Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story
1987 · 43m · USA
Directed by Todd Haynes
Genres: biography, documentary, drama, experimental
Tones: dark, darkly comic, melancholic, tender
Using modified Barbie dolls as actors in handmade miniature sets, the film tells the story of singer Karen Carpenter's struggle with anorexia nervosa and her death in 1983, intercutting the doll-enacted drama with documentary footage and educational materials about eating disorders.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Haynes carved the Karen doll thinner and thinner until Mattel sued the film out of existence — which is its own kind of accidental endorsement. The Barbies make it more devastating, not less.
Haynes's Barbie-doll requiem is the rare bootleg classic that earned its mythic status — its formal extremity does not distance the grief but sharpens it. YouTube gates it behind age-verification, which is workable.
Carving the Karen doll progressively thinner across the film is the cruelest visual gag in 80s cinema - and exactly why the dolls intensify rather than distance the grief. YouTube confirms 210K views and age-restriction, which tracks for a contraband cult object.
Reviews
Haynes takes materials and even methods that could easily be deployed for cheap satire and perfectly calibrates them so that any potential laughs get caught in the viewer's throat.
Not a comedy at all, but a sneakily subversive tragedy and an inspired wedding of form and content.