The banned Barbie film: her anguished first role as Karen Carpenter | Movies

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, out next Friday, is the most anticipated film of the year. Yet, for all the hype, this is not the first time Barbie has found herself cast as the lead in a film. Much like mumblecore queen Gerwig herself, Barbie first arrived on screen as an insurgent outsider. Back in 1987, Todd Haynes, later the director behind contemporary classics such as Carol, Safe and Far from Heaven, cast a downmarket version of the popular doll in the title role of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. The underground classic charts the rise and tragic demise of singer Karen Carpenter and her breezily Californian musical stylings, using whittled down Barbie-style dolls to illustrate the worsening anorexia that eventually led to her untimely death in 1983. Thanks to a spot of litigation from the Carpenter estate, this long out-of-circulation film is today most likely to be watched on iffy YouTube bootleg.

Superstar draws a parallel between these two American icons – Carpenter and Barbie – and dramatises the former’s decline against newsreel footage of America at war. Early in the film, a tank firing off rounds is intercut with a domestic scene of Karen complaining about how unflattering her maxi dress is, while her mother’s spindly plastic limb snakes a measuring tape around her daughter’s waist and pronounces the measurements as if delivering a decree. Set in a time before anorexia was widely understood, these dolls’ domestic sphere was a psychological war zone.

The 1970s was a reactionary period in the US, as a crisis of national self-confidence stoked by the Vietnam war and Watergate met the social upheavals initiated by campaigns for civil rights. Conservatives found themselves looking back longingly towards the pre-hippy era as a time of stability, and so the nuclear family gained significance as a comforting symbol in need of protection. Enter the Carpenters; a family band with sunny tunes and a clean image. Yet for all its promise of security, in Haynes’s vision, the Carpenters’ suburban doll house becomes a nightmare for Karen. An atonal, sinister drone scores a montage of the endless fattening family meals she is subjected to, all photographed in unappetising Kodachrome colours as you might see in a dogeared 70s cookbook. Later, a musical conductor guides the scale ever downward as another cavalcade of unappealing foods dances across the screen.

The suffering of Carpenter’s doll-like facsimile supports the film’s ambiguous interest in quaint, chintzy consumer culture. Her plastic quality and fixed grin reinforce the popular perception of the Carpenters’ music; innocent, anodyne and commercial. Yet her anorexia is seen to reject the values of American consumer democracy, turning instead towards a fascism of the body. An infomercial-style interstitial opines that “in a culture that continues to control women through commoditisation […] the anorexic body excludes itself, rejecting the doctrines of femininity, driven by a vision of complete mastery and control.” With an impossible figure set off by a multitude of accessories, a Barbie doll becomes the perfect vessel to express the unresolvable tension between these mirror-image imperatives of consumption and suppression, phenomena both concerned on some level with personal empowerment.

Gerwig’s glossier film similarly utilises the ambiguity of Barbie. The film’s trailer tells audiences, “If you love Barbie, this film is for you. If you hate Barbie, this film is for you.” This playful yet subversive pitch makes a gleamingly commercial proposition for a digital age of hate-watching and algorithmically whipped-up anger; love it or loathe it, you have to see this film. Barbie can be everything to everybody.

In both films, the doll ultimately decides she must leave her home. For Carpenter, this precedes an attempt at healing, away from well-meaning if destructive family dynamics. For Margot Robbie’s Barbie, her journey leads her to discovering true power in the real world, outside Barbieland’s colourful confines. Both films imagine the home as a place of repression, and dolls as a vessel for often contradictory ideas about domesticity, femininity and self-realisation. This is perfectly fitting; Barbie was first conceived of to provide children with a female role model who worked outside the home. To counter that her first job was as a fashion-model would perhaps be churlish from today’s perspective.

In his 1979 book Stars, film scholar Richard Dyer claimed that popular actors’ “star images” usually reconcile seemingly irreconcilable traits. This could be innocence and sexuality, independence and romanticism, or any other similarly opposed qualities. Having ignited so much pre-release conversation, and by speaking to so many people’s disparate readings, with Barbie we may be finally witnessing the big-screen arrival of a new, truly fascinating film star.