Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story
1987 · Todd Haynes · Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story on Sightlines
Halfway through, the Karen doll's face is not the face it started with. Someone took a knife to it. The cheeks are scooped, the jaw filed to a point, and the repaint doesn't quite cover the cut marks. Nothing in the scene points at this. The camera doesn't move in. The doll keeps smiling, because smiling is a property of the mold. You register it the way you register weight loss on a person you haven't seen in months: not as an event, just as a fact that was already true before you looked up.
That whittling is Todd Haynes's invention, and it is not the same thing as the logline. 'The Karen Carpenter story, performed by Barbies' gets a laugh from people who haven't seen it. What Haynes actually built, in forty-three minutes of 16mm and doll-scale rooms, is a film where the acting is done by the object. The illness isn't depicted. It's carried out on the thing in front of the lens, between setups, with a blade. And the doll is not a stand-in for Karen. It's the manufactured ideal she was being measured against, handed the leading role.
Deleuze has a category for this that almost nobody borrows, because it sits between the two everybody does. Between the close-up, which holds a feeling, and the action scene, which spends it, he found a cinema of drives: the impulse-image. Its people don't decide, they're pulled. Hunger, appetite, consumption, collection. He called the mode naturalism, built it out of Stroheim and Buñuel, and gave it a fixed architecture. A recognizable social setting, the derived milieu, turns out to be thin skin over something older and more predatory, the originary world. Everything inside runs downhill along what he called the line of slope, toward exhaustion and death, with no way back up.
Superstar has that architecture laid out on a table at doll scale. The derived milieu is the Carpenter house: decorated, controlled, patriarchal, a dollhouse in the full sense, where the daughter is an ornament in someone else's arrangement of the room. The originary world is appetite. Haynes's argument, made by cutting rather than by dialogue, is that the appetite is not Karen's. It belongs to the culture holding the camera on her. That's why the film keeps splicing in the outside: consumer imagery, diet talk, the surrounding machinery of thinness, dropped in between the tiny rooms so the private ordeal and the public one collide and produce a third thing neither shot contains.
Watch what happens to food. It arrives at human scale beside a six-inch woman, and the disproportion does everything a psychologizing script would fumble. Deleuze's word for that is the fetish: a part-object broken off from the world and loaded with compulsive force. Here the loading is done by scale alone. A dinner plate becomes geological. Nobody has to say that eating has become an enormity.
And the whittling is the line of slope made literal. Most illness films give you an arc. This one gives you subtraction, applied to an object, permanent between shots. It cannot be reversed, which is precisely Deleuze's point about naturalism: the slope is not a plot the character could choose to exit.
Then there is what the dolls can't do, which is the other half of the film. They can't act. They can only be posed. Deleuze, reading Brecht, calls a posture that exposes a social relation instead of expressing a private feeling the gest. An actor has to fight their own expressivity to achieve one. The doll begins there. Every attitude it's placed in reads instantly as a position within an arrangement: daughter at the table, girl at the microphone, body on a bed. The fixed smile isn't a mood. It's what was manufactured onto her. The strange result, which anyone who has seen the film will confirm, is that you feel more, not less. Denied a performance to receive, you start supplying one, and you catch yourself doing it. That catching is the film's real subject.
Late Deleuze calls an image that has lost its self-evidence, that has to be deciphered rather than simply followed, a lectosign. A readable image. Superstar is nearly all lectosign. Title cards. A mock-clinical lecture that stops the story to define terms. The flat even light of a health-class filmstrip, which warms for an emotional beat and cools again. Above all, the split between what you hear and what you see. The Carpenters' own recordings run through the film, plush, immaculate, engineered to soothe, laid over a plastic woman starving. The sweetness doesn't comment on the suffering. It fails to notice it, which is worse and truer. A second voice, the scare-film narrator, delivers facts in a tone that also cannot reach her. Two sound tracks, neither able to touch the image. Deleuze thought this disjunction was how cinema finally began to think.
There's a reason this works better than a prestige biopic, and it's an argument, not a preference. The realist contract Bazin described, the one that makes us trust a photographed image, is also what lets a biopic lie. A well-fed actor performs starvation and photography lends the performance its guarantee. Haynes gave up the guarantee. Because his image is openly false, it cannot counterfeit a body, and what's left on screen is the shape of what happened.
None of it came from nowhere. Laying unlicensed pop records over images as ironic counterpoint is Kenneth Anger's move in Scorpio Rising; Haynes inherited the technique and its legal exposure in one gesture. The associative splicing of found consumer and disaster footage descends from Bruce Conner's A Movie. The essayistic lecturing voice that halts identification is Godard's, from 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. The dime-store objects treated as sacred come from Jack Smith and Flaming Creatures. The alarmist voiceover and moralizing intertitle are lifted whole from hygiene pictures like Reefer Madness. The deepest debt is to Sirk: All That Heaven Allows proved a genre dismissed as women's material could be turned into social indictment without a wink. Haynes takes the borrowed, devalued form and uses it to dignify his subject rather than to mock her. Camp and mourning at once, and the film never picks.
What it did to film: it proved appropriation could be sincere. The collage tradition mostly ran on irony, and Haynes aimed those tools at grief and they held. It launched a filmmaker and, through Apparatus Productions, founded with Christine Vachon and Barry Ellsworth, a production culture. Then it was killed. Richard Carpenter and the owners of the recordings pursued the unlicensed music, and the film was enjoined from distribution around 1990. It survives as a bootleg and a rumor. A film about a woman whose voice was managed and owned by the people nearest her was silenced by the owners of that voice. It now carries that second death as part of its meaning.
Find it if you can, and watch the scale. Notice where the camera stands in relation to objects it could have shown at any size, and notice the exact moment you stop seeing plastic. Then ask what that moment cost you: whether the sympathy you're handing a six-inch doll is the same sympathy the culture withheld from the woman, and why it took a toy to get you to hand it over.
Concepts in play
- impulse-image — Anorexia staged as pure drive rather than decision: the film's arc is compulsion and degradation (bingeing, purging, self-scrutiny passages) running beneath the soft-rock social surface, with no act available that could halt it.
- derived-milieu — The Carpenter home and recording spaces built at doll scale as 'a controlled, decorated, patriarchal domestic order in which the daughter is an ornament' — a concrete setting revealed as a surface.
- originary-world — The near-subliminal and aggressive intercutting of food, consumption and the surrounding culture of dieting and femininity beneath the dollhouse, so appetite reads as the savage world underlying the milieu.
- fetish — Props at human scale, 'especially food,' recurring at unsettling proportions against the tiny figures — the part-object charged with compulsive force by scale alone.
- entropy / degradation — The Karen doll is physically whittled and reshaped across the film so the object itself registers the body's wasting: an irreversible subtraction toward cardiac death.
- the-gest — The dolls cannot perform; they can only be posed. Emotion comes from framing, cutting and the viewer's projection, so every attitude (daughter at the table, singer at the mic, the molded smile) reads as a social position rather than a private feeling — the film's Brechtian estrangement.
- symbol — The modified Barbie itself: 'the plastic, mass-produced female body becomes a literalization of the impossible ideal that the story implicates in Karen's illness' — one object condensing the film's whole organizing relation.
- the readable image — Text cards, mock-medical exposition, diagrammatic asides and the flat instructional lighting of educational cinema make the image a composited field to be deciphered rather than a window followed by sensory-motor habit.
- audiovisual-disjunction — The Carpenters' lush, immaculately produced recordings run over images of suffering, while a clinical health-film narrator lectures across them — 'the clash between the seductive commercial surface of the songs and the grim clinical voice.'
- montage-dialectical-soviet — Editing as 'the film's true engine of meaning': doll drama cut against title cards, mock-medical exposition and consumer imagery so the viewer is forced to produce a third term — Karen's private ordeal as an effect of the surrounding culture.