05 November, 2010

Tabloid

While the audience at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art was watching Errol Morris' latest film, Tabloid, he was off at the Plaza having a burger and a Point beer. I think we got the better deal.





The movie sees Morris move away from politics, or perhaps more correctly, away from political figures and back to the garden variety weirdoes that roam free amongst us. It concerns one Joyce McKinney who was once crowned Miss Wyoming. She fell in love with a Mormon man, Kirk Anderson, and they were engaged. However, Anderson was sequestered or otherwise fled to England but she didn't let this inconvenience deter her. McKinney, convinced her fiancée had been brainwashed, assembled a crack squad of acquaintances to kidnap the man and have her true love returned to her. They abscond with Anderson to a country cottage where the deprogramming consists of chaining the man to a bad and McKinney "raping" him repeatedly in the hope that he remembers his love for her.

Or something like that.

Neither Anderson nor any Mormon brethren would sit before Morris and his Interrotron so we are left without their stories. But, as you can imagine, this tale made for great tabloid fodder and the movie includes interviews with a couple tabloid journalists who covered the story at the time. They come across as anything but disinterested observers with the photographer being especially gleeful at uncovering dirt. And even the tabloids couldn’t agree on exactly what McKinney was. Was she a whore or a victim of the tabloid press?

For her part, McKinney comes across as relentlessly cheerful as she questions the strange events of her youth. She acknowledges much of what the tabloids wrote about her but she contradicts other elements. She didn't rape Anderson, but rather the sex was consensual, for instance. Whatever the truth behind the matter, McKinney is a classic Morris subject. There's a crime involved and she is obsessive.

McKinney's friend and accomplice in the kidnapping died several years ago so we don't get his side of the story either. However, a pilot she hired and a former Mormon get some screen time. The former illuminates some of the story's background and highlights McKinney's obsessiveness while the latter bolsters the notion that Anderson was brainwashed by the Mormons. But what neither these two nor the reporters above and McKinney do is to really get at the truth of what happened. The film's subject is an unreliable narrator and the tabloid reporters come across as being just as obsessive as she is in pursuit of their own goals.

The events of 30 years ago are given a postlude where McKinney's dog Booger dies and she finds scientists in South Korea who clone the hound giving her five Boogers. During the Q&A after the screening, Morris described his subject as being like a child in need of constant attention. Showtime, which helped fund the movie's production, wanted him to drop the whole bit about the dog cloning but he kept it in. And the movie is better for it because it reinforces that McKinney is off her rocker. She is an even stranger person than we were led to believe as she cannot let anything go and will go to extremes to keep the things she loves in her life. It's adds a bit of tragedy to a story that has something akin to a happy ending.

The movie leans away from examining the elusiveness of truth and more towards the study of a character that exhibits all the traits that Morris finds interesting. Tabloid will likely be seen as one of Morris' lesser works but this is strictly because no political events or figures are involved. There's no major controversy such as Holocaust denial present and no one in authority to heap blame upon. But the film is funny and absurd and it's a tragedy to boot. What’s not to like?

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