Stylized Denial: The Liminal Journeys in Carnival of Souls and Dead Man

The final paper for Writing About Film. Take one of the films we viewed for class (or clip thereof—which threw Blade Runner and 12 Monkeys in as a qualified sources material—and compare it with another film.

This one didn't go where I wanted it to, but it arrived somewhere nonetheless.


~•~


ENG 317
December 8, 2009
Final Essay

Stylized Denial:
The Liminal Journeys in Carnival of Souls and Dead Man


If I go first, I'll wait for you there,
on the other side of those dark waters.
―James Jones

The world of departed souls is said to be to the west—towards the setting sun. The path leads through a dim world of twilight. Another trail intersects this first; used by shamans as a shortcut to encounter the souls in journey to that other world. At some point along its westward travel, the path encounters water—a running stream, a lake, the great black ocean when the soul crosses to the sunless lands. At the brink, before this point is reached, the soul comes upon a lodge or passageway, where the guardians wait. When the soul reaches the lodge, it comes face-to-face with these guardians. Sometimes the guardians welcome the soul with laughter and drumming, and they carry the soul on to where it will ultimately pass alone. Often times the soul is not greeted warmly, fear and denial dominating what transpired in leading the soul to this point on its journey.

In Mary Henry's voyage from the river where the car she rode in plunged—killing all its occupants—she travels westward to Salt Lake City. Once there, she is drawn to a ruined structure on the outskirts of town that to her is hauntingly familiar. This is the Saltair Pavilion, and in Herk Henry's bleak supernatural tale Carnival of Souls (1962), it acts as Mary Henry's ghost lodge, through which she must pass en route to her ultimate destination.

Similarly—and more directly linked to our analogy of the journey of the soul—Jim Jarmusch's 1995 film Dead Man, shows us William Blake's westward movement from Cleveland to the Pacific Northwest and beyond the reaches of the living. Unlike Mary, Blake is lead by a guide rather than making the trek on his own.

The two films share many semblances. Both are shot in black-and-white, and both have distinctive soundtracks which use only a single instrument performed in a minimalist capacity and employed with deliberate effect to push its constraints. In Carnival of Souls, Gene Moore uses the pipe organ to create the eerie soundtrack which keeps the audience as unsettled as the protagonist, who, incidentally, is an organ player herself. This brings the sense of music into being part of the narrative created by the film and is a vehicle for Mary sense of place within the liminal space of her journey. For Dead Man, the weapon of choice is Neil Young's electric guitar, which fades and rises like a waning heartbeat behind William Blake's travel towards some unknown westward land.

Another trait both films share is their lack of adherence to a single genre. Like their main characters, the films exist in an over-lapping, in-between space of convenient labeling. Carnival of Souls is at once a B-grade horror film, a supernatural thriller, has grown to be seen as an art film, transcending the trappings of its genre. Dead Man is, on its surface, a Western, yet William Blake is no Shane, and the almost surreal Old West town of Mechanic is not a place we're likely to find Clint Eastwood; its theme is far closer to the religious ecstasies displayed in the paintings of the other William Blake—18th century visionary writer and painter who is the namesake of the protagonist.

In Carnival of Souls, the culmination for Mary Henry comes when she walks through the angular curvature of deep shadow at the Saltair, in a north-western direction, passing beneath a framed Arabesque arch. She looks across a barren salt beach, where the jutting piles of decayed docks rise like tombstones, markers of the afterworld. In a reprise of an earlier scene—where Mary played the church organ and fancifully imagined this one—white-faced ghouls rise from the dark water the lake that could as easily be her subconscious. A dozen ghouls amble to the pavilion and, amidst the framework of the decrepit ballroom, they begin to waltz. Circling back and forth, they leer, dancing to the organ music of a malicious merry-go-round.

Mary stands at the periphery, terrified of this totentanz. She has chosen to come to this place, but upon her arriving, denies her own part of this world. Having "seen" this waltz before—while playing the organ at church—she has called this world to her. The organ could be her heart, and she plays it hoping for more life, while all around her evidence of her death dances. When the music stops, the ghouls cease their waltz and turn towards her in sudden pursuit.

They chase Mary out of the pavilion, onto the white salty shoreline of the afterworld. Mary runs beneath the pavilion, among the pylons of the foundation—into the base foundation of her own consciousness—but everywhere she turns she finds a white-faced ghoul waiting. She's returned to her primordial mind and death courts her from every shadow.

The ghouls act as shepherds, herding Mary towards the lake. She runs from beneath the pavilion and out on the featureless salted shore, she stumbles, and the ghouls are upon her. Mary's fall is not so much to the salt and sand of the beach beneath her, but back through a liminal world to the place of her long-procrastinated death.

The denouement is two-fold. Three men, the policeman, the doctor, and the minister—male representation of the Three Fates—follow Mary's path along the beach to where she fell and discover no tracks beyond that point. Following their observations, there is a cut to back east, where the car Mary had been in—and plunged off a bridge into a river—is towed up from the water. Mary's body is, of course, inside.

When it comes to William Blake's moment of passage, he is delirious from his long trek through the dark woods of his own fear and dark night of the soul. Unlike Mary Henry, Blake's journey has had a guide, a psychopomp named Xebeche, a Wakashan who calls himself Nobody. Numerous times along the way, Blake has insisted that he's not dead, but in reaching the gate—both a literal as well as figurative—of a Makah village, he cannot walk through of his own power, his own body allied with his vocal denial of death. Blake leans awkwardly against a section of fallen tree, the rings—its lifespan and evidence of its death—visible around him. Nobody, having lead Blake here, continues his own role as spirit guide, and brokers a deal for Blake to pass through the gate. The solo guitar of the soundtrack pulses in a desultory staccato, as Blake stares up at a carved raven totem and his consciousness fades.

When Blake comes to, more than a dozen Makah stare at him like the faces of ancestral spirits. They appear concerned, confused, menacing. Blake has little choice now, and they seemingly witness his death finally catch up with him. His consciousness fades again.

Blake lays on a shale beach, birds can be heard overhead, the ocean crashing at his head. He is wrapped in funerary cloaks and attempts one last look around, bewildered and uncertain. As his perspective is our own perspective, we are left in this ambiguous state of understanding, having left one world—one film story—but have not yet arrived entirely in another. When he next opens his eyes, Blake is on a canoe laden with, Nobody says, cedar boughs. "It is time for you to leave now, William Blake," Nobody tells him, "Time for you to go back where you came from ... The place where all the spirits come from and to where all the spirits return."

Nobody pushes the canoe into the vast dark waters to the west, but Blake looks back, to the east. He watches helpless as Cole, a bounty hunter who has pursued him, approaches Nobody from behind. In a choreographic death, Cole and Nobody shoot each other—manifestations of Blake's higher and lower ideals; that which wisely guides and that which gives feral chase. William Blake's burial canoe is pulled out to sea by the tides as the staccato guitar pulses and then dies.

Carnival of Souls and Dead Man are cyclic stories which don't so much end where they begin but meander a pre-destined path before finally settling at the conclusion. Upon first-glance Carnival of Souls has a straight-forward understanding at its finish—that Mary died in the car wreck which began the tale, and her spirit continued on a path much the same as if she had lived—Dead Man's ending is left far more metaphysical and ambiguous: At what point did William Blake die? Shot in Thel's room in the town of Machine? In the forest where he fled? On the canoe drifting out to the open ocean?

In both instances the protagonists of these films have made stylized westward journeys through the twilight at the edge of the world to reach acknowledgment of their deaths.

•

Bibliography

Carnival of Souls. Dir. Herk Harvey.

Perf. Candace Hilligoss.

Criterion Collection 63, 1962. DVD.

"Carnival of Souls." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.

14 Nov 2009, 12:31 UTC. 1 Dec 2009.

Curnutte, Rick. "Mad Poets: William Blake,

Jim Jarmusch and Dead Man."
The Film Journal 1 (2002).
The Film Journal.
May 2002. Web. 1 Dec. 2009.

Dead Man. Dir. Jim Jarmusch.

Perf. Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer.

Miramax, 1995. DVD.

Kawin, Bruce. "Carnival of Souls."

Carnival of Souls
Criterion Collection 63 (2000). Print.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan. "A gun up your ass:

An interview with Jim Jarmusch."
Cineaste 22.2 (1996). Print.

Taubin, Amy. "Dead Man Talking."

The Village Voice 14 May 1996, 41.20. Print.

· • ·

Sometimes, A Hat Is Just A Hat

The directions for this assignment were to write a purely textual analysis paper on Miller's Crossing. Then write a critical response paper to your own analysis.

It was an identical assignment I had for Reading Popular Culture class (same professor), the difference is that the film class understood the assignment completely. The pop culture class bumbled and stumbled and fumbled around in the dark looking for comprehension of that vastly complicated instruction for the assignment. Write an analysis paper on a text. Then write a critical response to your own work.

Common sense ain't often common, and for some folks, simple directions ain't so easy to understand.


~•~
(Essay: 2nd/Response 1st draft)


ENG 317
November 10, 2009
Essay & Response 2: Miller's Crossing

Sometimes, A Hat Is Just A Hat

Nothing more foolish than a man chasin' his hat.
―Tom Reagan

Almost an hour into Miller's Crossing (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1990) we encounter the only scene in the film where a hat of some kind is not visibly represented. Yet even in being physically absent within the frame of what is seen, hats—or at least one hat—still play(s) a crucial, an integral, part of what takes place between Tom Reagan and Verna Bernbaum (Gabriel Byrne and Marcia Gay Hardin) at this point.

The scene opens in Tom's apartment. Wearing suspenders over his undershirt, Tom sits hunched forward on the edge of his bed smoking a cigarette. A (presumably empty) flask of whiskey sits on a small stand nearby. Through stain-yellowed lace curtains the sky outside lightens with dawn. The telephone rings and Tom answers it as though he's been waiting for it to ring. His side of the conversation is sparse and seemingly uninformative: "Yeah? Yeah, yeah. Where? Okay." He hangs up the phone and pulls the chain to turn on the bedside lamp next to the telephone. Verna stirs in the bed, asking if he's been up all night and what he's chewing over. Tom replies with a comment about a dream he had once. A dream about his hat.

Tom describes his dream to Verna; it's a scene we've already witnessed. In the opening credits of the film the camera looks up towards the sky through the limbs of a forest of pine trees. Without context as to where this forest is or why there is a sudden—seemingly disconnected—shift from urban gangster film and this rural forest, we move as if walking slowly through the trees. Then, cutting to a view from ground-level, a hat falls to the leaf-covered path. The hat is picked up by the wind and swept further along the path away from us, disappearing from view as the opening credits fade out. Only later do we learn that this forest path is the eponymous Miller's Crossing, a remote place where the criminal henchlings take people to be killed.

Verna's response to hearing Tom's dream is somewhat Freudian in nature, in that she assumes a conclusion that is based on stereotypical ideas of what happens in dreams and that symbolism holds sway no matter what the context. When she hears Tom tell her that, in his dream, his hat blew off his head while he was walking in the woods, she interrupts saying, "And you chased it, right? You ran and ran and you finally caught up to it and picked it up but it wasn't a hat anymore. It had changed into somethin' else—somethin' wonderful."

Tom berates Verna's interpretation, almost as if scolding her for her fanciful ideas, "No, it stayed a hat..." He gets up abruptly and starts getting dressed. His demeanor has quickly shifted —as if at the drop of a hat—from quiet rumination to aggravation. We can deduce that the phone call was asking him to meet someone and now he must go throw his hat into the ring. But in this narrative of gambling against double-double-crosses, Tom Reagan plays all angles. He collects as many secrets as he can (keeping them under his hat) and tells others, like Verna, only as much as they need to know; only sharing enough necessary details to get the information he needs. And in this conversation with Verna, Tom continues his habit of talking through his hat.

He asks her where her brother Bernie is—the double-dealing source of the current downward spiral of trouble between crime bosses in this corrupt town—telling her that since Bernie isn't protected anymore, Tom should warn Bernie to split town. Of course, the reason Bernie isn't protected anymore is because of Verna and Tom betraying Leo with their volatile hidden affair.

The banter between Tom and Verna is filled with sharped quips and untold history. Just the sort of hard-boiled dialogue that distinctly marks the noir genre of gangster films Miller's Crossing mimics, draws itself from, and, in many ways, satirizes and contradicts. This scene can be held as a microcosm of the entire film—of the entire genre in its way—filled with variations on the traits and clichés of film noir. The dingy apartment of a down-on-his-luck boozing gambler who's having an affair with his boss's vampy girlfriend; the constant swirl of cigarette smoke; the barbed witty comments between characters; ambiguous motives that form only certain pieces of the puzzle the viewer is invited to figure out but will never fully understand because of the gaps between the information given and the information withheld. And, of course, the hats.

When watching the archetypical film noir movie, a single line of summary could suffice for the entire genre: "I think the man in the hat did something terrible" (The Big Chill, Lawrence Kasden, 1983). Taking that as being true (at least for Miller's Crossing), it becomes ultimately significant that this scene in the middle of the film is glaring empty of any visual hats is itself centered on the talk of a dream in which a hat is lost. The connection between the opening credits (which evidently portray Tom's dream of his hat blowing away in the woods—down a path he will later walk on two separate occasions—once to kill a man ad then again when he is almost certainly going to be killed; both times the expected murder is avoided by a double-cross) and this scene must not be forgotten, bridged, in a way, by the scene following the opening credits, in which Tom awakens from a drunken stupor with his hat missing.

At the close of this scene, Tom—who is already plotting how to play the next series of angles he's been given via the information Verna gives him about Bernie—stares coldly at Verna as she voices a statement that displays the ethically ambiguous nature that pervades Miller's Crossing, "The two of us, we're just about bad enough to deserve each other." As if rationalizing the nature of his own actions—holding himself to a set of moral ideals reserved exclusively for himself—Tom replies with the opened ended question, "Are we…?" Of course, Verna thinks so and answers the question accordingly. But Tom disagrees, and his almost-righteous certainty leads us as witnesses to this tragicomedy of betrayal to remain unsure of what moral and ethical principals are at work here, and, perhaps, where his hat is.

Response

As in almost any gangster or film noir movie, hats play a significant role in setting the tone, creating atmosphere, and casting a particular style to the visual narrative. In the Coen brothers film Miller's Crossing (1990) this tone atmosphere and style involving hats is taken to the extreme.

The scenes discussed in "Sometimes, A Hat Is Just A Hat" (Barrett, 2009) exemplify how even in missing from visual context, the hat is an integral part of the story being told. This then unequivocally demonstrates the symbology involved in what a hat can represent, as well as the importance of meaning placed upon its presence, even if that is a presence via absentia.

When Verna asks Tom what he's chewing over, he tells her he's thinking about a dream he had once. This comment, follow one about having been up all night, inherently implies that the dream he relates to her was one that happened some time ago. It's still in his head some days, if not weeks, later. Powerful imagery to linger in his conscious mind for so long. Taking visual cues from the story, the dream he describes is a scene we witnessed with the opening credits of the film, and subliminally connects us to the importance not only of hats in general, but more specifically, each individual man's hat as being something crucial of himself.

This idea plays out several times in the film. When Tom visits the boxer Drop Johnson, he finds a hat on a table that is far too small to fit Drop, thus the hat left behind becomes more than a hat on a table, it becomes crucial evidence of a double cross in the works. By Tom discovering it, the hat, being citing as too small for Drop, also comes to represent the emasculation of the hat's owner—most likely Bernie Bernbaum. Later, when Bernie himself shows up for the second time at Tom's apartment, his mere presence being a threat to Tom, hats come to represent power and protection. While Bernie is seated in the apartment, his hat rests on his knee as if it were some sort of shield or royal crest. Tom sits across from him in his long underwear and suspenders, almost naked in his hatless state. When Bernie leaves, Tom—only one of two instances in the film where he's been caught off-guard or is defenseless—leaps into action, grabbing—not his shoes and coat, but his pistol and his hat. He short-cuts his way downstairs trying to get the drop on Bernie, but trips and falls to the floor, losing his firearm and hat in the process. Walking past a prostrate and hatlessly naked Tom, Bernie has all the power in this scene.

Towards the end of the film, when secrets are slipping out from the hats they've been tucked under, Verna meets with Tom strolling along a sidewalk in the rain. She asks him what he's doing. "Walking…" he replies curtly. "Don't let on more than you have to," Verna says, obviously frustrated. Tom deigns to elucidate this one time. "…In the rain." When they pause a moment, the rain pelts his hat, rivulets running off as if it can wash clean the secrets and blood causes by the numerous betrayals, lies, and double-crosses we've witnessed in this film. But of course, there is no absolution for this is gangster film noir, and in this scene Tom's hat merely serves to keep the rain off.

Works Cited

Ayto, John, comp.

Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.

17th ed. London: Collins Reference, 2006. Print.

Coen, Joel, and Ethan Coen.

"Miller's Crossing Screenplay."

Screenplays For You.
Kinozol. Web. 2 Nov. 2009. .

Miller's Crossing. Dir. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen.

Perf. Gabriel Byrne, Albert Finney,

Marcia Gay Hardin, John Turturro.
20th Century Fox, 1990. DVD.

· • ·

Dismembering Superstar

If you've never seen Todd Haynes' Superstar, you really should at least watch a few minutes of it. You'll never look at Barbie dolls, The Carpenters, or food the same way again.

[There's a link to the video in the Works Cited list following the essay. I could have included one up here, but way make things too easy?]


~•~
(2nd draft)


ENG 384
September 29, 2009
Essay 1: Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story

Dismembering Superstar


Loneliness is a such a sad affair...
―Bonnie Bramlett and Leon Russell

In the underground film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), Todd Haynes uses the elements of horror cinema—particularly the slasher genre—to construct a sympathetic portrayal of Karen as a victim of her family's desires and the expectations of the musical industry which made her into a celebrity. Her situation becomes the masked killer, which stalks, tortures, and ultimately, kills her.

Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock 1960), is seen as a prototype for the slasher genre, where unusual and disturbing camera angles create a semblance of the insanity which afflicts the protagonist, Norman Bates. The film's narrative uses these angles to toy with the viewer's perceptions, as well as assumptions and expectations. These same traits were mimicked by John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) and Sean S. Cunningham's Friday the 13th (1980), and were likely influences upon the way the camera was used for as a character's point-of-view in The Shining (Stanley Kubrick 1980).

Todd Haynes uses these methods and effects in Superstar, beginning with a common horror movie theme, the allusion of slasher film victims as being "dolls" to be played with by the killer. In a case of metafictional, Haynes indeed tortures his dolls before killing one of them and subjecting several to burning, scarring, flaying, and dismemberment throughout the film.

In an early scene, we have an example of archetypal horror movie angle: a voyeuristic POV shot from outside the Carpenter's suburban home looking in through the window of the kitchen. Inside, Karen sings along with a Dionne Warwick's sugary pop song—"I'll Never Fall In Love Again"—which plays in the background, similar to the tantalizing radio-friendly song of "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" (Blue Öyster Cult) playing on a car stereo in an early scene of Halloween. As the camera closes in on the kitchen window, it seems as if an intruder is approaching. And, in a way, this is the case. The intruder is the audience, and like a future victim being stalked by a killer, Karen Carpenter is oblivious to her impending doom. Her singing has also drawn the attention of her own family, who hear her from the living room which sets into motion the horror story that will take her life.

In the next scene, the camera pans along the wall into a normal living room. The mise-en-scène is arranged so that eerie shadows are cast from the furniture and table lamps; light glaring in through French windows creates the shadowy pattern of gothic arch across the background wall. A house plant obscures the couch on with Agnes Carpenter sits, her sharp, shrill voice cutting her son Richard down to size with what sounds like one more lecture. Richard's father sits on the arm of a chair, his features obscured by the darkness that clings to the edges of the scene. Richard himself sits with his back to the camera, dutifully agreeing with his parents that his music is lacking something essential.

This sets up the mundane aspects of life that are needed for the introduction of the uncanny which shows an immediate registry of change: the slow rising in background volume of Karen singing from the kitchen.

Richard complains, "Mother, I can't sing, play keys, and lead a band all at the same—"

"Shh!" Agnes hisses.

Just as the need for a singer is mentioned, Agnes hears her daughter in the kitchen. Agnes gets up from the couch, rising into frame. The close up of her head leaves the background in a disorienting blur—reminiscent of the effect a film noir wide angle lens zoom shot creates. It's a common technique in horror films when revelation has struck a character, or the monster is about to be revealed. In this case, the revelation and monster are one and the same: Karen herself, singing on the other side of the kitchen door.

The comparison Agnes' close up to the revelation at the end of Psycho when the desiccated figure of Norman Bates' mother is shown is aptly made by Glyn Davis in his Cultographies book on Superstar (50). In Psycho, Norman's downfall was caused, previous to the narrative of the film, by a over-bearing mother who drove him murderous insanity. In Superstar, Karen's downfall is precipitated on screen by her own domineering mother who suggested she become the singer—and thus the public face, voice, and body—of Richard's band.

Another analogy here would be that of the mother figure in Cunningham's original Friday the 13th. In this, we have gone through the length of the film with the intended belief that the masked killer is Jason, when in fact, the gruesome serial killer has been Jason's mother all along.

Although the literal "killer" in Superstar is Karen—who mistreats her body to the point it fails to properly function—but on another level, the killer is her mother's unreasonable demands placed upon Karen, which leads to a metaphoric strangulation which chokes the life out of her.

This parallels the typical story-line of a slasher film. The victims, usually teenagers or young adults, are warned in an over-the-top manner about the bad things that will befall them if they go to a certain place or display a particular behavior. By ignoring these warnings, the victims offer themselves up to be killed. In this sense, Karen offers herself up to be killed by agreeing to the Faustian bargain for fame and fortune, along with which comes impossible expectations about endurance, behavior, and body image.

In the final scene of Superstar, we are treated with an barrage of horror film staples. It begins with a montage over which is the sound of a telephone ringing. A vertical shot angled down at a man spanking a girl's bare bottom, which is taken to be Karen as a child being spanked by her father. Abusive parenting of a killer is a common thread in slasher films. Then we see the murder weapon: a bottle of ipecac. In a disturbing juxtaposition of coherence, the sound of the telephone continues to ring as we see a hand reach across the screen to hang up a telephone handset. Then, as Karen speaks to her doctor in a voice over, the camera takes on her POV as she wanders through the darkened hallways of her apartment until she reaches the brightly lit bathroom where her bottles of ipecac wait. The most obvious parallel to the horror genre here is to the opening scene of Halloween when the camera takes on Michael Meyers' POV as he enters a kitchen, draws a butcher knife from a drawer and walks through his house from the lighted downstairs to the darkness upstairs where he stabs his babysitter to death.

More than Halloween, however, the sound in Superstar's final scene can be compared to The Shining (Stanley Kubrick 1980). Throughout The Shining, music and sound play significant factors in creating the tension of atmosphere and an overwhelming sense of dread—mixing ambient sounds with minimalist music that is sometimes only a wash of screeching viols or clanging metallic percussion ("De Natura Sonoris No. 2" and "Utrenja" by Krzysztof Penderecki).
In Superstar, Karen's voice over continues as strains of multiple Carpenters songs begin to play at different speed, creating a warped cacophony of sound and music with a synthesized effect similar to Bernard Herrmann's often imitated music for Psycho's infamous "shower scene."

Once in the brightly lit bathroom, Karen Carpenter drinks two bottles of ipecac and, with a quick montage of brutal images, she throws the bottles in the trash and vomits. With the horrid blur of sound continuing—the songs over-lapping each other and playing at different speeds—the montage shows flash cut images of a lurid yellow background when Karen pukes, the trash can where she throws away the ipecac bottles, Karen's bare leg sticking out from under a bed sheet covering her lifeless body, and historical footage from a German concentration camp where guards toss an emaciated body into a ditch with others. The montage ends with a static image of the real-life Karen Carpenter, her face beaming a smile beneath colored stage lights.

This unsettling montage resembles flash cut shots in The Shining, when the young boy, Danny, has visions of the hotel's past—the bloody hallway where the twins were hacked apart with an axe, and a torrent of dark red blood pouring from the golden-colored doors of the elevator.

Todd Haynes uses sound and imagery to great effect in achieving his horrorshow of Karen Carpenter's death. Yet, even as he brutalizes the actors—the dolls playing the roles in his film—he manages to solicit sympathy for the victim/killer, Karen herself. Much like Hitchcock did in Psycho, the murderer is seen as someone we as an audience identify with, and ultimately feel sorrow for because of the situation which drove them to kill. Unlike the slasher films Haynes draws from, the only death in Superstar is ultimately the killer herself. And Karen Carpenter dies a lonely death as a result of the circumstances inflicted upon her, and throws herself away just as if she were a doll that had been abused to make a cheap macabre film.

•

Works Cited

Carpenter, Karen. "Superstar."

By Bonnie Bramlett and Leon Russell.

The Carpenters. Jack Daugherty, 1971. CD.

Davis, Glyn. Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.

London: Wallflower, 2008.
Print. Cultographies.

Friday the 13th. Dir. Sean S. Cunningham.

Perf. Betsy Palmer, Adrienne King,
Harry Crosby, Laurie Bartram.
Paramount/Warner Brothers, 1980. DVD.

Halloween. Dir. John Carpenter.

Perf. Donald Pleasence, Jamie Lee Curtis,
Nancy Loomis, P.J. Soles.
Compass International, 1978. DVD.

Herrmann, Bernard. "Theme from Psycho." 1960. CD.
Penderecki, Krzysztof. "De Natura Sonoris No. 2." 1971. CD.
Penderecki, Krzysztof. "Utrenja (Morning Prayer)." 1969-71. CD.
Psycho. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock.

Perf. Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh,

Vera Miles, John Gavin.
Paramount/Universal, 1960. DVD.

Roeser, Donald. "(Don't Fear) The Reaper."

Blue Öyster Cult.

Sandy Perlman, 1976. CD.

The Shining. Dir. Stanley Kubrick.

Perf. Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall,
Danny Lloyd, Scatman Crothers.
Warner Brothers, 1980. DVD.

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.

Dir. Todd Haynes.

Perf. Rob LaBelle, Gwen Kraus, Bruce Tuthill.
1987. Google Video.

Warwick, Dionne. "I'll Never Fall In Love Again."

By Burt Bacharach and Hal David.
Burt Bacharach and Hal David, 1969. CD.

· • ·