Director: Erroll Morris
Year: 2011
Country: U.S
Language: English
What is Tabloid? A love story? A conspiracy? A tale of religious morality? It is certainly a unique documentary made by a talented filmmaker about an eccentric woman with an incredible story that turned her world topsy turvy. Where most documentaries offer some sort of truth, this one does not. It will remind many viewers of Legendary Japanese Director Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, in which there are many stories about the same event in question but it is not revealed which is truth. Is this a spoiler? I think not. Mainly because the stories you will hear while watching Tabloid are among the strangest you will ever hear.
The year was 1977, a lot of things happened this year. Elvis died, Chaplin died, Punk took the UK by storm and Joyce McKinney, the subject of this documentary, was involved in an infamous scandal that nearly left her life in shambles. The tabloids dubbed it "The Case of the Manacled Mormon", though the stories spread because of this headline seems stranger than the headline itself. A former model, she was said to be a desperate and crazed woman who kidnapped an American Mormon missionary from the U.K, handcuffed him to a hotel room bed and made him her weekend sex slave. Of course McKinney insists that the stories of her being a sex-crazed rapist are entirely false. She was rescuing the man she loved from a wicked cult, then fled the country to Canada as part of a mime troupe.
The tabloids' attempts at making her seem like a lunatic didn't end there, They also picked up a story on her years later when she attempted to clone her dead dog...and when she robbed a few people in Tennessee because she wanted money, to buy a false leg for her three legged horse. Why would someone buy a three legged horse? I guess these stories will lead to questions that make you doubt her sanity.
Both stories seem very plausible, yet only one can be true. Which one is it? Can both be false? There are many questions that this film brings up, many reasons for why we should think McKinney is a bit nuts, but also many reasons for why we should think McKinney is telling the truth. For a woman who has been accused of so much and basically had her life ruined because of these stories she seems to handle her self pretty well. It is possible that Director Erroll Morris wants us to sympathize with McKinney but I think his genius is making us really think about the nature of truth, celebrity, sex and cult.
I found it quite interesting that this film emphasizes the lack of difference between "religion" and "cult". Is "religion" all that different from "cult"? McKinney says she was saving her lover from a cult, the press says that he was merely a Mormon missionary performing his duties. Yet he is a man and men have desires that are quite sexual. Mormon missionaries were not only forbidden to have sex, but they couldn't be in the same room alone with another woman. I worked at a place where you couldn't be alone with a girl because they wanted you to "avoid the appearance of evil". What is "evil" about love? Perhaps when religions make rules that are contrary to human nature they become "cults". Was McKinney's lover raped or was he so afraid of being persecuted by his mormon "cult" that he made up a story to save himself?We are never sure what Erroll Morris thinks, he baffles us with twists, turns and the strangeness of reality, yet his opinion is not apparent. His film is incredibly personal and seems to be more than a documentary. It gets us asking questions about reality itself, something I truly unique in documentary filmmaking.
In conclusion, Morris' film Tabloid is unique because it is non judgmental and makes us question the nature of sex, religion, cult, love, reality and many other topics. I can definitley see this being shown in philosophy classes along with Kurosawa's Rashomon. There are many documentaries out there, but few that can actually make the viewer really thing. Was McKinney telling the truth? I'm still not sure. Does it matter? Praise it! 4/5
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