quietly accompanies this second shot takes on the tone and philosophy of a disease-of-the-week television episode, as the question "what happened" with which it begins implies that the scandal, the tragedy, is something incompatible with the life supposedly unfolding in such a privileged environment. The voice-over promises us that what follows will be an attempt in flashback to answer this question. In the credit sequence a tracking shot accompanied by the song “Superstar” traces a series of quasi-identical suburban houses and cars, placed at the edge of a driveway. This is, as Mary Ann Doane describes it, “a signature shot” in Todd Haynes’s filmography, because it also appears in Poison (1991) and Safe (1995), and one that recurs so often in television and cinema that “it has virtually become the stereotype of all stereotypes, a kind of metastereotype”25, connoting suburban euphoria, homogeneity and safeness, but also their underside, that is, suffocating suburban life and the risks encountered by bodies in such a world of suppressed negativity. A study of Superstar’s editing, camerawork and frame arrangement will show Haynes’s interest in associating Karen’s health risks to the dynamics produced in a domestic and social environment of both perfection and pressure on one’s body image.
13The tracking shot ends in front of the house’s entrance, an identical shot with the one symmetrically placed before the flashback, creating a kind of palindromic movement between present and past, to suggest a closed circuit, an impasse in which our character is already entrapped. The camera tracks in and a dissolve leads to the first shot of the narrative proper in which the two symmetrically placed trees are replaced by the two shutters of an open window. The window is the first clear manifestation of the frame-within-the-frame motif, which functions in Superstar in multiple and contradictory ways: it is part of the previously introduced rhetoric of closing, entrapment and symmetry; it distances the spectators by inviting them to sense the imaginary, fabricated nature of the narrative; it abolishes the same distance, by manipulating their gaze so that it can be absorbed in the frame all the more intensely as the content that fascinates them is not an ordinary one. As a matter of fact, the audience in now invited to stare at a dollhouse décor and the movements of a Barbie-like doll entering from the left of the frame; from now on, Haynes’s frame-within-the-frame aesthetic will also have the function of relegating Karen to a kind of spectacle, in which the viewers are invited to see her life as a performance, constrained and manipulated by an omnipotent metteur-en-scène.
14While Karen is in her bedroom, her singing can be heard off-screen in the living room where the rest of the doll family is gathered to take a decision about the group’s commercial strategies. Mrs. Carpenter suggests that Karen should join the group as a lead singer. She knocks on the bedroom’s door, from which Karen appears and listens to the decision about her future. Doubly framed by the edges of the door, and by Richard and her mother who are strategically placed on both sides of the screen, Karen has no escape. Her future is about to be sealed, against her will, by a family’s choice. To Richard telling her that mother believes that she should sing lead, she responds “No way”. However, a whip pan suggesting that things have rapidly taken their “natural” course, carries us into a record company’s office, where an agent sitting opposite to the pop duet promises them to “make young and fresh a happening thing”, provided that “you put yourself in my hands”. The rest of this scene will be ironically intercut by the close-up shot of a human hand and blasts of frightening sounds, to culminate into an archival image of a female carcass being thrown into a pit by a WW2 soldier. In the intertitle that follows we read the auteurs’ statement of intent: “We will see how Karen’s visibility as a popular singer only intensified certain difficulties many women experience in relation to their bodies”.
- 26 In an interview given to Scott MacDonald Haynes attributed the spanking scene to a childhood fantas (...)
- 27 Doane, “Pathos and Pathology,” 3.
15 The Holocaust image and the intertitle introduce another element of Haynes’s stylistic strategy toward his theme. Similar techniques, such as archival war footage and references to Watergate, demonstrations and protests, and a non-diegetic interview style, all derived from the documentary tradition, will multiply in the course of the film, but, at first sight, they are not incompatible with a period biopic film, seemingly interested with the causes that led to a celebrity’s death from anorexia. However, as Mary Ann Doane argues, Haynes’s position with regards to his subject matter, which have perplexed critics of Superstar and other Haynes’s films, is the result of his tendency to merge two contradictory ethics or, in her terms, of his “paradoxical insistence on a certain conjunction of distanciation and pathos in viewing” (3). She detects this tendency, inter alia, in the previously analyzed signature tracking shot of the credits, and in another one that occurs in Poison, Superstar and Dottie Gets Spanked (1993). This shot centers on a doll in the process of being spanked. As in the case of the Holocaust carcass, because it anticipates Karen’s emotional state or translates a deeply rooted masochistic desire26, the spanking scene constitutes, as Doane maintains, “a curious mixture of intensified subjectivity and anonymity or voicelessness (an image that seems to come from nowhere, with no specific origin)”27.
16 In Superstar the curious mixture between the diegetic and the non-diegetic, the documentary’s objectiveness and the fiction’s deepest subjectiveness has also the ethical function of giving access to only partial and uncertain knowledge about Karen’s anorexia, and in the final analysis to no more than the knowledge that Karen herself acquires of her body’s risks in the course of the film. At the same time, Haynes’s dolls and dollhouses keep our gazes occupied, fascinated and identified with an object related to an idealized past, which is not only the perfection promised by middle-class suburban life, but also, as we shall see in the next section, of its (female) childhood fantasy of domestic agency. In a similar way that the auratic object inscribes the entwinement of distance and closeness with the realm of the unconscious, conveying the emptiness and flatness of Karen’s identity and surroundings and at the same time absorbing the viewers into these same objects has a similar function of both promoting and blocking audience identification. In this way, Haynes prepares his viewers for the type of auratic experience, through profane illumination, which is indispensable for a more productive use of their alienated conditions.
- 28 In this regard, the term “Superstar”, which borrows the film’s title, is also overturned or ironize (...)
17Thus, ideal conditions of success and perfection always come with their subjective underside. When, in the concert scene placed about seven minutes into the film as part of the group’s success narrative, Karen sings surrounded by a rectangle of gleaming lights (as another incidence of the frame-within-the frame motif), the use of a dutch angle to film the doll functions as a signifier of the emotional unease that she feels. Many times, Haynes’s visual, narrative and generic strategies suggest questions of proximity and distance to Karen’s subjectivity and, at the same time, ask the viewer success and perfection are finally the terms in which to think about Karen, rather than illness or anormativity28.
18And suddenly the tone changes: we see flickering archival footage – recorded from a television broadcast – of bombs dropping on Cambodia, Governor Reagan, President Nixon at his daughter’s wedding, the American flag and a violent protest. The voice-over defines the cultural agenda of these turbulent times:
The year is 1970, and suddenly the nation finds itself asking the question: what if instead of the riots and assassinations, the protests and the drugs, instead of the angry words and hard rock sounds, we were to hear something soft and smooth, and see something of wholesomeness and easy handed faith.
- 29 Danielle Bouchard and Jigna Desai, “‘There’s Nothing More Debilitating than Travel’: Locating US Em (...)
19It is of no coincidence that Haynes places right after this series of shots the scene in which Karen’s cough interrupts the group’s studio recording. Karen’s decline is therefore set in motion as a consequence of this enterprise of social, political and cultural whitewashing, a point which Haynes will often return to in the film. Karen feels right to apologize to her brother for not feeling well, but she is at a loss for words: “I don’t know what’s the matter with me”. Her role is limited to making excuses, and also obeying her brother who tells her in a confident, well-meaning, patronizing voice: “Just relax, take a deep breath. Well, we’ll just do it until it’s right.” Karen’s response to Richard has the keyword to our reading of Karen’s health risks in the film: “I just wanted it to be…perfect”. The association between society’s ideal of perfection and Karen’s health risks is made even clearer in the following shot where Karen sings the perfected version of the song. The camera starts a slow tracking out from her figure, and the lights gradually fade to leave in the middle of an almost blackened frame only a tiny, pale doll face. When archival images of Nixon and the Vietnam War reappear on screen to suggest the insistence of the troubled political reality of the 1970s, they will be cleverly attributed by Haynes to a radio program delivering the news, since the following scene will start with Mrs. Carpenter’s hand switching off the transistor and restoring silence. “I can’t hear myself think,” she explains to Karen. Mrs. Carpenter is measuring Karen and worrying about her being “so fanatical about [her] weight,” thus mediating her daughter’s relation with her body. However, this has also been the case a few seconds earlier, when she switched off the transistor radio, shutting Karen off from the world’s violence and negativity, a bit like the Wrenwood’s clientele in Safe “is urged and pushed to desist from reading newspapers, to refuse the negative and troubled world around them”29. This reaction has been linked by Danielle Bouchard and Jigna Desai to the idea that illness in Haynes’s films is inextricably tied to the white middle and upper class’s refusal to see and acknowledge alterity and otherness. Karen’s body is caught into the traps of spectacle, visibility and perfection that are suggested in the film by its frame-within-the frame motif, editing, and more general aesthetic-political strategy of both entrapping and distancing the audience’s gaze. Inevitably, this strategy also echoes Haynes’s dialectical approach to Karen’s anorexia, as it conveys at the same time the expression of her loss of control over her body, given over to the ideals of homogeneity, performance and operationality, and a way to retrieve, to be in charge of it. Interviewed on this subject, Haynes claimed that
- 30 MacDonald, “From Underground to Multiplex,” 57.
Superstar was also our way of trying to understand anorexic behavior, which, as we learned, often occurs within very controlling families, and in Karen Carpenter’s case, […] her desire to take back control over her life was something that we understood and tried to create some sympathy for30.
20The use of Barbie-like dolls and settings in the film has been most often interpreted as a comment upon the patriarchal values of stardom and commodity culture that have determined Karen’s image of herself as a woman. As Mary Desjardins notes:
- 31 Mary Desjardins, Recycled Stars: Female Film Stardom in the Age of Television and Video (Durham NC: (...)
Barbie brings her own intertextual baggage to the film, a history that includes one of the great success stories of any product of postwar corporate America, the most significant achievement of which was to wed the notion of an ideal, sexualized female body centered around commodity purchases of clothing, accessories, and dream houses to little girls’ fantasy narratives of successful maturation31.
We must however note that, like all objects of mass culture, Barbie dolls can be potentially invested with values different from those supposedly planned for them in the first place. Lynn Spigel’s survey into adult women’s (and some men’s) engagement with Barbies has shed light on such diversions that resist the elitist view of these objects as one-sidedly mass-production and culture icons. Focusing mainly on the artisan practices of craft that accompany the collection and public display of Barbies, like the design, fabrication and restoration of doll costumes and miniature settings, Spigel makes a number of observations on how these kinds of activities become the ground on which women form cultural communities, appropriate domestic space and redefine their relation to themselves and their place in society. Furthermore, these practices, due to their antiquated and anachronistic nature, generate emotions of nostalgia and longing that play a crucial role in the process of re-evaluation. According to the poet and literary critic Susan Stewart:
- 32 Susan Stewart quoted in Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs ( (...)
[w]e cannot separate the function of the miniature from a nostalgia for preindustrial labor, a nostalgia for craft […] Whereas industrial labor is marked by the prevalence of repetition over skill and part over whole, the miniature object represents an antithetical mode of production: production by hand, a production that is unique and authentic32
Following these remarks, adult women’s engagement with Barbie dolls could be seen as simultaneously incarnating the mass-fabrication values that these dolls represent in the first place and an ideal, distant past of authentic, domesticated labor that encourages emotions such as nostalgia and longing for better days. However, referring back to craft-based cultures is not the only way by which the appearance of distance in the experience of dolls changes the status of the object. Narratives that have become available to us by various women’s testimonies and confessions in magazines and other media demonstrate that playing with Barbie dolls, due to these objects’ flexibility and openness to change, can be a means of direct expression of female subjectivity, like other practices of autobiographical self-disclosure, such as letter and diary writing. Consisting of projecting and playing imaginary roles, adult women’s engagement with Barbies mostly generates emotions of nostalgia and longing because it encourages women to compare their adult selves with the ways they had imagined and envisioned them in their childhood past. Therefore, from the point of view of a more or less disillusioned present, Barbie-dolls become a medium for these women to hang on to the wholeness and purity of their imaginary girlish past, that is, to be absorbed in a type of auratic experience.
- 33 Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse, 327.
In the case of Barbie culture, the reader of these autobiographical stories is encouraged to see herself as a child playing in the fantasy world of Barbie’s teenage romance, and at the same time she is asked to imagine herself from the perspective of the married adult woman who remembers herself as a romantic teen. In this regard, the stories implicitly ask women to think about the difference between these adult and girlish selves33.
- 34 Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body (Berkeley: University of Cal (...)
- 35 Arthur Hamilton Crisp, “Anorexia Nervosa: feeding disorder, nervous malnutrition or weight phobia?” (...)
For a number of feminist writers, anorexic women embody their reaction to aspects of mature “feminine” subjectivity that they consider abject34, and purge them by attempting to withdraw into the childhood ideals of wholeness and plenitude35. Viewed through this prism, anorexia is not merely an obsession brought about by the silent acceptance or refusal of the mass media and consumer culture’s messages about the ideal woman. It is at the same time, and maybe above all, an experience of a desire which is even more powerful from the negativity it contains and ultimately turns against itself.
- 36 Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation (Princeton: (...)
- 37 Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism, 15.
21More generally, adopting a specific attitude toward food and eating as a means of asserting and controlling corporeal identity has preoccupied several thinkers and artists alike, who approach the individual’s body as the foundation upon which the relationship between the inside and the outside, and consequently every type of binary opposition, is initially structured. Maggie Kilgour, whose work on communion and cannibalism is based on the premise that eating is an act of incorporation in which an external object is taken inside another36, sees in the process of subsuming and drawing into the center (typified by the human body) an attempt to restore an ideal primal identity, whether this be, in Freudian terms, the unity with the mother’s breast, or, in biblical terms, the identity with God during the act of communion37. With regards to the first case, breastfeeding becomes cannibalistic since the child does not see mother’s breast as a separate object, and it does so only later and at the expense of developing a feeling of aggression towards something that has now become external and that it attempts to get it back inside.
- 38 Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism, 15.
22With regards to the second case, communion sets up a type of relationship which is also an ambiguous one, a reciprocal incorporation in which it becomes difficult to determine who is eating whom: “Man is a host in that he literally takes God, in the form of the Host, into himself. But the Host is the kind of food that converts the feeder into himself”38. Though not anorexic, the heroine of the conceptual short-film entitled Barbie (Tina L’Hotsky, 1977), shares many similarities with Haynes’s Karen Carpenter: she is also imagined and represented as a Barbie doll, and her unusual eating practices are invested with the significance of the fantasies of self-sufficiency and autonomy played out in the primal oral and biblical phases. Directed and interpreted by an avant-garde personality of the Downtown New York scene of the 1970s, the film follows a naked woman who returns from shopping, opens the door to her apartment, takes the groceries out of a paper bag, unwraps a Barbie doll, fries it up and eats it. This Barbie lives in a tiny and miserable apartment, and her nudeness and slow but resolute movements give to the whole act a ritualistic quality, re-enacting the Bible’s myth of fall and return in the modern conditions of isolation and self-alienation. However, the relation between an inside (Barbie’s body) and an outside introjected into herself (the Barbie doll and its values that have replaced God in the sacrament of the Eucharist) is an ambivalent one. Is Barbie attempting, by literally and metaphorically eating her ideal image, to incorporate its power, or to protect herself against a threatening and oppressing (poisonous) substance?
- 39 See Megan Warin, Abject Relations: Everyday Worlds of Anorexia (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers Universit (...)
23In Superstar Haynes is concerned with representing Karen’s life and career as a trajectory in constant motion, reflecting the back-and-forth reality of the people diagnosed with anorexia39. Brief scenes of her rise to fame, like the one in the record company office, when the group is about to sign their contract, soon turn sinister through sound and visual distortion, Karen’s harmonious relationship to her brother and parents is thrown into crisis before being returned to normal, Karen’s obsession with her body is torn between phases of eating less and using laxatives to slim down and states of recovery, begun with her house move to a condo where we watch her holding a fashionable party, and later interrupted in a nightmarish sequence when she is lonely again, before the crisis reappears to be winding down when during another party she meets a man, Tom Burris, a real estate developer. Her subsequent marriage to him, as a title card informs us, will not last. However, the following scenes recounting her treatment in the hands of a recovered anorexic writer, Cherry Boone O’Neill, and a doctor, Steven Levenkron, seem to re-instill a sense of hope in the film. Karen gains weight, and upon her return to California, she reunites with her family to eat a meal she has cooked. Then a long and trembling black-and-white point-of-view shot, accompanied by melodies from the group’s songs mingled together and slowed down, begins to follow Karen around the house and to the toilet where she takes an overdose of Ipecac – a once widely used emetic drug – that leads to her death. This sequence climaxes in a thrilling rapid montage of extreme blasts of sounds and close-ups showing several Ipecac bottles, a vomiting woman, opening doors of a fridge, a dustbin and a closet to discover on the latter’s floor Karen’s dead body. The two final shots of the film are again taken from documentary sources: a Holocaust carcass dragged on the ground and a flickering and pixelated image of the real Karen Carpenter.
24The ending sequence is typical of the entire film’s stylistic strategy. Superstar borrows elements from different genres, such as family melodrama, music biopic, horror film, animation and documentary, and manipulates them through various forms of audio-visual distortion and disintegration in order to reflect Karen’s state of emotional and physical instability. The demonic aspect of aura, an element of great importance in Benjamin’s conception of profane illumination, as a prerequisite for the viewers’ productive engagement with modern forms of alienation, manifests itself in the scenes where technological manipulation of the image and sound is employed to describe a traumatic experience:
- 40 White, Contemporary Film Directors, 14.
Throughout Haynes’s film, audiovisual distortion and especially uncanny juxtapositions, overlaps, tangles, and loops open up a dimension of horror and trauma at the level of the film’s form40.
Audio-visual disintegration, employed by Haynes to evoke the emotion of horror, saturates the scenes with intense subjectivity, taking the spectators deep into Karen’s traumatized self, and, at the same time, fulfills the opposite task of distancing them from Karen’s subjectivity, which is somehow absorbed in the objectiveness of the technological medium. Premised on the demonic aspect of aura, the horror dimension in Superstar’s multiple audio-visual distortions produces, therefore, a shock of self-recognition to the spectators who see in Karen’s loss of control over her body the risks that themselves encounter in the age of mass-mediated reproduction.
- 41 Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 38.
25Benjamin sees in cinema the capacity to mobilize critical-dialectical thinking that goes against its own nature as a product and a vehicle of alienated mass production. More specifically, he discerns this possibility in certain films dealing with forms of eccentricity, modern alienation and mass psychosis, thus allowing the spectators to encounter and react to fragments of their own existence and “prevent their natural maturation in the masses”41. For Benjamin, films such as American slapstick comedies and Disney animations achieve this significance mainly by having their characters mimic technological effects on the human body. For example, Chaplin’s innovation lies in the fact that:
- 42 Walter Benjamin, “The Formula in Which the Dialectical Structure of Film Finds Expression,” in The (...)
he dissects the expressive movements of human beings into a series of minute innervations. Each single movement he makes is composed of a succession of staccato bits of movement […] always the same jerky sequence of tiny movements applies the law of the cinematic image sequence to human motorial functions42.
- 43 Walter Benjamin, “Mickey Mouse,” in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility (...)
A similar remark could be made in the case of Mickey Mouse, whose mechanical and, in the modern context of aura’s decay, horrifying gestures and movements may become proofs “that a creature can still survive even when it has thrown off all resemblance to a human being”43. Viewed from this perspective, the dolls’ movements in Superstar – clumsy walks, unsteady shifts to the right and left, abrupt appearances into the frame – add a demonic dimension to their already discussed auratic character, thereby consolidating their status as ambiguous objects.
- 44 White, Contemporary Film Directors, 13.
The dolls in Superstar are just these plastic things from which all human traits are missing: desire, thought, even those characteristics that make a face truly a face – expressive movement and constant aging. Perhaps the gross, even obscene presence of these lifeless objects is an almost mythopoeic way of imagining the spectral evaporation of being and the slow annihilation of the psyche as a process of calcification, or rather plastification44.
- 45 Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 39.
- 46 Hilderbrand, Inherent Vice, 178.
26Another parallel could be drawn between Haynes’s stylistic strategy of degradation and fusion of genres and the means through which Dadaists have consciously sought to destroy aspects of the traditional aura, or to account for its actual uselessness, in their literature and paintings: “They sought to achieve this uselessness not least by thorough degradation of their material”45. Their word-salads and patchwork procedures have much in common with Superstar’s uncanny juxtapositions between different genres, aesthetics and image formats. We must also note that in Superstar the intense flickering and pixelation of many found-footage and originally created scenes is due to the fact that they have been taped from television with a VCR and then played back and reshot in 16 mm from the surface of a monitor46, to reinforce their already “out-of-reach” quality. And on the top of that is the degradation in which has resulted the long history of bootleg duplications, as it has been already noted. This type of degradation, the gradual loss of the film’s uniqueness, originality and fidelity from one VHS tape to another, is the result of the bootleggers’ tactile investment with their object of desire. However, as Hilderbrand notes:
- 47 Hildenbrand, Inherent Vice, 176.
analog reproduction of the text, rather than destroying the original’s aura, actually reconstructs it. Materially, the fall-out of the image and the soundtrack mark each successive copy as an illicit object, a forbidden pleasure that has been watched, shared and loved to exhaustion47.
27But, maybe, at the same time, like Karen’s striving to retrieve the wholeness and uniqueness of her body through its very refusal, the bootleggers’ illusion of becoming closer to an inaccessible object, only increases the distance that separates them from it.
28Through the deployment of specific visual, narrative and generic strategies, Superstar entails an unusual regime of viewership, in which, as in the case of Benjamin’s auratic object, distance and proximity lose their traditional oppositional relation and become entwined in a dialectical fashion. Karen’s performance of identity within an environment marked as idealized by several forms connoting upper class’s cultural values or childhood dreams of perfection, agency and safeness, simultaneously absorbs and keeps audience at a distance from the temptations of identifying with the protagonist. It is the same forms that become in the film metaphors for a society’s overbid of control over the bodies, entrapped in literal (audio-visual) and metaphorical barriers and frames of visibility. Karen is a hostage of her environment as the mise-en-scène, framing and audio-visual distortion suggest at every moment. At the same time, the Carpenters’ songs and the doll aesthetics draw the eye and the ear so close to her, that the fascination they provoke prevents viewers from adopting a superior (ironical or cynical) subject position towards Karen’s fate. This fundamental ambivalence sets the grounds for an experience of the film that has the qualities of Benjamin’s profane illumination because the viewers are carefully guided to project themselves into Karen’s environment so that they never acquire a full explanation for her disease, though feeling as if the dangers encountered by her were also their own.