Karen Carpenter Research Paper

Media and cultural studies Assignment :

Grainy days and Mondays

Karen Carpenter was an important twentieth century female American pop singer, drummer during the 70s, And was best known for her vocals, Karen became more of a vocalist, rather than a drummer, further on into her career, because of the logistics of the trap sets that made drumming and singing simultaneously too difficult. Her music as very popular with American girls and her elegance on stage set a role model for them. Critics often labeled her the "girl next door.”
She along with her brother, Richard Carpenter formed the famous duo-The Carpenters. She died at an early age of 32 due to heart failure and complications with her illness of anorexia
FSLC head programmer Dennis Lim called it “the skeleton key” to all Haynes’ work, and you can see what he means; he works with the themes of fame and popular culture obsession that would reappear in his famous work, while engaging for the first time with a female protagonist. He devised the project with friend Cynthia Schneider, hitting on the idea of making a movie with dolls “because I was interested in sort of playing out some theories or ideas or questions about narrative structure, and how we identify in stories emotionally. It came out of some stuff in college, critical theory and stuff like that. It was made against the backdrop of 1970's, when America was going through a tumultuous change .Gay and lesbians and Afro Americans were fighting for equal rights, Beatles were a rage and people were very much interested in personal lives of superstars .The movie 'superstar 'made on the life of Karen Carpenter which was released in 1989 shows the female body issues with anorexia nervosa and her inability to deal with her personal and public life which ultimately resulted in her death. Lucas Hilderbrand an assistant professor of Film and Media studies was fascinated with the movie because it was made at a time when America was dealing with War, unemployment, political issues, drugs and gay rights He has given us a
It was their response to the movie, by watching, copying and illicitly which entirely changed the history of movie distribution. In spite of the tape’s poor quality, the kids had such strong emotional responses to the film that it became the model for their own projects. Many people even reported having watched the tape on first dates; the lure of seeing a rare film apparently functions as an extremely seductive tactic. People who had not seen the film, showed a desire to watch it as soon as they could —rather something close to insistence that he shows it to them—or, in one case, having the embarrassment about not being able to claim the cool cachet of having seen it. The poor quality of the copy often added to the experience. The poor quality of the tape makes people realize that the movie was not meant to be watched, at least legally. Not only the forbidden nature of such tapes attracted the audience more towards it but also made the movie a cult. They was a mass who wanted to watch a movie which talked about the personal life of their ‘Superstar’. There was another group, which was interested in it only because its ban attracted them more towards