the Incredible Shrinking Star Todd Haynes and the Case History of Karen Carpente
films whose style displayed traces of “appropriation and pastiche, irony,” and a social constructionist understanding of history. N
If 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 moreA focus on such figures made apparent the tendency of traditional biographies to assert which lives are acceptable as they narrate which lives are exceptional
how stars literally and figuratively embody cultural contestation over identity, or even reveal the similarities between stardom and the construction or performance of the body
Haynes’s self-conscious recontextualizations of generic conventions of the woman’s film and the star biopic, as well as his infamous use of dolls, do not necessarily result in an escape from either the fantasy potentialities or epistemic foundations of those genres, which promise the recovery, the plentitude, of the biographical subject
its citations of the woman’s film and star biopic deploy irony, distinction, and hybridization to question and critique those norms
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.
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.
ironic recontextualizations of these forms evidence a social constructionist historiography and assert Haynes’s directorial agency as resistant to the norms of conventional cinematic representation and spectatorial identification.