#Superstar: the Karen Carpenter story

[mangle-my-mind]

Pictures from the MoMI Todd Haynes Retrospective

@silverfactory and I went to the Museum of the Moving Image for a (you guessed it) Velvet Goldmine screening, which was fantastic as always. The screening was part of a Todd Haynes retrospective series, but they also have a small exhibit dedicated to his image books, drawings, and production material from some of his films. Here are a few pictures I took while we were there!

The Velvet Goldmine section. At the top is one of the image books for the film. Todd Haynes puts together these books for all of his films with visual inspiration for the project. @silverfactory and I were SO disappointed we couldn't flip through the book, but it was super neat seeing it in person!

The initial concept for the film (what kind of a title is Star Star lol) and some art to go along with it. I didn't know how skilled Todd Haynes is in visual art like this - all the drawings throughout the exhibit are his!

Script and storyboard moments - The Kiss, Arthur's room, Young Jack Fairy scenes

Some more Todd Haynes art, including his ideas for promotional film content

The script for Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, and a doll in one of the original Karen costumes!

A concept description and storyboard for I'm Not There

An original People magazine featuring Mary Kay Letourneau and a prop People magazine from May December

[amatesura]

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) | dir. Todd Haynes

[cancmbyn]

An interesting read and reminder of Todd Haynes’ early work using Barbies; Very much in contrast with Greta’s recent film.

Trigger warning for anorexia and body images issues within.

Link to the film

[erstwhile-punk-guerito]

[lascenizas]

The Last Movie I Watched...

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987, Dir.: Todd Haynes)

[itsblosseybitch]

My poster for the Todd Haynes cult film, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.

[i-am-made-out-of-bees]

Fun double feature idea!

[thesoftestcowboy]

i honestly dont give a shit about which current film people are watching etc etc but

everyone being all ohhh if u dont wanna see b/arbie you obviously HATE FUN!!1 (which is literally i take ive read on here. and lets be real, the mindset is applied to literally anything these days) and it's like. okay orrrr maybe people just have different tastes (i literally never played with b/arbies and just dont care)

but also i did so much reading on mattel and the b/arbie branding and the feminist discourse surrounding it all in like 2020 (for unrelated reasons) and the whole discourse just confirms my personal conclusions and opinions on it. both on positive/neutral aspects (peoples personal relationships with b/arbie as a toy and how kids actually subvert stereotyping in unexpected ways are really interesting) and negative aspects (tldr: fuck mattel)

like. this could be a fun discussion but i despise the discourse so lets just pretend i never said anything

[superstarbarbie]

Ok I know I said Steve loves the carpenters but

Billy HATES them. He can’t stand their bland wonder bread outdated sound. He thinks they’re the epitome of boring privileged celebrity.

When Karen Carpenter dies, Billy doesn’t really care, he just assumes it’s another celebrity overdose, and he groans at the thought of hearing the lame music back on the radio.

In college, Steve comes home one night with a tape of Superstar:the Karen Carpenter Story. He bought it as a joke after Billy teases him for choosing Close to You for karaoke night. They watch the movie right away, with only the knowledge that it was made by a gay film student.

Billy lasts ten minutes before bawling. Because he sees his father in Agnes Carpenter. He sees himself in Karen. And suddenly he understands the tragic beauty of her art. How he isn’t alone in his self-destructive habits.

Steve buys him the Close to You album for his birthday and they dance to it in their living room.

Later, Billy finds out what a kick ass drummer Karen was and he immediately stans

[mangle-my-mind]

I've been waiting for Greta Gerwig and Todd Haynes to discuss the Superstar->Barbie legacy :)

[femmepathy]

superstar: the karen carpenter story

[rgr-pop]

My goal for the year was to watch & log 100 movies. Shorts count, didn't matter whether I had seen them before, but they can only count once for the year. I logged 117!

First & last watched: Ken Russell's Women in Love (1969)--the reason I cared about movies so much this year, just an obvious life-changer for me--and Ken Russell's The Rainbow (1989)--Westlin's suggestion for the perfect round out. Surprised to be surprised by how good it was. Great films! Totally on the program! Questions to this day unanswered! Let's go!

Shorts (everything short of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story) watched: 16

Favorite shorts: Nuit et Brouillard (Alain Resnais, 1956) (decided this year one of my all-time favorite films); Un Chant d'Amour (Jean Genet, 1950); Fireworks (Kenneth Anger, 1947)

Next year my shorts watching will be more programmatic

Films I watched twice in 2023: Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Todd Haynes, 1987) (another film I realized this year obviously belongs in my top ten--more specifically I decided finally that this is my favorite non-Texas Chain Saw film); Beau is Afraid (Ari Aster, 2023); The Nightmare Before Christmas (Henry Selick, 1993)

By decade: Before 1900: 0 1900 - 1910: 1 1910 - 1919: 1 1920 - 1929: 1 bro come ON what the FUCK 1930 - 1939: 1 im literally evil 1940 - 1949: 7 1950 - 1959: 3 1960 - 1969: 24 1970 - 1979: 14 1980 - 1989: 16 1990 - 1999: 17 2000 - 2009: 13 2010 - 2019: 9 2020 - 2023: 10

By nation/language roughly: uk/english: 6 us/english: 66 canada/english: 6 france/french: 10 italy/italian: 4 italy/france/french: 1 italy/english: 1 czechoslovakia/czech: 5 palestine/arabic: 3 soviet/russian: 2 russia/russian: 1 austria/german: 1 austria/french: 1 spain/spanish: 1 japan/japanese: 1 poland/yiddish: 1 poland/polish: 1 senegal/wolof: 1 brazil/portuguese: 1 sweden/swedish: 1 eur/farsi: 1 south africa/afrikaans: 1

numbers not adding up there but w/e

By director: Not sure if this is surprising or totally unsurprising, but in spite of my auteurial talk (and all the thematic/completionist plans I like to make), I very rarely watched more than two movies by the same director. I can't decide how I feel about this, nor do I know how to proceed this year given that my goal is to discover who my top five directors might actually be. How do you go about investigating that?

Overwhelmingly the director I watched the most was Adrian Lyne, with five films. I have a few more things to work on but I'm close to done with my shakedown/theory. Neither my favorite director nor favorite guy, I would say I probably 'enjoy' and 'personally get more out of watching' his films more than most. In second place, I watched three Kenneth Anger films--all shorts of course. I watched two films each by the following directors: Ken Russell, David Cronenberg, Stanley Kubrick, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Paul Schrader, Bernardo Bertolucci, Ti West, Todd Haynes, Michael Haneke, Jan Švankmajer (both shorts), and Billy Wilder (one of which being a war department documentary short).

I have mixed feelings about this approach (let me watch man movies if i I want to!) but a quick skim suggests I watched about 15 films directed by women (12%)--lower than expected and probably low for me typically. I always have a romance habit on the backburner so it's never hard for me to watch a lot of movies by women, but obviously my focus on revered directors I never previously wanted to spend time on has had an impact here, meaning I should make an effort with Great women directors in 2024 to keep that in check. I will also say that I specifically recall having a hard time getting my hands on things I wanted to watch by women in a few different cases, including by Great women directors (Barbara Hammer and Akerman), and especially also soviet women directors. There's an overlap here with difficulty accessing short films!

I'm not an active or thoughtful starrer, but these are the films I watched in 2023 that I've given five stars to:

Women in Love (Ken Russell, 1969) (upgraded from four after the year of appreciating it) Mandabi (Ousmane Sembène, 1968) Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996) Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Todd Haynes, 1987) The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1956) Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975) (demoted Teorema [1968] to four stars to prevent Salo is A Perfect Film deflation) Un Chant d'Amour (Jean Genet, 1950)

Least favorite films watched in 2023: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019), Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023), All My Good Countrymen (Vojtěch Jasný, 1968), Zahrada (Jan Švankmajer, 1968), the one streaming true crime doc I watched that I then had to log (will not repeat in 2024)

Loved/treats for me: Barry Lyndon, Crossing Delancey, Unfaithful, The Cremator, The Night Porter, Cabaret, talking to people about Funny Games and realizing I love it more than I think I do

Recommended for the romance girls as a thank you for the good romance you have recommended me: Habibi (Susan Youssef, 2011)

Most incredible movie experience of the year by miles and I can only hope 2024 has something this good to offer: House of 1000 Corpses (Rob Zombie, 2003) anniversary screening my birthweek

The otherwise defining film of 2023 for me: Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005)

Onward! Back to work! On the Terror and Violence line! The Family is out there, comfortable, in relative peace…

[transmutationisms]

Do u have any thoughts to share about May December? 💭

hm i mean. it was good, not great, perfectly entertaining way to spend 2 hours. if you had to complain i think the obvious point would be that between the three leads, joe gets a bit shortchanged in terms of the balance of narrative focus, and it is a bit frustrating that his confrontation of gracie comes after so much prompting from elizabeth—melton's performance is standout, but the script isn't quite committed to letting his character earn that arc on his own terms. i remember a lot of reviews when it came out saying that the film wasn't moralising or wasn't passing judgment on gracie—i really thoroughly disagree lol and i'm not really sure why people think that. moments like the high school boy trying to show off for elizabeth, and her just laughing it off because he's a kid, or joe getting high and crying in his son's arms, seem p clear and even didactic to me. which, like, yeah it's a moral position i agree with but i think as a piece of cinema, the film is more interesting where it's sketching out the psychologies of its characters, and there are some missed opportunities imo with the way joe is written: we don't so much get him speaking on his own terms, like gracie and elizabeth, because ultimately the film itself is convinced that the only way someone could be in his position is by lying to themselves ("people see me as some kind of victim") and the only progression or arc presented for him is to, essentially, follow elizabeth's suggestion.

i do actually think there's some thematic continuity here with todd haynes's karen carpenter movie 'superstar', insofar as 'may december' is also interested in interrogating fame and infamy, and what drives us to make a tabloid story out of someone's abject misery. with carpenter too a lot of the coverage did take a specifically very moralistic tone, and was simultaneously so clearly motived by and capitalising off of people's desire to gawk. and whereas in 'superstar' haynes resists that sort of payoff by using the barbie dolls in place of emaciated bodies, in 'may december' there's a somewhat similar effect achieved by keeping the story so focussed away from the actual details of what happened—and by making elizabeth, who's often an audience proxy to ask these questions, pretty uncomfortably intrusive and self-serving at points. nothing about it, like, blew my mind, but yeah it was generally solid, and particularly anchored by three really strong lead performances imo.

[jamboreeofsurprises]

wow I totally forgot to post the fantastic dream i had this morning. I was having a really good Sparks dream and then got a phonecall from my aunt telling me extended family were coming over and being the only person home i needed to be the host, so it ended possibly before it ever even got to the meat and potatoes. but as it was...

I was with my family in our old family van, which is technically my car now, but back then it was the family van. anyway, here comes a recurring theme from many past Sparks dreams: the boys were set to play a venue close to my old hometown, so we needed to give them a lift for some reason, although I guess Russell already got to the venue so Ron was riding with us.

We got tremendously lost. I meant to tell my mom to circle around to a different parking lot to redirect us and instead we drove to like...a whale exhibit (?) and the whales were huge and splashing overhead with no glass or anything while we walked up a ramp to get to the next part of town. didn't make much sense but ron liked the whales. It was really surreal seeing him just sitting upright in a carseat i'd sat in many times, completely blasé to the whole situation as if he were just a random man we picked off the street. i always look at him then look away quickly in my dreams. he would sometimes reply to situations in a very drab and matter of fact way that we found amusing.

anyway, guess what our mystery venue was? my childhood church, although as is typically the case in dreams, it looked nothing like the real thing, yet by dream logic nothing seemed different. Russell plus the band's entourage were there setting up equipment, i think russell was kind of like "what took you so long?" as there were a lot of mishaps along the way (including us accidentally hitting a kid on his bike while parking but don't worry he was fine). I asked ron if he ever considered reversing their roles and doing the singing while russell played the keyboards. he said he could probably sing but russell only knows how to play one note on the keyboard. they both snickered at this. I do not know what this means.

in the church auditorium with my family + the audience, there was an opening act of a magic show that involved. eggs? it went on for too long and impressed nobody. And then there was like...a free-for-all act where we voted on Simpsons characters. I don't know either. this briefly fused into a family guy segment before we were like "its 11pm can we please get Sparks onstage" so we did. but i don't remember anything about the show and i'm not even sure there was a show, because for all the talk of playing and equipment, apparently tonight's event that we reserved tickets for was actually the premiere of a brand new sparks BIOPIC.

it opened with 70s-esque footage of a teenage girl talking into the camera from her bedroom reminiscing about the band from her perspective until "amateur hour" kicks in and pretty decent-looking actors portraying the boys are shown playing onstage during the 70s. i'm thinking, this is pretty cool, i always wondered if a movie like this would happen. and then...

through some sort of stylized shot transition, the band are being played by kittens, singing and prancing around onstage. russell doing all his usual movements but in feline form. Haha what a funny and oddly stylish bit, i'm thinking to myself. what a fun way of depicting their personalities. but it just...continues like that? punk russell in 1976 singing "i wanna be like everybody else" while twirling around with the microphone but as a kitten, thrashing about? everyone is laughing. it's so good.

the movie truly does continue on in this fashion yet for as confounding as its sudden shift in direction is, we become oddly immersed in its storytelling enough not to even notice the boys are still being played by kittens, in a stroke of auteuristic magic a la todd haynes' superstar: the karen carpenter story. a sequence depicting "girl chasing" in their younger years in the form of kittens climbing onto the legs of girls who are walking away from them up some stairs while they mew desperately has the audience both cackling and aww'ing. another scene that stands out is a roadie saying "you guys don't eat enough!" and putting both ron and russell kittens in a bowl of mashed potatoes and gravy.

I was under the impression ron and russ were really proud of the film and likely had direct involvement themselves, but had kept it so tightly under wraps that no one knew what was coming. I wish I could tell you more but then i got that phonecall.

[itsblosseybitch]

I know it’s a very simple edit, but I think this is my most inspired TikTok edit to date.