Conference Agenda

“Long ago, and oh, so far away,” an expectant audience was confronted with the death of Karen Carpenter in Todd Haynes’s 1987 cult film, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. Despite several legal attempts to suppress the film due to unauthorized use of The Carpenters’ music, bootlegs of Superstar survive on YouTube and through physical copies. As Karen’s voice fantasmatically reverberates through several narrative planes, her body is represented by a Barbie doll whose cheeks are whittled down to represent the star’s real-life struggle with anorexia. By combining studies of the piracy (Davis 2009) and consequent “bootleg aesthetics” (Hilderbrand 2004) of Superstar with discourses of gender, affect, and voice studies (Jarman-Ivens 2011; Morris 2013; Eidsheim 2019), I argue that Haynes’s illegal use of The Carpenters’ music and Barbie dolls offers a rhizomatic critique of documentary reenactment while cultivating an “erotics of empathy” between audience and doll.

The use of The Carpenters’ music, featuring Karen’s close-miked voice, critically constructs character-identification by employing the “erotics of bodily empathy,” which links the audience’s body to one that is queerly “false,” absent, present, and decaying. These tenuous divisions between “represented” and “imagined” bodies are further problematized by the material decay engendered by generations of bootleg reproduction. Significant loss of audiovisual information has led to multiplicities of affective affordances by placing high demand on the viewer-listener as mediator and meaning-maker. Superstar can thus be theorized as a body in itself, one whose audiovisual deterioration parallels the physical emaciation of Karen’s body, both real and represented.

“The taps were just as we did them, with no additions... they were real,” reflected Ginger Rogers about her tap dance battle with Fred Astaire in the 1935 film Roberta (RKO). Narratives of tap dance performances on film, such as these, often emphasis authenticity and liveness as part of the production process, despite seemingly overwhelming challenges to the contrary: single takes and direct sound demand perfect recording conditions. From the onset of sound film in the late 1920s, the issue of authenticity and sound fidelity dominated the use, marketing, and innovation of sound recording and sound-image synchronization technology. In the age of early sound film, innovation and development was rapidly changing the context of filming music and dance numbers, and dubbing eventually dominated production. Pervasive in musical numbers in the 1930s, however, were tap dance performances, which presented unique and complex challenges for film makers and performers. Tap sounds blur the line between musical sound and bodily sound, and its dubbing practices share similarities to those of Foley work. Such embodied soundscapes tread the subtle territory between uncanny, authentic, and spectacular. This paper discusses a specific example of mixed use of both direct-recorded and dubbed musical and tap dance sounds in the film Roberta, contextualizing narratives of “liveness” and “authenticity” with phenomenological analysis of performance scenes (noting specifically timbre, quality, perspective, image, and editing), situating this analysis within the larger landscape of sound-image synchronization and production history.