« Give Him a Mask, and He’ll Tell You the Truth »: Todd Haynes’s Music Biopics and the Exposure of Identity Traps

Abstract

Avoiding any attempt to freeze them in a media or cinematic discourse and image, whose nature they question, the figures of the musicians in Todd Haynes’s three music biopics, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, Velvet Goldmine and I’m Not There, are precisely of the infigurable. The singer Karen Carpenter, disfigured by illness, is also disfigured by the society of spectacle and by the numerous clandestine copies of the film which seem to reflect her gradual disappearance. Brian Slade –deeply malleable– goes from the representation of an androgynous and provocative star of the glam scene to that of a commercial music singer enslaved to the conservative power in place. As for Bob Dylan’s figure, at once everywhere and nowhere, it is to be sought by the spectator in the shimmering and tangled web of his multiple representations. Faced with a subjective and musical identity that is changing and polymorphic, the poetic and musical body of the musician’s voice nevertheless manages to recreate a coherent presence and to attach us to it.