Grainy days and Mondays: Superstar and bootleg aesthetics.

The year is 1970, and suddenly the nation finds itself asking the question, "What if, instead of the riots and assassinations, the protests and the drugs, instead of the angry words and hard-rock sounds, we were to hear something soft and smooth, and see something of wholesomeness and easy-handed faith?" This was the year that put the song onto the charts that made the Carpenters a household word.

--Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story

The Carpenters have "only just begun" when a male narrator dryly delivers this speculative historical analysis. His somber voice is juxtaposed with flickering, pixelated period images shot off the surface of a television monitor: bombs falling, California governor Ronald Reagan, an American flag, a flurry of angry protestors, Richard Nixon with his daughter Tricia, a stock photo of a happy heterosexual couple, and the final triumphant moments of a beauty pageant. Immediately following this commentary and montage, the opening piano notes of" (They Long to Be) Close to You" knell on the soundtrack as the film cuts to the inside of a recording studio. The camera pans to show Karen in the booth, and just at the moment when she should begin singing, "Why do birds suddenly appear," she coughs instead. (1)

"Karen, are you all right?" asks her brother Richard, the musical duo's other half. "I'm sorry, Richard," she replies. "Goddamn, I'm really flubbing it up today, aren't I? I'm sorry, guys. I don't know what's the matter with me." "Just relax. Take a deep breath," Richard coaches. "Look, we'll just do it until it's right. Just do what I tell you, and it will be great." Karen responds, "I just want it to be perfect." And in her retake, it is.

This sequence appears early in Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (dir. Todd Haynes, US, 1987), a forty-three-minute 16mm film that uses dolls to portray sibling supergroup the Carpenters' rise to fame and singer Karen Carpenter's struggle with anorexia. Since 1989, the film has been forced out of legitimate distribution and into an underground economy of bootleg circulation for copyright-infringing use of the Carpenters' music. Although this scene presents an opportunity for its audience to hiss at Reagan's appearance and to cackle at the plasticky good girl botching her signature song, the sequence also concisely presents the film's critique of cultural signification and its personal effects. The contrasts among the iconic, reshot images of American culture, circa 1970, are striking, whereas the dissonance between the degraded footage and its indexical capacity to portray history--and between the rough images and the purported softness of the Carpenters' sound--is perhaps more subtle. Superstar strips away the media's surface sheen and exposes the human frailty behind easy (if often melancholy) listening. As I will argue in this essay, appropriated music and images function expressively within the text to re-produce the mass-mediated context of the Carpenters' work and to re-present an affective cultural memory of the 1970s. Pirated videotapes of the film, by extension, inscribe a bootleg aesthetic that exhibits the audience's engagement in a clandestine love affair--watching, sharing, and copying the illicit text so that the viewers' reception of Superstar becomes historically, perceptually, and emotionally reshaped.

Superstar positions the sunny Californian Carpenters, whose image as performers promoted conservative family values, as something of an anomaly during a period of social revolt. They were, however, extraordinarily popular and scored twenty top-forty hits between their debut single "Close to You" in 1970 and Karen Carpenter's death by heart attack following an overdose of Ipecac syrup in 1983. Haynes's Superstar is at once a portrait of a historical period and a critique of popular culture's failure to respond adequately to it. Yet the Carpenters' popularity may in fact suggest that their conservative image was not anomalous and that instead, perhaps, our skewed historical perspective erroneously assumes the majority of the population to have participated in the counterculture movement rather than longing for a stable status quo. Or, perhaps most commonly, viewers find themselves in the ambivalent position of singing along to songs they might otherwise be ashamed to enjoy. (2) As personal tastes in opposition to historically and socially specific trends, guilty pleasures are generational, so that younger viewers are perhaps less likely to feel shame about liking the Carpenters' music--or feel its emotional resonance.

Haynes simulates the Carpenters' domestic and professional dramas with a cast of Barbie-type dolls (and occasionally human body doubles and talking heads) and presents cultural context for the group's fame and Karen's body issues. In the process, the filmmaker structures the narrative through the generic modes of star biopics, disease-of-the-week television movies, health educational films, and feminist documentaries. Haynes imitates and combines familiar film and television genres not to critique these modes but to use them strategically to present allegorical narratives--functioning as shorthand for expressing the characters' emotional states and for producing audience affect. Haynes's focus on body genres and intertextuality in Superstar presents themes and modes that have remained central to his subsequent films. Haynes not only combines disparate narrative methodologies but also textures the film by interweaving a variety of media and formal styles. His work in Superstar was influenced by the late-seventies and early-eighties shift from purely formalist experimental cinema to an avant-garde cinema of narrative experimentation used to explore social issues. (3) At the time of the film's release, it would have proven difficult to miss the connections between Karen's anorexic wasting and the emaciating effects of AIDS. I suspect that the more historically removed we get from the 1980s public panic over AIDS, the less the text will be read allegorically, so that Superstar will increasingly be seen as 'lust" about eating disorders and media culture.