Our lectorial this week was all about how to use the library and collaboration part two, so not much to blog about that I haven’t already covered. So instead, I thought I’d talk again about one of my other subjects, textual crossings, which once again has a startling relevance to media one.
This week in textual crossings, we started looking at adaptations of real stories, and watched Todd Hayne’s 1987 biopic Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. It was particularly relevant to media one because we’re in the midst of assignment three, which is once again about doing a media portrait, but this time about someone else. It’s not exactly a biopic; it’s an exploration of their personality rather than their life story, but I would say Superstar actually fit this brief nicely. Instead of telling Karen Carpenter’s life story, it focussed on a few years and her battle with anorexia, dissecting the motivation of it and in turn different aspects of her personality.
Now that I’m planning my own media portrait, it was interesting to see the innovative ways in which Haynes tried to represent Carpenter’s personality. The most obvious is that nearly the entire film consists of barbie dolls being moved around in front of the scene to represent the Carpenter family. It’s a interesting depiction not only of the Carpenters’ reputation as being the wholesome, “American Dream”-like family next door, but also of Karen’s obsession with her body image.
Having said all that, it’s important for me to say that I really hated Superstar. I thought it was really crass in the way it made a melodramatic, almost horrific spectacle of what should have been Karen’s private battles, and I thought that it unfairly reduced her entire personality down into one illness. But within the context of assignment three I was almost glad I had disliked it because it gave me an understanding of my own personal tastes when it comes to media portraits and exactly what I don’t want to do with my own work.
Of course, I’m only one person. Haynes’ film is considered by many to be a gritty, artistic film that gives the viewer a real understanding not just of Karen’s personality but of anorexia as a disease. Because Haynes never got permission to use the many Carpenters songs that appear throughout the movie, it was never able to be released in cinemas. It was shown at several festivals and awards nights after its initial release, with a mostly positive response, and then it was distributed through back-door, black market channels. Currently, you can see it on YouTube, so I’ve linked to it below so you can have a look at a bona fide media self-portrait. Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think; I know I’m looking forward to the discussion in the textual crossing tute tomorrow.