Hilderbrand offers a reading of what he refers to as the "bootleg aesthetics" of Todd Haynes' Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1989), a 16mm film, now out of circulation due to copyright laws. Low-fidelity reproductions formally mirror the film's thematic concerns -- bodily breakdown and distortion in the mass media -- rendering the film's content on the surface of the bootlegged films' grainy images.