Todd Haynes animated the impossibly slender doll to show what drove the singer to her early death. The film has more in common than you might expect with Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster
Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, out next Friday, is the most anticipated film of the year. Yet, for all the hype, this is not the first time Barbie has found herself cast as the lead in a film. Much like mumblecore queen Gerwig herself, Barbie first arrived on screen as an insurgent outsider. Back in 1987, Todd Haynes, later the director behind contemporary classics such as Carol, Safe and Far from Heaven, cast a downmarket version of the popular doll in the title role of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. The underground classic charts the rise and tragic demise of singer Karen Carpenter and her breezily Californian musical stylings, using whittled down Barbie-style dolls to illustrate the worsening anorexia that eventually led to her untimely death in 1983. Thanks to a spot of litigation from the Carpenter estate, this long out-of-circulation film is today most likely to be watched on iffy YouTube bootleg.
Superstar draws a parallel between these two American icons – Carpenter and Barbie – and dramatises the former’s decline against newsreel footage of America at war. Early in the film, a tank firing off rounds is intercut with a domestic scene of Karen complaining about how unflattering her maxi dress is, while her mother’s spindly plastic limb snakes a measuring tape around her daughter’s waist and pronounces the measurements as if delivering a decree. Set in a time before anorexia was widely understood, these dolls’ domestic sphere was a psychological war zone.
