the Incredible Shrinking Star Todd Haynes and the Case History of Karen Carpente
Superstar is interested in Karen Carpenter’s biography in these terms, and in the irony of using a “shrinking” star to take on the burden of “embodying” feminine visibility.
Superstar’s investment in critique of genres and character types does not circumvent its conveyance of the sexist notion that mothers are often the worst, albeit unwitting, purveyors of patriarchal ideology
Haynes has been quoted many times as saying that he wanted to use dolls for actors so that viewers would be conscious of how conventional narratives coax us into identifying with characters and their ideologies.
Superstar cites past films or genres to expose the degree to which strategies of narrative cinema depend on the representation of the female body.
This intersection allows the films to resonate with contemporary struggles over the meaning of the female body and female agency—discursive categories and lived realities for women in society after the women’s movement.
Biopics have their ways of compensating for this “lack”: having a major star with their own aura of power play the star subject (e.g., Barbra Streisand playing Fanny Brice); having the star subject dub the singing voice of the actor playing them (e.g., television biography of Judy Garland); casting an actor who bears a close physical resemblance to
... See moreIf biography has been “appropriated by the nation-state of industrial capitalism as an articulation of its knowledge-power,” these star bodies trouble the process by which biography has traditionally plotted the trajectory of the body in cultural discourse as a support for patriarchal, capitalist culture “administering the body and controlling
... See morehow stars literally and figuratively embody cultural contestation over identity, or even reveal the similarities between stardom and the construction or performance of the body
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 history and identity politics in biography (Balsamo 1996, 3).