The incredible shrinking star: Todd Haynes and the case history of Karen Carpenter.

Critics have consistently characterized the films of Todd Haynes within the terms of what B. Ruby Rich described in 1992 as the "new queer cinema"--films whose style displayed traces of "appropriation and pastiche, irony" and a social constructionist understanding of history. Not surprisingly, most of these critics, as well as Haynes himself, have sought analytical explanations for his directorial choices in relation to the generic (the woman's film, the star biopic), authorial (Douglas Sirk, Rainer Werner Fassbinder), and theoretical (theories of narrative, identification, repression) antecedents cited in his body of work. (1) In other words, Haynes's authorship is constituted in the repetition of his particular citations of past forms. The ironic recontextualizations of these forms evidence a social constructionist historiography and assert Haynes's directorial agency as resistant to the norms of conventional cinematic representation and spectatorial identification.

This essay does not seek to overturn these models of authorship or those of the new queer cinema. It will examine the construction of Haynes's authority as it emerged from the material practices that produced and surrounded Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (US, 1987), a film biography cowritten with Cynthia Schneider of the singer Karen Carpenter, who died of anorexia nervosa in 1983 at age thirty-two. This forty-three-minute, 16mm film using dolls to enact the life of the 1970s singing star was not Haynes's first work, but it was the one that authorized him as a promising director of alternative cinema. Film festivals and critical reviews, in sites ranging from local city newspapers to Art-forum and the Village Voice, served as the vehicles of Haynes's ascension as director. But his decision to shape the narrative around the placement of a number of Carpenters songs also resulted in a legal battle (lost by Haynes) with A & M Records and the Carpenter family over the question of who was authorized to represent Karen's life and her voice. Defining Haynes's emerging authority at this time only in the contexts of his trajectory to critical fame or of his legal troubles with Superstar, however, would prove insufficient in answering key questions about Haynes's authoring choices that produced a particular version of Karen Carpenter's life within its historical and cultural context. For that reason, this essay will explore the degree to which Superstar affirms and reproduces the norms of conventional cinematic representation and spectatorial identification--even as its citations of the woman's film and star biopic deploy irony, distanciation, and hybridization to question and critique those norms. A major contention of my article is that Haynes's self-conscious recontextualizations of generic conventions of the woman's film and the star biopic, as well as his infamous use of dolls, do not necessarily result in an escape from either the fantasy potentialities or epistemic foundations of those genres, which promise the recovery, the plentitude, of the biographical subject. The film's threat to A & M Records and the Carpenter family plausibly came as much from its forceful evocation of this desired plentitude (expressed through the voice) as from its parodic critique and the illegal soundtrack.

The generic, cultural, and historiographic work that Superstar performs, and the constraints in which it operates, are made clearer by comparing and contrasting the film not to one of its antecedents but to one of its successors, The Karen Carpenter Story (dir. Richard Carpenter and Joseph Sargent, US, 1989), the made-for-television movie authorized by the Carpenter family. It could be argued that the films should be discussed together if for no other reason than that the subsequent television movie offers the Carpenter family's version of Karen's life that was produced once Haynes's version had been legally silenced through their efforts. However, I argue that the films share remarkable similarities in their contexts as biopics: they were released during a period in which there was an explosion of media-produced biographies (and sometimes attendant controversies), and they share similar representational challenges in narrating, visualizing, and vocalizing a well-known public figure, as well as occasionally--and uncannily--overlapping in actual content. In some ways, the films arrive at--even resurrect--the same Karen.

Both films participate in the biographical genre's doing the work of history at a time when biography as history was big business. Although the biopic never completely disappeared from Hollywood theatrical feature production, the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, with such critical and/or box office hits as Raging Bull (dir. Martin Scorsese, US, 1980), Gandhi (dir. Richard Attenborough, UK/India, 1982), Tucker: The Man and His Dream (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, US, 1988), Malcolm X (dir. Spike Lee, US, 1992), Nixon (dir. Oliver Stone, US, 1995), Geronimo (dir. Roger Young, US, 1993), The Doors (dir. Oliver Stone, US, 1991), Chaplin (dir. Richard Attenborough, UK/US/France/Italy, 1992), What's Love Got to Do with It? (dir. Brian Gibson, US, 1993), were arguably high points in the genre's status since the decline of the studio system in the 1950s. Furthermore, the emergence in television of A & E Channel's series Biography, the Biography Channel, public television's American Experience and American Masters series, E! Entertainment Channel's various biographies, VH1 Channel's Behind the Music, not to mention the many print biographies on the best-seller lists and "one-man" biographical shows on Broadway, attests to the profitability and presumed public appetite for understanding the historical past through the life stories of political and show business celebrities. The use of biographies to organize historical narrative in this period sometimes became the subject of self-conscious and heated discussions about multiculturalism and the value of so-called great men narratives in public education and museum exhibition. This held especially true of the use of biographies of nontraditionally historical figures (i.e., nonpolitical ones) or of members of once marginalized racial, ethnic, or sexual groups. A focus on these figures could make apparent the tendency of traditional biographies to assert which lives are acceptable as they narrate which lives are exceptional. (2) Superstar and The Karen Carpenter Story may focus on a mainstream media star, but as this essay will explore, Karen's story and its contexts raise questions about how certain figures become representative, idealized, and claimed.

Superstar and The Karen Carpenter Story share representational challenges, both basic to the genre and particular to their specific star subject. They struggle with similar conundrums about how to represent the anorexic body, how to represent the star body and voice--especially in dramatic, narrativized biographical form--and how to negotiate the possibilities of agency for an adult woman still being guided by parents (especially her mother) while contracted to a business circulating mass-produced images of femininity. Both films are examples of contemporary star recyclings that use the biographical form or what is assumed to be audience knowledge of star life stories to explore, implicitly (The Karen Carpenter Story) or explicitly (Superstar), the relationship between stars as idealized embodiments of cultural ideals and the body as enacting the staged performance of identity in contemporary capitalist, patriarchal culture. The legal battles over who was authorized to tell Karen's story--which means who was entitled to the cultural and/or financial capital as a result of the telling--serve to highlight the extent to which these two films might provide exemplary texts and contexts to explore the performance of (feminine) identity in patriarchal, capitalist culture. The star body (including the biopic's recovery of the "real" body and the necessity of a substitute body, the body of the voice), the scandal of anorexia, and the authorization/ownership of biography are terms so interrelated and overdetermined in these films that what follows here will repeatedly return to them as each section of the essay explores a different facet of their interlocking relations.

Stardom, Biography, and Ownership

If, as some critics have argued, the production of "meaning in biographical form is a powerful force in shaping and reshaping cultural memory," (3) biographies can provide crucial sites of contestation over historical meaning or material for contemporary identity politicking. Because the body is the "material embodiment for ethnic, racial, and gender identities, as well as a staged performance of identity," it is central to those contestations of identity politics in biography. (4) Much of the machinery of star making at the industrial level, as well as at the level of reception, has affirmed the role of the star body in constructing the star as a cultural ideal. It is not surprising that many film, television, and video star biographies foreground how stars literally and figuratively embody cultural contestation over identity, or even reveal the similarities between stardom and the construction or performance of the body.