Thanks to its legal status, "Superstar" is a true piece of underground cinema, and one of the best of its kind. Here in the era of "South Park" the idea of a drama about the Karen Carpenter tragedy acted out by Ken and Barbie sounds like a crass joke, and yet Haynes treats the material with extraordinary assurance. The dolls evoke not only the cultural issue of female body-image but a not-entirely vanished society -- Nixon's "Silent Majority," with its suffocating aesthetic and tight-lipped insecurity -- and the strange sound the Carpenters constituted within it: wholesome, sweetly naive songs delivered in Karen's deft, sultry/ melancholy voice. It was an odd enough voice to be coming from the real Carpenter, and here, juxtaposed with the wide-eyed, increasingly skeletal "Karen" doll, the effect is spooky and shockingly poignant. To what degree the treatment is fair to the Carpenter family is unclear, but as a film it makes an interesting companion piece to Haynes' extraordinary "Safe" and stands on its own as a superb pop-art elegy and a genuine outlaw triumph.
Review of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story
