So in the midst of this novel/novella, I-as-writer (as opposed to the I-as-narrator function) ask myself, where as this is going? Sometimes I know, but other times I'm writing my way towards something and don't know what. This is one of those sort of stories. And, as I-as-narrator answered that, I initially thought, how ludicrous. But then I realized that was exactly the way this Brett Easton Ellis-meets-Shirley Jackson tale goes. And the path there is quite wonderful. I hope sometime to find out if you think so as well.
Such unexpected turns are one of the tasty reasons I love what I do—the thrill of being in the midst of pure story as it manifests from the what-it-is-not. If it can surprise, challenge, convince, and thrill me, I suspect/think/hope/pray it may do similar things for others.
· • ·
Showing posts with label metafiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label metafiction. Show all posts
Friday, March 12, 2010
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Meta-Maus
Like the Essay and Response paper for Writing About Film, this was an essay and response assignment on either Octavia Bulter's Kindred or Art Speilgelman's Maus. I wanted to write about Kindred, but that would have been a more difficult effort, and with the work load I had, I wasn't ashamed about taking the easy way out with Maus.
Like Speilgelman is light reading or something...
In assessing my own work, this is mediocre.
~•~
(very 1st draft! almost ashamedly so)
ENG 384
November 10, 2009
Essay & Response: Maus
Upon turning onto page 102 of (The Complete) Maus, a curious event occurs; along with the narrative, the style, artwork, and even genre suddenly changes. In effect, the storyteller has suddenly changed the rules in the reader's contract. We slip from one level of storytelling into something deeper. Not merely self-referential and self-aware (although Maus is certainly that), but cognitive of its own self-awareness. This is akin to the subtle difference between sentience and sapience; knowledge and wisdom. In being aware of itself, Maus almost becomes a recursive loop, becoming wise to its own graphic form, as connects to another scene on the palindromic page umber from our first, 201. Through these two scenes, Art Spiegelman tells us of the same personal tragedy twice, in two different methods, each seemingly aware of it other despite a decade separating their creation.
Most obviously, the border on this page has changed from white to black. In the first frame, we are treated to a title header in the gregarious style only comix could have—Prisoner on the HELL Planet: A Case History—with a photograph next to it being clutched by a gnarly hand. From this frame—due perhaps to the overly dark nature of the entire page—the eye is suddenly drawn to the lower left corner, the outer edge, where a more simplistic hand holds a comic book that happens to be the very page we've just turned to in Maus. It isn't unlikely that our own hand rests eerily close to one or the other of the hands drawn on the page. This presents us with a self-awareness we find in meta-fiction; that is, a story in which the storytelling or story being told becomes a part of the shared narrative, most easily exampled by having the author appear as himself in the work. Which is obviously the point in Maus, the difference being this would then have become a meta-biographical memoir in the structural form of a graphic novel.
Here, Spiegelman appears as himself—as a human and not a mouse—dressed as a concentration camp prisoner, telling us how his mother committed suicide in 1968, when he was 20. His father found her when he came home from work. In the final long horizontal panel on the page, Spiegelman stands (dressed as a prisoner) at the periphery of a crowd outside an apartment building. "I'd just spent the weekend with my girlfriend, Isabella. (My parents didn't like her.) I was late getting home … I suppose that if I'd gotten home when expected, I would have found her body…" (Spiegelman 102).
The suicide of Spiegelman's mother is dealt with again in the second part of Maus. Again Spiegelman appears as a human, but in this instance he wears a mouse mask. In the first panel on the page, he sits at his drawing desk where two flies buzz around him. Above the line of the panel are the words "Time flies…" (201). In each of the first three panels on the page, Spiegelman makes two statements referring to two different timelines in each, and in doing so, brings the self-awareness of metafiction once again to be a central issue in considering the story he tells.
In the first panel Spiegelman refers to the death of his father Vladek in 1982, commenting that he and his wife stayed with his father in 1979. In the next panel Spiegelman states that his father started work as a "tinman" in Auschwitz in 1944, and that he himself began working on the current page of Maus in February 1987. It's in the third panel that this dichotomy of timelines draws to its most contrasting points: "In May 1987 François and I are expecting a baby… Between May 16, 1944, and May 24, 1944 over 100,000 Hungarian Jews were gassed in Auschwitz…" (201). In the fourth panel, Spiegelman turns to address the reader face-to-face (albeit, his is covered by the mouse mask). He speaks of Maus first being published. The presence of flies is increasing.
In the last panel on the page—one that takes up an equal amount of space as the four previous combined—Spiegelman slumps over his drawing table, a heap of bodies seeming to be on the floor of his studio while outside the window of the room is a barbed wire fence and prison guard tower. Spiegelman complains that he's had several offers to sell the rights to Maus so a movie could be made from the graphic memoir, but he laments that he just doesn't want to. He then mentions again the death of his mother, "In May 1968 my mother killed herself. (She left no note.) Lately, I've been feeling depressed." A voice sounds from outside the panel—somewhere off the page—and the words are meant as a double entendre: "Alright Mr. Spiegelman… We're ready to shoot!…" (201). Given the context, this could be as much a reference to a director shooting film as to soldiers shooting Jewish prisoners. The heap of bodies remains the focus of both.
The two scenes discussed in "Meta-Maus" share the connections of metafictional self-awareness, feeling imprisoned, and the suicide of Spiegelman's mother. In the first, what are we to make of this abrupt change in story-telling method? We've gone from an Animal Farm-like tale involving Jewish mice, German dogs, and Polish pigs to the lurid-stylings of 1960s comix involving directly autobiographical human characters set in a recursive metafictional narrative.
Spiegelman wants us as readers to be aware that we are not part of his story, that we are pushed to be outsiders to what he reveals to us. But more than that, he himself is an outsider to his own story, evidenced by the fact that he places himself within the narrative as a human prisoner (from "Hell Planet") because what he tells us about himself is too painful for him to be directly included. This is why he imprisons himself in the scene, and via the title, literally places the event out-of-this-world (on the aforementioned "Hell Planet"). The recursion of illustrated hands holding the book we are reading further emphasizes the removal of direct reader-involvement as well as distances us and himself from the trauma-within-trauma he describes. Surviving a Nazi concentration camp requires one level of distance (which Spiegelman invokes with anthropomorphic characters of mice and dogs) but his mother committing suicide years after that forces Spiegelman to further distance himself from the very thing he wishes to share.
When he mentions his mother's suicide later in a scene titled "Time Flies…" it is with far simpler and less descriptive language (showing the small healing graces of passing time) and amidst a plethora of seeming inconsequential information. This information all suggests that Spiegelman conceals as much as he shows, even if that concealment is superficial.
When Spiegelman tells us that his father worked as a tinman in Auschwitz, it could easily be passed over as insignificant. But nothing in Maus can be taken as inconsequential. Being a tinman involved constructing roofs and walls that would ordinarily be used for protection and security (against the elements and to create a dwelling place), but in context, the skill was used to contain and conceal (minimal prisoner housing and to ensure any sense of "home" would be rife with death and uncertainty).
Spiegelman mentioning the birth of his child alongside detailing the numbers of Hungarian Jews killed in a specific period shows that he is still equating any life as being paid for by the death of others. There can be no small amount of guilt associated with this observation. And again, the recursive, self-aware meta-narrative comes to the fore when Spiegelman sits at his drawing table and his studio alters itself around him to show a pile of bodies that resemble the infamous Belsen heaps with the exterior world transforms into the confines of a concentration camp. Spiegelman still feels trapped by his family's past even forty years later.
Even as he is publicly dealing with his grief and confusion about the Holocaust, Spiegelman struggles with himself as to why and how he does so. It is this internal conflict which drives the themes and structure of Maus to be a story that simply cannot be told in a direct, unadorned manner. In Spiegelman's case, however, that adornment comes not in the form of stylish language and heroic plot, but in self-consciously anthropomorphized animals, animal-masks on humans, and altered identities to reveal the facts of some events. This is a story that could not exist without the structure of metafiction, self-aware narrative, and the deliberate distance imposed upon the reader.
We can never be a part of this story, but we as readers can take the opportunity Spiegelman offers us to take a peek behind his many masks and layers to understand not only the story he tells us, but how he has brought himself to do so and, perhaps most importantly, why he does so.
"Bergen-Belsen concentration camp."
· • ·
Like Speilgelman is light reading or something...
In assessing my own work, this is mediocre.
~•~
(very 1st draft! almost ashamedly so)
ENG 384
November 10, 2009
Essay & Response: Maus
Meta-Maus
Upon turning onto page 102 of (The Complete) Maus, a curious event occurs; along with the narrative, the style, artwork, and even genre suddenly changes. In effect, the storyteller has suddenly changed the rules in the reader's contract. We slip from one level of storytelling into something deeper. Not merely self-referential and self-aware (although Maus is certainly that), but cognitive of its own self-awareness. This is akin to the subtle difference between sentience and sapience; knowledge and wisdom. In being aware of itself, Maus almost becomes a recursive loop, becoming wise to its own graphic form, as connects to another scene on the palindromic page umber from our first, 201. Through these two scenes, Art Spiegelman tells us of the same personal tragedy twice, in two different methods, each seemingly aware of it other despite a decade separating their creation.
Most obviously, the border on this page has changed from white to black. In the first frame, we are treated to a title header in the gregarious style only comix could have—Prisoner on the HELL Planet: A Case History—with a photograph next to it being clutched by a gnarly hand. From this frame—due perhaps to the overly dark nature of the entire page—the eye is suddenly drawn to the lower left corner, the outer edge, where a more simplistic hand holds a comic book that happens to be the very page we've just turned to in Maus. It isn't unlikely that our own hand rests eerily close to one or the other of the hands drawn on the page. This presents us with a self-awareness we find in meta-fiction; that is, a story in which the storytelling or story being told becomes a part of the shared narrative, most easily exampled by having the author appear as himself in the work. Which is obviously the point in Maus, the difference being this would then have become a meta-biographical memoir in the structural form of a graphic novel.
Here, Spiegelman appears as himself—as a human and not a mouse—dressed as a concentration camp prisoner, telling us how his mother committed suicide in 1968, when he was 20. His father found her when he came home from work. In the final long horizontal panel on the page, Spiegelman stands (dressed as a prisoner) at the periphery of a crowd outside an apartment building. "I'd just spent the weekend with my girlfriend, Isabella. (My parents didn't like her.) I was late getting home … I suppose that if I'd gotten home when expected, I would have found her body…" (Spiegelman 102).
The suicide of Spiegelman's mother is dealt with again in the second part of Maus. Again Spiegelman appears as a human, but in this instance he wears a mouse mask. In the first panel on the page, he sits at his drawing desk where two flies buzz around him. Above the line of the panel are the words "Time flies…" (201). In each of the first three panels on the page, Spiegelman makes two statements referring to two different timelines in each, and in doing so, brings the self-awareness of metafiction once again to be a central issue in considering the story he tells.
In the first panel Spiegelman refers to the death of his father Vladek in 1982, commenting that he and his wife stayed with his father in 1979. In the next panel Spiegelman states that his father started work as a "tinman" in Auschwitz in 1944, and that he himself began working on the current page of Maus in February 1987. It's in the third panel that this dichotomy of timelines draws to its most contrasting points: "In May 1987 François and I are expecting a baby… Between May 16, 1944, and May 24, 1944 over 100,000 Hungarian Jews were gassed in Auschwitz…" (201). In the fourth panel, Spiegelman turns to address the reader face-to-face (albeit, his is covered by the mouse mask). He speaks of Maus first being published. The presence of flies is increasing.
In the last panel on the page—one that takes up an equal amount of space as the four previous combined—Spiegelman slumps over his drawing table, a heap of bodies seeming to be on the floor of his studio while outside the window of the room is a barbed wire fence and prison guard tower. Spiegelman complains that he's had several offers to sell the rights to Maus so a movie could be made from the graphic memoir, but he laments that he just doesn't want to. He then mentions again the death of his mother, "In May 1968 my mother killed herself. (She left no note.) Lately, I've been feeling depressed." A voice sounds from outside the panel—somewhere off the page—and the words are meant as a double entendre: "Alright Mr. Spiegelman… We're ready to shoot!…" (201). Given the context, this could be as much a reference to a director shooting film as to soldiers shooting Jewish prisoners. The heap of bodies remains the focus of both.
Response to "Meta-Maus"
The two scenes discussed in "Meta-Maus" share the connections of metafictional self-awareness, feeling imprisoned, and the suicide of Spiegelman's mother. In the first, what are we to make of this abrupt change in story-telling method? We've gone from an Animal Farm-like tale involving Jewish mice, German dogs, and Polish pigs to the lurid-stylings of 1960s comix involving directly autobiographical human characters set in a recursive metafictional narrative.
Spiegelman wants us as readers to be aware that we are not part of his story, that we are pushed to be outsiders to what he reveals to us. But more than that, he himself is an outsider to his own story, evidenced by the fact that he places himself within the narrative as a human prisoner (from "Hell Planet") because what he tells us about himself is too painful for him to be directly included. This is why he imprisons himself in the scene, and via the title, literally places the event out-of-this-world (on the aforementioned "Hell Planet"). The recursion of illustrated hands holding the book we are reading further emphasizes the removal of direct reader-involvement as well as distances us and himself from the trauma-within-trauma he describes. Surviving a Nazi concentration camp requires one level of distance (which Spiegelman invokes with anthropomorphic characters of mice and dogs) but his mother committing suicide years after that forces Spiegelman to further distance himself from the very thing he wishes to share.
When he mentions his mother's suicide later in a scene titled "Time Flies…" it is with far simpler and less descriptive language (showing the small healing graces of passing time) and amidst a plethora of seeming inconsequential information. This information all suggests that Spiegelman conceals as much as he shows, even if that concealment is superficial.
When Spiegelman tells us that his father worked as a tinman in Auschwitz, it could easily be passed over as insignificant. But nothing in Maus can be taken as inconsequential. Being a tinman involved constructing roofs and walls that would ordinarily be used for protection and security (against the elements and to create a dwelling place), but in context, the skill was used to contain and conceal (minimal prisoner housing and to ensure any sense of "home" would be rife with death and uncertainty).
Spiegelman mentioning the birth of his child alongside detailing the numbers of Hungarian Jews killed in a specific period shows that he is still equating any life as being paid for by the death of others. There can be no small amount of guilt associated with this observation. And again, the recursive, self-aware meta-narrative comes to the fore when Spiegelman sits at his drawing table and his studio alters itself around him to show a pile of bodies that resemble the infamous Belsen heaps with the exterior world transforms into the confines of a concentration camp. Spiegelman still feels trapped by his family's past even forty years later.
Even as he is publicly dealing with his grief and confusion about the Holocaust, Spiegelman struggles with himself as to why and how he does so. It is this internal conflict which drives the themes and structure of Maus to be a story that simply cannot be told in a direct, unadorned manner. In Spiegelman's case, however, that adornment comes not in the form of stylish language and heroic plot, but in self-consciously anthropomorphized animals, animal-masks on humans, and altered identities to reveal the facts of some events. This is a story that could not exist without the structure of metafiction, self-aware narrative, and the deliberate distance imposed upon the reader.
We can never be a part of this story, but we as readers can take the opportunity Spiegelman offers us to take a peek behind his many masks and layers to understand not only the story he tells us, but how he has brought himself to do so and, perhaps most importantly, why he does so.
•
Bibliography
"Bergen-Belsen concentration camp."
Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
Retrieved 00:39, November 7, 2009.
Green, Archie. Tin Men (Folklore and Society).Retrieved 00:39, November 7, 2009.
Champaign, IL:
University of Illinois, 2002. Print.
Rothberg, Michael. "'We Were Talking Jewish':Art Spiegelman's Maus
as 'Holocaust' Production."
Contemporary Literature 35.4 (1994).
JSTOR. Web.
Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus.as 'Holocaust' Production."
Contemporary Literature 35.4 (1994).
JSTOR. Web.
New York: Pantheon, 1991. Print.
· • ·
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
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.
[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
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.
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Penderecki, Krzysztof. "De Natura Sonoris No. 2." 1971. CD.
Penderecki, Krzysztof. "Utrenja (Morning Prayer)." 1969-71. CD.
Psycho. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock.
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