"In both films, the [Barbie] doll ultimately decides she must leave her home."

"For [Karen] Carpenter, this precedes an attempt at healing, away from well-meaning if destructive family dynamics. For Margot Robbie’s Barbie, her journey leads her to discovering true power in the real world, outside Barbieland’s colourful confines. Both films imagine the home as a place of repression, and dolls as a vessel for often contradictory ideas about domesticity, femininity and self-realisation."

I'm reading "The banned Barbie film: her anguished first role as Karen Carpenter/Todd Haynes animated the impossibly slender doll to show what drove the singer to her early death. The film has more in common than you might expect with Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster" (The Guardian).

The Todd Haynes film using Barbie as Karen is "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story." It's existed since 1987, but litigation made it unavailable until recently. You can watch the whole thing at that link. From the Guardian article:

"If I really believe that life is that devastating, that destructive, I’m afraid that my immune system will believe it, too. And I can’t afford to take that risk. Neither can you."

Says a character in "Safe," quoted in "The 1995 film ‘Safe’ has new meaning during our coronavirus isolation" (America/The Jesuit Review). 

We watched "Safe" last night (the last chance to catch it on the Criterion channel) and this morning I'm reading articles that connect it to the Covid pandemic. To list a few: 

"Watching Safe at the End of the World/In the second installment of his series about films that resonate in the age of COVID-19, our critic dives deep into an unsettling 1995 movie with Julianne Moore" (Variety): "[T]he trembling, terrified, inexplicable Carol White—who starts the movie at the peak of late-’80s prosperity and ends it battle-scarred, gaunt, and living in a literal igloo on a commune—has been on my mind. Yes, because of COVID-19: because a movie in which a woman starts to feel alienated from her own home, and from the people surrounding her, and from her own life writ large, has an eerie resonance." 

"Todd Haynes’s Masterpiece 'Safe' Is Now a Tale of Two Plagues" (The New Yorker): "'Safe' is an unsettling film to watch while in quarantine from a disease that feels both everywhere and nowhere, and which is being willfully misunderstood by powerful people who can’t quite care enough to fight it. Whatever name the culture gives to the force that prises people apart at a given moment in time, it has always pushed in the same direction—back inside and further into solitude, back into blame and shame and doubt, back toward the mirror and a reflection we keep trying to trick." 

"Why Julianne Moore in Safe Is Everyone’s Social Distancing Panic Mood Right Now/Todd Hayne's 'Safe' is all too prescient" (W): "Though fans of the film point out that it touches on numerous themes of modern life (there are correlations to AIDS, feminism, predatory self-help mumbo jumbo, and the loneliness of privileged suburban life, for sure), the film resonates especially right now because it asks 'What’s worse: a mysterious disease or the stress of trying to protect yourself?'"