#SUPERSTAR SONIC YOUTH COVER MOVIE#

If you are trying to get at something that is forbidden, maybe it should feel like your ear is pressed to a wall.

A couple of years later, I was lucky enough to borrow a pristine, straight-from-the-print copy from a friend, but there was experiential value in that first, frustrated viewing. The picture was dark and boggy, and the soundtrack seemed as if it were recorded on a boom box inside a washing machine I pulled my chair all the way up to the television set, squinting and rewinding, trying to make the words and images resolve. I first watched the film in 1998, when I rented it from Mondo Video, in downtown Buffalo, which kept a second- or third-generation dupe behind the counter. The controversy vaulted Haynes onto mainstream America’s television screens via the likes of “Entertainment Tonight” and “Larry King Live,” where he came across as the most genial of guerrilla filmmakers.Īlthough “Superstar” was withdrawn from official circulation, if you lived in a big-enough city in the nineties and two-thousands, you might have been able to find it at a local indie video store. (Mattel also sought meetings with Haynes, but never took legal action at least some of the Barbie actors were off-brand, sourced from flea markets.) “Superstar” was pulled from distribution in 1990 the following year, Haynes’s first feature, “Poison,” which had received a post-production grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, drew the ire of right-wing groups for its government-abetted homosexual content. Haynes had not received permission to use Carpenters songs in the film, including ubiquitous hits such as “Close to You,” “Rainy Days and Mondays,” and the title track.

#SUPERSTAR SONIC YOUTH COVER MOVIE#

(“Finally, the little movie from hell that I’ve been waiting for,” Waters enthused.) But “Superstar” soon came under legal threat from Richard and the Carpenters’ label, A & M. Somehow, this not-a-short-not-a-feature, made by a graduate student for next to nothing, got a buzzy première at the 1988 Toronto International Film Festival, screened in large North American cities (including San Francisco, where it played as a midnight movie at the Castro), and won prominent fans such as the directors Jonathan Demme and John Waters. It was sui generis in both its execution and, arguably, its reception. “Superstar” begins as a droll prank and then tilts, almost imperceptibly, into surreal domestic nightmare and, finally, authentic tragedy.

(“As we investigate the story of Karen Carpenter’s life and death we are presented with an extremely graphic picture of the internal experience of contemporary femininity.”) In staging and filming his doll-house mise en scène, Haynes (who co-wrote “Superstar” with Cynthia Schneider) borrows tropes from horror flicks and disease-of-the-week movies and interpolates advertisements and product labels (notably, for Ex-Lax and ipecac, the poisons that kept Karen thin), contemporary news footage, faux talking heads, and grad-seminar intertitles. We see Karen and Richard onstage, in the studio, and at the White House, performing their smooth-as-syrup hits, and at home with their harridan stage mother, Agnes, and passive father, Harold. Made in the summer of 1985, when Haynes was attending Bard College, in New York, “Superstar” situates its plastic actors on miniature, hand-painted sets. “Mattel doesn’t really recognize that as a part of her career, and she did a really terrific job.”

“Barbie’s performance has been really acclaimed by fans across the country,” Haynes told Newsday, in 1990. More than three decades ago, the young filmmaker Todd Haynes directed an all-Barbie cast in his short feature “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,” which tracked the wholesome contralto’s Nixon-era rise to fame alongside her brother Richard and her subsequent descent into anorexia, which killed her at the age of thirty-two. But, to a certain slice of the Gen X cognoscenti, “the Barbie movie” will always and forever refer to a very different film, one both notorious and barely seen. It is a relief (if not a surprise, given Gerwig’s track record) that “Barbie” is also witty and inventive, a good rosé sparkling amid the usual summer-blockbuster sludge. The months-long publicity blitz and box-office triumph of “Barbie”-which earned a hundred and fifty-five million dollars on its opening weekend, giving the director Greta Gerwig and the nascent Mattel Films the biggest début of 2023-has been a dazzling confetti blast of media total war, as inevitable as a bright-pink Abrams tank.

Superstar sonic youth cover