Karen Carpenter: Afterlife as Afterimage

Afterlife as Afterimage: Understanding Posthumous Fame By Steve Jones, Joli Jensen Peter Lang (2005)

Popular singers often loom larger in death than in life. It is not surprising then that their gravesites often become destinations for pilgrimage. For example, the resting place of Jim Morrison in Paris has become a favored tourist destination, attracting numerous fans who express their respect and affection by leaving gifts and graffiti to honor the gifted singer and songwriter. Perhaps the most important lesson of these rituals is that, for some popular performers, the meanings inscribed in their public image often are derived from their fans' tendency to read their lives and music through the manner in which they gave their lives for the sake of their art. Carole Blair et al. (1994) note that gravesites and memorials are often places where readings of history are shaped and solidified in the public mind by ensconcing celebrated individuals within a framework that makes them legible for future generations as well as creating a space in which mourning can take place. One very striking shrine in the world of popular music is the mausoleum owned and maintained by the family of Karen Carpenter at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Downey, California. With its romantic and ecclesiastical imagery, few other rock and roll memorials so vividly encapsulate the ethical and ideological vocabularies that so often constrain the memory of popular musicians.

Karen Carpenter, along with her brother Richard, formed one of the most prolific and successful pop acts of the 1970s. The group was notable for a series of popular love ballads that featured Karen's striking voice and lyrics (many written by her brother and John Bettis) that were characterized by an ever-innocent romanticism. Thirty-three years after their debut, the Carpenters have sold over 100 million albums worldwide (20 million posthumously) while accruing three Grammys, an Academy Award, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. During the late seventies, fans of the group watched as Karen Carpenter struggled with AnorexiaNNervosa. On February 4, 1983, at 32 years of age, she finally succumbed to heart damage and possible complications from the drug Ipecac, which she was using to induce vomiting after meals. Karen had spent the night before with her parents, who had encouraged her to stay rather than going out with friends. The next morning, her mother, Agnes, found her daughter lying on the floor dead. During her autopsy coroner Ronald Kornblum noted the emaciation and dehydration common to anorexics who make frequent use of laxatives. For both her fans and the general public, Karen's image is now inextricably bound to the manner in which she died and the ethical persona of the anorexic that was evolving in the popular imagination during the 1970s and '80s.

During the early seventies in particular, when the popular culture was becoming much thinner and models such as Twiggy and singers such as Cher became theNnorm, popular myth has it that Karen became increasingly weight conscious when music critics began commenting on her weight. Richard, too, was quoted as asking whether the art direction staff could "do something about those hips" after he saw the photos of Karen from an album shoot early in their career. It is important to note that Karen was never intended to be a sex symbol in the erotic sense, as the Carpenters came to represent a more innocent America that so many sought to preserve during turbulent times. Indeed, they were one of the few popular music acts to perform in the Nixon White House because they so well represented that American ideal challenged by political and social adversities such as the hippie culture and the Vietnam War. It is important to remember that with the British Invasion of the mid 1960s, rock and roll became increasingly harder and more associated with youth rebellion, drug use, sexual miscreants, and social upheaval. By the late 1960s, rock music was essentially the soundtrack to Vietnam War protests, Black Power, and a rejection of traditional sexual mores and societal values. 

In 1970, the drug-related deaths of Janis Joplin and Jim Hendrix and the announcement that the Beatles had disbanded sent the rock world reeling, and opened the door to a cultural backlash. While the early 1970s saw groups such as the Rolling Stones pushing for increasingly harder rock forms that appealed to middle-class white male teens, folk musicians from the 1960s as well as new artists such as the Osmonds, the Jackson Five, the Captain and Tenille, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Olivia Newton-John and the Carpenters popularized a "softer" sound that bridged the gap between the older generation and American youth. Artists such as James Taylor, Carly Simon and Carole King wrote ballads--poetry set to music, really that emotionally allowed the country to heal from the turbulent 1960s. Around the middle of the 1970s, however, the American palate tired of this musical trend that harkened back to the simpler tunes of the1950s. With their wholesome family image, Karen and Richard were able to tap into this cultural ethic, with Karen in particular playing the role of star-struck female innocence - an image that was quickly subsumed by the ethical mandates of the pathology that eventually killed her.’

The Carpenter mausoleum is therefore more than a resting place for Karen's body; it is a temple to this lost innocence where guests go to pay their respects to their fallen icon. Karen rests in a tomb whose carved epitaph reads, "A star on earth. A star in heaven." This is a refrain that is often heard in texts that remember and celebrate her musical career, such as Tom Stockdale's eulogy (2000) depicting Karen Carpenter as an innocent young woman struck down in her prime and at the height of her creative potential. Above her tomb one sees an El Greco painting entitled Madonna and Child with Saint Agnes and Saint Martin (see figure 6.1). For the family members who have continued to take an active role in managing Karen Carpenter's public identity, particularly her brother Richard, these images are not accidental. Saint Agnes, with her characteristic lamb, is considered the patron saint of virgins, and was in fact considered the first of the martyred virgins (Hall, 1979, pp.10-11).' Given the Carpenters' outward persona of sexual innocence and naïveté, particularly the group's reliance on Karen's girl-next-door image to create consumer appeal, the selection of the virgin--the woman untainted by sin or the desires of the flesh- in many ways embodies the cultural legacy of the Carpenter myth. Yet, as Gillian Garr (1992) notes, the public memory surrounding Karen Carpenter has linked her ethical purity to the tragic nature of her death. In as much as she desperately tried to please her intensely controlling parents and brother, she remained forever locked in a pre-adolescent state. Rather than providing an image of feminine strength or self-reliance, Karen's story is one of a desperate little girl, bereft of any control of her own life, ultimately succumbing to the premier feminine pathology that would claim the lives of so many like her.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the public began to consume celebrities in a manner that demanded access to the private lives of these figures (Flanagan, 1999). No longer satisfied with merely witnessing the performer in the act of performance, trade publications and gossip magazines began to integrate elements of the private lives of famous individuals to supplement their public personae, giving birth to the modern cult of the star. Karen Carpenter was no exception. As early as 1975, her fans became aware of the fact that she suffered from an acute eating disorder and, over the next several years, watched as she slowly died in front of their eyes. 

With the finality of her death, Karen's memory would be eternally linked to the illness that killed her. Kim Chernin (1986) writes, "with the life and death of Karen Carpenter, a generation of young women found in her a symbol for their lives" (p. 12). In many ways she would come to embody the tension between beauty and moral purity with which many female listeners could identify. Eating disorder expert Joan Brumberg (1988) further notes that Karen's "death made anorexia nervosa a household term and underscored the serious consequences of the disorder" (p. 92). Often, for diseases to capture the public imagination, they require a personification, much as the famed baseball player Lou Gehrig would become associated with Anterior Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). The irony of Gehrig's illness was of course that the player who had played in more consecutive games than any other before him (a record that would stand for many decades) would suffer rapid muscular degeneration. For Karen, the irony was that she did not engage in the lifestyle and drug use that had taken so many rock stars before her such as Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and a host of others whose hedonic practices led, almost inevitably, to tragic conclusions. In a perverse reversal of this narrative, it would be Karen's austerity that would kill her. By trying so hard to please her family and fans, she would become locked in a self-destructive attempt to become that perfect little girl that they desired. Rather than dying from her perceived hedonic excesses, she would literally die from the aesthetic practices of self-starvation designed to purify both mind and body. In a New York Times article about her death, one writer summarized that "Anorexia, in the end, claimed victory over her body and her name, which became practically synonymous with the affliction" (Hoerburger, 1996, p. 53). 

In other words, the image of Karen Carpenter, the iconography that she represented, became interchangeable with the public's understanding of eating disorders in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Karen Carpenter became "chat pop star who died of anorexia," and anorexia the illness "that killed Karen Carpenter." One cannot understand one semiotic without understanding the other.

Living at home until her mid-20s in the midst of a controlling family, Carpenter ultimately became what Lidia Curti (1992) has termed a "female fabulation,' cautionary tale for young women. As a singer whose public persona relied on a myth of retarded sexuality, Karen's handlers were quick to use her infantile nature as a marketing tool. In an era when women were beginning to express greater autonomy, Karen was distinctly traditional and nonthreatening-a throwback to what was rapidly becoming an outdated image. Henry Krips (1999) notes that often the association of a desired image or individual with religious iconography in the cultural marketplace can lead beyond mere association, conflating the allegorical and the material to create secular saints (p. 77). These saints become themselves objects of desire capable of transmuting mere sexual attraction into more resonant compulsions. In the present case Karen Carpenter would become symbolic of the quest to purge the flesh of its sins by denying the appetite--a story that would repeat itself in the lives of tens of thousands of young women who would come to regard the emaciation of anorexia as a quest for ethical perfection. As biographer Ray Coleman (1994) notes, her "exhilarating journey to a summit in show business has its shocking end with the price a young woman paid for hating what she saw in the mirror" (p. xili). In essence, the life of Karen Carpenter has become a fable or cautionary tale about the psychological threats that confront women in the modern world.

In recent years, a number of musicologists and cultural critics have begun to explore the impact that popular female performers have on their audiences--particularly how they shape the contours of modern femininity. Lori Burns and Melissa Lafrance (2002) provide one of the most recent analyses of this sort, examining how the private lives of performers such as Tori Amos shape the music that they create and the female image they market. Strong female performers, operating in a male-dominated industry, often struggle against the ideological codes of the marketplace to create an image that is at once authentic and their own (Whitely, 2000). In the contemporary world of pop stars such as K. D. Lang, the Indigo Girls, and Madonna, Carpenter's memory reads as the antithesis of the current artists, with her childlike qualities and failure to control her own image. This modern perception of the independent female artist has deep roots. While rock music was for the most part male dominated in the 1960s, novelev all-girl bands such as record producer Phil Spector's Crystals or the Ronettes were modestly successful. In the last half of the decade, Janis Joplin of Big Brother and the Holding Company and Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane pioneered a role for women rock stars. The "folk rock" movement provided an outlet as well. The public personae of singers such as Carole King and Carly Simon's public persona asserted women to be prominent as artists as well as social activists, drawing on the achievements of the Women's Movement in the 1970s. This set the stage for the Lilith Fair generation in the 1990s. Although many female musical artists suffered personal pain, even tragic ends, the dominant image shown the public is often that of a woman who can stand apart by drawing on an inner strength.

In order to more fully understand how Karen would emerge as an icon for female passivity, the following exploration will first examine the way that she, through both marketing and her song lyrics, came to embody the anorexic saint. Since anorexia was coming under increasing public scrutiny during Carpenter's rise to fame, her image and the evolving vocabulary of this mental illness were interpenetrating and thus shaping the public's perceptions of both. After her death, the Carpenter family attempted to maintain Karen's marketability by reinforcing images of Karen's virginal sainthood (as seen in her mausoleum), thus unconsciously promoting both anorexic stereotypes and the myth of her martyrdom. The second portion of this analysis will examine the challenges to this narrative through films such as Todd Haynes's Superstar as well as the suppression of song lyrics on later albums that the family deemed inappropriate for the Carpenter image. Commentators such as Haynes have attempted to appropriate Karen Carpenter as an allegory that can be used to critique the idealization of submissive, innocent femininity that she would come to embody. Whatever efforts the Carpenter family made to insulate Karen's name and reputation from what they felt would be the irreparable stigma of anorexia, Karen's death from anorexia irrevocably sealed her fate as forever associated with the disease in the public mind.' The subsequent analysis explores the public representations of Karen's life, death, and the feminine stereotype with which she remains associated. By examining the manner in which she has been eulogized throughout the popular media, one is afforded a unique glimpse into the manner in which public memory binds fans together amid the mythic terrain of martyrdom, ethics, and disease.

David Blake (2001) notes that a celebrity is a fiction--a collection of myths designed to market the texts with which they are associated. They are, in essence, walking, breathing commercials for music, books, and films. Popular shows such as Behind the Music, The Osbournes, and MTV Cribs, are just a few modern manifestations of the attempt to use a celebrity's private life to reinforce the marketability of their music. Karen Carpenter was no exception, as her handlers, particularly her brother Richard, were able to promote an ambience of suspended, happy adolescence around her. Indeed, one of the things that made her suffering seem so pathological was the fact that she seemed to have everything. To the public, she seemed to come from the ideal nuclear family and possess talent, beauty, and wealth along with sound middle-class American values. So why would a young woman who came so close to these cultural ideals literally starve herself to death in front of the American public over the course of a decade?

Examining the traditional anorexic ideology, one can see that this practice should not be surprising, as it fits seamlessly with dominant ethical imperatives within Western culture. Take for example the Miracle Maidens who would sporadically appear throughout medieval culture, starving themselves to demonstrate their devotion to Christ and their capacity to subsist on pure spiritual energy. If this early anorexic ethic is combined with the hagiography of virginal martyrdom through images like that of St. Agnes, young women such as Karen Carpenter, by denying themselves the consumptive and sexual pleasures of the flesh, are in one sense atoning for the sins of an entire culture that has grown soft and gluttonous in its own material excess. At the same time that Karen and Richard Carpenter were visiting with the record producers at A&M records, eating disorder therapist Hilde Bruch was interviewing young women with a bizarre new illness that led them to diet themselves into a state of emaciation. Bruch (1978) eventually came to the conclusion that these individuals had an unnatural desire for perfection and attempted to attain it by rejecting the role of adult femininity--the fuller body, sexual activity, and the role as mother that it entailed. These girls were often over-achievers who were hypersensitive to criticism. The anorexic's starvation produced a visual tableau for demonstrating a virtuous interior and, because her body was beyond criticism, so was her mind. Add to this mix the increasingly thin models found in the fashion magazines at this time and the recipe for wide-scale anorexic practice was firmly ensconced in the public imagination. Karen's mother would often recall that Karen's anorexia began when she was reading a review of one of her concerts where the writer referred to her as possessing "baby fat." At that point she entered into what Susan Bordo (1993) has called a state of consumptive asceticism where, in the process of obtaining ideal beauty, the sufferer ends up disciplining her body as a moral imperative. Given the aesthetic qualities of Carpenter's music and public image, she would tell the tragedy of the victimized young girl in an extremely compelling fashion.

In 1970, the Carpenters would revive the little-known Burt Bacharach song "Close to You," a lyrical melody that would remain one of their signature songs. The tension that would define the Carpenters' work was that Karen, still an innocent 19-year-old girl, was to perform a repertoire of love songs that often expressed adult desire. In contrast to the current age, where singers such as Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera market themselves as sexual commodities at a very young age, Karen would remain the goofy teenager admiring her object of desire in terms that were distinctly less erotic and nonsexual. The lyrics to this classic demonstrate the way that this tension was negotiated. In this context, Karen is allowed to express her admiration and desire without explicit reference to her own body or desires. In many ways the love expressed in these lyrics is somewhat spiritual in nature. Music producer Herb Alpert notes that Karen "was a little girl woman who was always looking for something or someone to fill her life beyond hit records, and seemed very lonely and very innocent in her pursuit" (Coleman, 1994, p. xv). In retrospect, many fans have returned to songs such as "Close to You" and reread them through this lens of unattainable perfection-forever close but never realized. In his comprehensive history of asceticism in Western culture, Geoffrey Harpham (1987) writes, "while asceticism recognized that desire stands between human life and perfection, it also understands that desire is the only means of achieving perfection" (p. 3). In order to move into the hagiographic realm, one does not eliminate desire, but one rechannels it toward spiritual ends in order to transmute it to something less reliant on the flesh. Karen was therefore able to express desire in a fashion that seems so idealized and naive that her own purity remains intact. In fact, one of the composers for her solo album remarked, "(she) had this very sexy voice, but she wasn't a sexy person at all" (Hoerburger, 1996, p. 54). Yet, what might appear to be a contradiction was quite possibly the crux of her appeal--the ability to express profound desire without retreating to gross sensuality.

Central to the Carpenters' marketing narrative was the idea that Karen had emerged from the ideal family who had a vested interest in insuring that her sexual growth remained somewhat stunted. In the photograph for the cover story inRolling Stone Magazine (figure 6.2), we see Karen looking characteristically happy and making a childlike face into the camera. In the accompanying 1974 article setting the stage for the group's new tour, Tom Nolan (1974) writes that "Karen is in some ways like a child, which is not surprising. A star since 19, she probably missed out on one or two normal stages of adaptation to the real world" (p. 63). It is indeed interesting to note that even at her graveside eulogy, Karen would continue to be referred to as a child despite the fact that she was 32 years old. This imprisonment in a state of eternal adolescence is central to the anorexic allegory for young women. When Karen Carpenter finally admitted publicly to having anorexia, she sought out Cherry Boone (daughter of singer Pat Boone), who advised her to visit the psychiatrist Steven Levenkron. Although her illness was not publicized as widely, Boone's struggle with anorexia mirrored many of Karen's experiences. She came from a traditional family who expressed dismay and resentment when their daughter went public with her illness, thus tarnishing the myth that they were indeed the perfect nuclear family. In one scenario described by her biographer, Karen, who entered treatment against the wishes of her family, was finally able to convince her mother and father to attend a session where she broke down and expressed "... how badly she felt about her-self; how much she wanted to apologize for ruining her family's life and causing distress to her friends; how her feelings of degradation had threatened her career and ruined her personal life" (Coleman, 1994, p. 3). Levenkron had just authored his now classic text The Best Lite Girl in the World (1978) that has become a staple in the library of many young adults, and with which Karen was reputedly secretly enamored. In this text he created the classic anorexic template where a young woman, consumed with the desire for perfection, used her interest in dancing to resist her parents' authority, starving herself as an act of rebellion. Levenkron's conclusion was that, since these anorexic girls are engaging in a form of rebellion, they simply needed to be chastised by a paternal authority figure to stop dieting--a role that Levenkron would often play with his patients. It is important to note that in this model, the young woman remains a somewhat powerless and passive entity in her own recovery--a role that Karen, now a legal adult, played all too well.'

One of the most disturbing questions for many fans has been whether one can see the signs of her mental turmoil in her work, outside of which she and her handlers were so careful to mask it. This follows from the general notion that mental illness will often express itself unconsciously through particular cultural productions. In another one of her standards, "Rainy Days and Mondays," one can see that depression often played a role in her song texts. There is perhaps little that is unusual about tragic plots in popular youth music from the 1950s onward, particularly stories of loss and early death (Cooper 1991). However, the Carpenters focused a bit more overtly on the psychological manifestations of loss such as sadness and ennui, although in this case something as simple as rainfall can produce the depression. Notably, in this song, it is not necessarily a particular event that has produced the sadness, but it exists as a more or less general state of being. An even more compelling image of alienation emerges later in the song "When It's Gone".

After Karen's death, songs such as this were often reread in a much more complex and sympathetic light. Rather than a little girl fumbling for the words to express her loss, she became instead a deeply introspective and psychologically complex artist. David Sanjek (2001) notes that as a musician's popularity increases, often their artistic talents fall under some suspicion--that perhaps their music lacks an authenticity that would immunize it apainst the marketplace. This balance between the need to sell records and the artistic integrity of a work is sometimes called creative conservatism (Street, 1986, p. 193). Artists and producers must create a product that appears creative, but does not challenge standards in a way that would alienate those who buy records. In the case of the Carpenters, interest in their music had begun to decline in the 1970s as the age of bubble-gum pop music came to a close. Yet after Karen's death, much of the Carpenters' work was revived within the cultural memory because suddenly Karen had an artistic depth not attributed to her in life. Neil Nehring (1997) has traced a similar phenomenon in the work of the rock band Nirvana after the death of its lead singer Kurt Cobain, one of the most influential singers of the past twenty years, who went from a pop-grunge rocker to a symbol of repressed male anger (p. 99). For Karen Carpenter this “deepening" largely revolved around the recognition that she was experiencing pain and suffering and that the smile she showed to the public was little more than a façade. Ray Coleman (1994) perhaps puts it best when he writes that for many of these fans Karen's "art must have been to a large degree the product of her soul [and] many interviewees have remarked on her psyche and the quality of her voice which evoked loneliness" (p. xi). In some ways, anorexia gave Karen Carpenter a psychological depth that hitherto she had been denied by mainstream audiences.

It should not be overlooked that Karen Carpenter's death may have provoked a certain amount of cultural guilt among those in her audience. If the very music that she had produced and that so many had enjoyed could be seen as having drawn the life from her, then what did that say about the audiences who attended concerts and commented freely on her appearance? In one sense, this collective guilt has done nothing but enhance Karen's image as the holy anorexic and virginal martyr. In the following lyrics from 1976, one can begin to see this gradual recognition in Karen's recording:

It took a while for me to learn

That nothing comes for free

The price I've paid is high enough for me.”

Of course the idea that one pays a price for one's desires, particularly a psychological price, is a notion that is extremely resonant with the dynamics of sacrifice. As Rudolph Bell notes (1989), "the holy anorexic never gives in, and ultimately she may die from her austerities. She rejects the passive, dependent, Catholic religion of meditation through priests and intercession by saints, and so herself becomes a saint" (p. 19). In the numerous tributes that one sees to Karen Carpenter in both print and on the Web, they share the common characteristic of profound sadness at her tragic death while celebrating the purity of her legacy. Like St. Agnes she remained pure and devout, devoting herself to a higher calling that sprung from a childlike innocence. Given the nature of her marketing along with the manner of her death, Karen Carpenter would indeed come to embody the ultimate feminine victim caught between two worlds one of purity and the other of beauty. After starving herself to death, she became the ideal type or living embodiment of the anorexic subject--female, sexually underdeveloped, and obsessed with perfection.

With these attributes the stereotypes of the eating disordered subject would become firmly entrenched in the American mind and acquire their most resonant personification. Karen would thus become both patron saint of anorexia as well as its most resonant cautionary tale. In 1998 the board of directors for the Richard and Karen Carpenter Performing Arts Center elected to create a walking exhibit in the lobby--this in response to numerous requests on the part of visitors who wondered why representations of Karen Carpenter seemed to be at a minimum. The directors, in conjunction with Richard Carpenter, created an exhibit that detailed the Carpenters' "creative process" along with their instruments and gold and platinum records. Karen's battle with anorexia is mentioned only briefly in the exhibit, an omission that seems somewhat remarkable given the amount of attention it has received over the years. It should be noted at this point that while Karen's illness remains a crucial part of her story, her family has often expressed embarrassment about the nature of her death, perhaps as a result of the stigma often attached to mental illness in the popular culture. Indeed, despite the autopsy results, Karen's family continues to deny that she was taking Ipecac, contrary to the testimony of friends and its consequences in her body. In his classic treatise on insanity in the age of reason, Michel Foucault (1966) notes that madness was often constructed as a polluted site of cultural impurity as society entered the Age of Enlightenment, leading to profound moral stigma regarding the behaviors of the insane. The cultural response to those with mental pathologies was to contain and control them. Phyllis Chesler (1972) would extend Foucault's observations to the sphere of mass representation, arguing that women were often the subjects of art and literature regarding mental illness, a dynamic that led to a feminization of madness within the medical and popular cultures. By coding femininity as a state of mental illness, women who were either independent or troublesome could be easily dismissed. 

As the most prolific “women's disease" of the twentieth century, eating disorders such as anorexia have become the primary vehicles for reasserting this relationship between femininity and madness. Given the fact that Karen quickly became the personification of this illness, the Carpenter family has attempted to downplay the importance of anorexia in Karen's life, while embracing other, more appealing aspects of the virginal, little girl narrative. For example, when Richard was discussing an actress to play Karen in the proposed television movie about their lives, he said, "She never got that thin," although she chronically weighed 79 pounds during the last several years of her life (Rosenfeld, 1985, p. B3). Carpenter family spokesperson Paul Bloch "downplayed the anorexia connection" to People magazine just weeks after her death, saying that she was a "vibrant and energetic person" (Levin, 1983, p. 53). The president of A&M Records at the time also told People, "Karen was the girl next door, always up even when she was down" (p. 53). What emerges is a cultural exchange where the boundaries of feminine pathology are subject to continual scrutiny .

Immediately following Karen's death, America found itself in a full-blown eating disorder panic. John Springhall (1998) notes that it is not unusual for moral panics to emerge in response to youth culture when a broader society perceives that its ethical fiber is under assault (p. 176). After Karen Carpenter's death, people in the broader culture began to self-identify as anorexic as well as to scrutinize family members who were also potentially affected. In an effort to minimize the damage to the Carpenters' reputation, Richard would participate in the production of The Karen Carpenter Story, one of the most highly rated made-for-television movies in history. The movie presents a fairly humane representation of Karen, and even discusses Richard's brief foray into the realm of drug addiction (this against his family's wishes). The result of the first airing of the movie was to spark another cultural panic about anorexia, as eating disorder clinics reported record numbers of phone calls and admissions the following week (i.e., see Los Angeles Times, 1989, January 4,). Suddenly, like never before, the beauty and diet industry saw itself under attack for the manner in which it imprisons and deludes young women. Patricia Brennan (1989) would sum up the film's impact by arguing that it used Karen's life as a "cautionary tale" to warn young women about the dangers of dieting (p. 4B). In the film, the ideal family is seen to disintegrate once Karen and Richard leave home and are subjected to the adult stresses of the music business. Note that Richard was very careful to implicate neither himself nor his parents in Karen's death, focusing instead on the pressures of touring and fan expectations. Yet, given the fact that Karen's myth was growing beyond his control, the discourse of mental pathology began to take on a life of its own.

In 1983 the award-winning director Todd Haynes produced his first film, entitled Superstar, a film depicting the life and madness of Karen Carpenter using Barbie Dolls for actors. With the film's stark framing and violent music, Haynes would demonstrate an acute awareness of the cultural vocabulary of anorexia by using the Barbie Doll, one of the primary culprits in promoting unrealistic expectations about the female body type. In an analysis of the relationship between high art and horror cinema, Joan Hawkins (2000) argues that independent filmmakers use the aesthetics of terror to represent turbulent psychological interiors. In Haynes's film we see the slow degradation of Karen's mind and body coupled with grotesque images of food, vomiting, and even stock footage of mass graves during the Holocaust. In the film, Haynes locates much of the blame for Karen's condition on her perversely overbearing family, who are seen as bizarre shadows hovering around her as she passes in and out of her catatonic states. This would be one of the primary reasons that Richard and the rest of the Carpenter family would repress distribution of Haynes's film by threatening lawsuits due to copyright infringement (Haynes makes extensive use of Carpenters music). The result was to create a cult classic. 

As has been pointed out earlier in this chapter, the anorexic subject is written as one who exists in a regressed state of childhood where often the only way that one can exercise control is to regulate food intake. As Avis Rumney (1983) writes, "I adopted the only strategy open to me in order to preserve any sort of identity, however precarious, and in order to believe in myself as an individual being, separate from both family and the school" (p. 56). Haynes, who demonstrates a fairly sophisticated understanding of the causes and symptoms of the eating disorder, is aware of the semiotic that he is creating in Superstar, stating that "identity is a fragile and basically an imaginary construct that we pretend to carry around." (Taubin, 1996, p. 33). Here Haynes represents Karen's anorexia as a sort of self-destructive bid for control over her own life in response to her over-bearing family, an interpretation that the Carpenters understandably resist. In short, her life becomes a parable for modern femininity in a society where access to power is often denied to women. When asked why he continues to threaten lawsuits against Haynes, Richard replies simply that the movie is "mean" (Kahn, 2002, p. A10). Given its candid portrayal of Karen's sexuality and the unsupportive nature of her family, it is not surprising that the result of such texts is a history war. Despite an unsuccessful marriage (her premarital relationships were kept secret), the Carpenter family had been able to preserve Karen's hagiographic image, and Haynes's suggestion that they played a role in her martyrdom was threatening to the legacy they had constructed for their daughter and themselves. Perhaps the most egregious form of revision (from Richard's standpoint) that Haynes would engage in was to reread the Carpenters' music through Karen's illness. His frequent use of the more popular Carpenters songs, often warped and played in minor keys, created much of the film's suspense and horror aesthetic. One segment of the film is particularly striking where he uses the song "Top of the World" to depict the mania that often accompanies the dieting impulse in anorexia. 

This song is one of the Carpenters' classic "feel good" tunes where Karen is expressing joy at the sensations that love produces. In Haynes's film, however, he uses an ironic juxtaposition where he depicts a series of meager salads with iced tea, concerts, and a scale showing progressively lower weights. Here Karen is viewed not in terms of sainthood, but as clearly located in the realm of mental illness. While expressing spiritual joy on stage each night, she is not purifying her thought and body, but obsessively destroying her tissues in a most grotesque fashion. By comparing Karen's body, which her family and record producers attempted to hide during her singing career, to the victims of the Nazis being tossed into mass graves,

Haynes draws attention to the fact that there is little spirituality to the anorexic's quest. Instead it is both gory and repetitive and possesses little romanticism. In death there is neither purification nor transcendence, but instead the decay of tissues that in many ways might mirror the decay of the mind. In this appropriation of sound and image, Haynes clearly transmutes hagiography into madness. It is in large part this revision of the Karen Carpenter myth that has made her an icon for underground grunge culture as well as a mainstream pop star." She began to represent not only the good-girl singer, but also an emblem for the excesses and mendacity of the traditional American culture that she had come to embody so well.

During the final years of her life, Karen had initiated a mild resistance to the traditional control that Richard had exercised over her in the creative process and an attempt to ascend into the ranks of independent female artists. In one interview she noted, "He'll always stall when we're due to go into the studios and not let me know the title or the nature of the song until we get there. I keep saying, What is the song' and he keeps saying, 'Oh, you'll be OK. It's easy for you. He doesn't let me know what my work is! And I hate that about him" (Coleman, 1994, p. 224). This anger was compounded by her eventual recognition that her family had manipulated her life by orchestrating the male relationships that she would enter and exit--with her own staff members working alongside Karen's parents in secrecy. The degree of possessiveness can be seen in Richard's anger after her death when he claimed to experience "silent fury at being robbed" and that he "should have been more of a bear on her" (Coleman, 1994). Rather than expressing sorrow or sympathy, he was clearly angry with Karen for depriving him of her talent. Rather than acknowledge the struggle for identity that she underwent on a daily basis, it became easier to simply blame her or attribute her illness to his failure to exercise sufficient control over her. This battle to control Karen's voice would continue well into the late 1990s.

During 1979, Karen had recorded a series of songs with Phil Ramone that would expand her repertoire and image. Karen had been inspired by Olivia Newton-John's transformation from doing Christmas specials to the sexually aware young woman in the movie Grease. When she and Phil Ramone played these songs for the executives at A&M records, they scoffed at the idea of Karen Carpenter doing post-disco music. One must recognize that while Karen had certainly performed a number of love songs, the majority of these did not feature sensuality as a main component. When Karen expresses her desire, she often describes her ideal mate as a dream, someone who is almost, by nature of his perfection, an absent lover. In her analysis of sexuality in Western literature, Camille Paglia (1990) writes of Emily Dickinson," because her eroticism is visual rather than sensual, Dickinson's love affairs take the form of adorations and apotheosis" (p. 668). This is very similar if not identical to the manner in which Karen Carpenter expressed desire in the music she performed with Richard, and very consistent with virginal desire. The male other becomes an idealized apotheosis, a spiritual embodiment that is not to be touched, but only longed for. Notice how in “Superstar” the idealized lover is present only as a vision or a disembodied voice. He is not a body that she can touch or experience in an immediate fashion. Thus while she is singing about love with her adult alto voice, the lover's absence mediates between her desire and her body. It is where these two spheres meet symbolically-where adult or "womanly" desire can be experienced. Given the fact that it is one of the primary goals of the anorexic to literally erase her own body and the sexuality it represents, Karen appeals to the anorexic consciousness by rendering her own body mute in her song lyrics.

Perhaps one of the reasons that the Carpenter family actively sought to repress the Ramone recordings despite public interest after Karen's death was because she had clearly violated the boundary so clearly established in her prior music. In these solo recordings we see a sexually mature Carpenter who is no longer pining for the lover who is not there and can never be there, but is instead driven by her body to cling to an imperfect man. Suddenly she had a body that itself could be touched and aroused. This song was augmented by a remake of Paul Simon's "Still Crazy After All These Years" that depicts old lovers getting together to have a few beers, and by songs such as "Making Love in the Afternoon" and "Still in Love with You," including the line, "I remember the first time I laid more than eyes on you" Javors, 1979).

It has been well publicized that the Carpenter family disapproved of Karen's solo career (Hoerburger, 1996). Richard felt betrayed and was sharply critical of the final product, accusing Karen of "stealing" the Carpenters' sound and of a weak performance. When she took her first collection of songs home, Phil Ramone reported that upon her return, he confronted an "eighty-pound Auschwitz victim figure" who left laxatives all over his house (Hoerburger 1996, p. 54). It was clear to the Ramones that Karen had disagreed with her parents and that she was continuing to pursue her solo project against their wishes.* Indeed it was when she was emotionally pressured to stay with her parents that Karen finally killed herself. Yet, when she was with the musicians who treated her as an equal and working on her own music, she seemed to recover temporarily. Karen's best friend, Frenda Franklin, said, "She told me that working on this album was the happiest time in her life" (Hoerburger 1996, p. 54). In a conversation with Phil and Itchy Ramone only thirty-six hours before her death, the following exchange took place:

Karen: "Can I use the F-word?"

Phil: "You're a grown woman. Say whatever you want.

Karen: "It's a fucking great album." (Coleman 1994, p. 321; Hoerburger, 1996, p. 53)

Along with these moments of self-assertion, Karen would also express amazement at the press shots for the album cover, remarking that, photographed as an adult in good health, "Look at me, Itch, I'm pretty! I'm really pretty!" (Hoerburger 1996, p. 54). It is interesting to note that Richard would use this photo for a posthumous release of the Carpenters' final but unfinished studio work because Karen did not look so gaunt. The systematic repression of this image of Karen has been an important part of the hagiographic myth, and by extension, to the anorexic subject that she would come to idealize. More importantly, the Carpenter family attempted to manage Karen's legacy in a way that allowed them to celebrate her moral purity while extracting the sources of this purity from the disease that killed her. Despite this effort, a growing discourse has emerged that critiques this seamless narrative, creating a collection of counter myths that overtly point to the psychologically destructive nature of female submission within a material culture.These detours in the myth of Karen continue to present a more complex and conflicted history of feminine pathology in the twentieth century as the struggle to control the image of the secular saint continues. Commentators such as Todd Haynes and record producers such as Phil Ramone have attempted to revise the Carpenter image--to reread Karen's narrative in such a way that the sources of her pathology are accurately portrayed and a more complex analysis of feminine identity rendered. From the family's point of view, they would prefer she remain forever their little girl who just happened to make some bad decisions when she entered the world outside their protection. Given the powerful relationship between femininity and popular music, Karen Carpenter remains a resonant template for young women, in particular, struggling for a sense of self in a male-dominated industry.

Her failure to author her own voice would in many ways become symbolic for a generation of young women striving for moral perfection by systematically starving themselves to death. Given the major templates provided by female artists today, whether as independent songwriters or highly erotic pop stars, the images and narratives that they fulfill play a role in defining modern femininity. As Karen became the primary personification of mental illness, to some extent it rendered her girl-next-door image a façade at best, and a recipe for suicide. In many ways Karen has become a pure symbol of feminine pathology--the woman out of step with her own reality. Ellen Lansky (1998) notes that this narrative is not uncommon within the fabulations surrounding female artists. Using the template of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, she argues that the minds of women writers are often placed on display while their male counterparts look on, describing for the audience their gradual degradation due to alcohol or madness. This is not unlike the myths surrounding Karen Carpenter, who ultimately failed to author her own narrative. In death, she has become a pure container for failed feminine resistance. Nancy Love (2002) notes that female musicians have a cultural mandate to use their voices and body to challenge dominant ideological codes, creating an activist consciousness. From this standpoint, one would expect that the Carpenters would have long since been relegated to the realm of anachronism. Instead, her story is one that continues to resonate with new generations of fans.

Three years after the death of Karen Carpenter, the noted eating disorder therapist Susie Orbach (1986) described anorexia as the "metaphor of our age." In an age when women attempted to resist patriarchal representation of their bodies away from the confines of sexual objectification, the eating disorder continues to function as both a symptom and a resistance to the dictates of the beauty culture.

Oftentimes the ultimate form of resistance, as demonstrated by Judith Butler's (2000) Antigone, who resists the tyrant to follow the dictates of natural law, provides a symbolic death to demonstrate the capacity to resist oppression no matter the consequences. In some ways the struggle to link Carpenter's body with mind, whether through pathology or through desire, can be seen as an attempt to reread the eating disorder in a more politically complex context. It is interesting to note, for example, that Karen was also bulimic and her autopsy revealed that complications from a drug used to induce vomiting in fact caused her heart failure. Yet, given the gluttonous and sneaky stereotypes of the binging and purging bulimic present in the media, this fact is often conveniently ignored by those who wish to maintain the myth of Karen Carpenter's spiritual purity.

As popular icons, musicians may often come to represent larger ideological constructs rather than individuals. After death, this process of representation can become complex and revisions in their narrative can be viewed as attacks upon the ideals that they represent. From this standpoint, memory becomes a battleground where differing groups may carry ideological agendas to particular readings. Those who wish to believe the moral efficacy of traditional doctrines of spiritual purgation and sainthood remember Karen as a saint." Those who challenge often look to appropriate her for critical means such as exposing the politics of eating disorders or reinvigorating the little girl/victim image as an adult woman making choices and experiencing sensuality. On many websites, the now infamous "Karen's Law of Physics," which states that what "goes down must come up," has become commonplace within the eating disorder community (see for example www.lesion.com). Much as Agnes the virgin sought to maintain her purity in the face of pagan sexual assault, becoming a virgin martyr, Karen would evolve into the resident saint for eating-disordered women caught within the contradictions of religious austerity and beauty culture. In her book, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies, Katherine Verdery (1999) notes that the dead function to galvanize the public around both political and cultural regimes, becoming literal embodiments of histories both embraced and rejected. In Karen's death, her body became the literal inscription of martyrdom--a saint killed by a grotesque material culture that continues to assault generations of young women who die for its collective sins. In other words, she remains a resonant symbol with which many young women now identify. The way that Karen's history is told is crucial to the lives of these individuals and to the meaning of her musical legacy.

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