Karen Carpenter: Starving For Perfection

In the English-speaking world, almost everybody over a certain age is familiar with the story of Karen Carpenter. Indeed, a not insignificant number of people are alive because of it. Karen’s untimely death catapulted awareness of eating disorders into the spotlight, starting urgent conversations about the relationship between body weight, beauty, fame and control which are still going on today. Randy Martin’s documentary doesn’t add much to what we know about her, but does succeed in making her visible to younger generations, even if it seems exclusively concerned with speaking to older ones.

Early on in this film, which premièred at the 2023 Santa Barbara International Film Festival, anorexia is described as a form of self loathing, and the film reinforces this rather narrow definition throughout, which is disappointing in light of the complexity of the disease and the many different forms it takes. It seems to apply in Karen’s case, however. Of the vast number of photographs and film clips used here, quite a few show her smiling and excited, but very few show her looking relaxed and contented, as if, for her, happiness was usually just a fleeting thing, a thing we see less and less of over time. She looks most comfortable as a child, pictured with a baseball bat, a sporty kid building up the muscle which would contribute to her remarkable ability as a drummer. In recent years that ability has come much more clearly into focus as female drummers have become more accepted, so it’s good to see it getting proper attention here.

Behind her drum kit, which continually grew in size and complexity, Karen was able to do something which she knew she excelled at, whilst also enjoying a refuge of sorts. Intensely shy, she hated being at the front of the stage with everybody staring at her, but once the public and record companies became aware that she could also sing, there was no escaping it – that was simply how female musicians were marketed and the same shyness made her unable to successfully resist. We see her here on the Bob Hope Show, wearing a badly cut gold satin suit which wouldn’t flatter anyone, but which convinced her, when she saw the footage, that she was unacceptably fat. Anyone who has ever felt down after seeing a bad photo of themselves will relate. A sensible, short-term diet would probably have done her no harm, but as she started to lose weight, she starting getting praised for it. Belinda Carlisle, reflecting on her own eating disorder, emphasises how dangerous that can be.

Cynthia Gibb, who played Karen in a TV movie, recalls going through her clothes in chronological order and being horrified by how drastically they shrank. Even in an era when anorexia was hardly talked about, people watching her on stage or on TV could see that something was wrong. In many ways the most compelling part of this story is the question of how it was possible for someone in such a prominent position to do so much harm to herself, over the course of years, with barely anybody making a serious effort to intervene. This is also the strongest argument in support of the linear approach to storytelling which Martin has chosen. It’s slow and rather cumbersome in places, but it allows us to observe that deterioration and it emphasises that failure.

Previous narratives about Karen have often focused on her close relationship with her brother Richard, and on the control which he wielded over her life. Here, with the voices of people who actually knew her coming to the fore, that’s far less prominent. indeed, the film touches briefly on Richard’s own struggles with quaalude addiction, which suggests that both of them struggled to deal with the pressures of fame. Rather more focus is placed on the behaviour of her mother, Agnes, who restricted both siblings’ romantic lives well after they were out of their teens and was apparently always unhappy about Karen’s fame eclipsing Richard’s, giving her daughter feelings of guilt on top of everything else.

How serious an impact did all this have? It’s hard to say. Martin seems to be searching hard for a reason for Karen’s problem, even as he includes footage which reveals her talking about the absence of trauma in her past. Everybody says what an ordinary, wholesome American family they were, and nobody seems to reflect that the wholesome American families of the era might in themselves have been problematic places for ambitious young women to grow up. When the Carpenters are described as ‘deeply suburban’, the film seems to have something. Over the course of their career the world was changing dramatically, and Karen didn’t seem to get the benefit of any of it.

That suburban quality is, of course, proximate to whiteness. Karen began her career drumming in jazz bands alongside Black musicians, but as the film goes on, people of colour largely disappear from view. Whilst Karen’s voice is feted throughout, one gets the distinct impression that she’s only being compared to other white singers, and not to the Black women who recorded some of the same songs. This would account for the impression that she possessed some unique quality of sadness. In retrospect, the celebration of that sadness would also appear to have been detrimental to her.

In many ways, the praise that is heaped upon Karen’s singing is the film’s undoing. It gets repetitive after a while and is rarely insightful. There’s a also a repeated assertion that everybody is familiar with her songs, which is simply not true in the 21st Century. There’s a sense of ownership and objectification here which doesn’t leave a lot of room for insights into Karen’s personality. Remaining elusive, she bursts into life only in the film’s final stages, which deal with her desperate attempts to reach out for help. Two photos taken in hospital, like the tracks on the solo album she decided not to release, express something missing elsewhere.

There’s a good set of interviewees here from Karen’s social circle, including the late Olivia Newton John, and Cherry Boone O’Neill, who tried to help her at the end. In a sweet postscript which explores the treatment of Karen’s story after her death, Cherry expresses her surprise at how accurately Todd Haynes’ Barbie doll based Superstar was. Sadly, this film doesn’t really live up to it.