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Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story
Young musicians Karen and Richard Carpenter live with their parents in Downey, California. Richard shows great promise as a songwriter, and Karen, who plays drums, also begins singing, thrusting the duo into stardom. They become wildly successful, Karen’s striking voice and Richard’s soft melodies capturing the essence of the nation’s yearning for calm after the turbulent Sixties.
But the perfectionist Karen becomes increasingly preoccupied with her weight, despite being slender. Eventually, she is diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, a mental disease relating to stress, lack of control, and low self-esteem.
Todd Haynes’ postmodern retelling of Carpenter’s affliction by anorexia fostered a select but vocal audience after its Toronto Film Festival premiere, but enraged Carpenter’s family and initially got the film banned. Blending archival material, artificial talking heads, and Barbie-doll reenactments, the mid-length film criticises the objectification of female celebrities.
Bio Todd Haynes
Todd Haynes (1961) is an American filmmaker. His films explore the personalities of well-known musicians, dysfunctional and dystopian societies, and blurred gender roles. Haynes first gained public attention with his controversial short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), which chronicles the life and death of this singer and features Barbie dolls as actors. Superstar became a cult classic. Haynes’s feature directorial debut, Poison (1991), a provocative exploration of queer perceptions and subversions in the AIDS era, established him as a major figure in a new transgressive cinema.
The winking kitsch and stylistic distortions of Superstar’s storytelling – all the more distorted by the grainy restrictions of YouTube viewing, increasing the film’s sense of illicit artifice – thus allude slyly to popular culture’s very limited understanding of its most celebrated victims. It hardly seems more absurd to embody Karen Carpenter as an increasingly emaciated Barbie doll (Haynes chipped away at their plastic forms to illustrate her gradual deterioration) than to have her played by a workaday actress in a paint-by-numbers biopic.
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- This film was #37 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025