Well cray.
Nottingham’s participation in Scalarama continued with Screen 22’s screening of the great Errol Morris documentary Tabloid last Monday. Even by Morris’ standards, whose previous works include The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War, Tabloid is an inexplicably weird, but typically brilliant film.
It relates the story of former Miss Wyoming beauty queen, and obvious lunatic, Joyce McKinney whose exploits with Mormon Kirk Anderson dominated the British press through the 1970s.
In an incident that came to be known as ‘the Mormon sex in chains case’, McKinney allegedly kidnapped and raped Anderson in a cottage in Devon, after following the missionary over from the USA, accompanied by with a friend and private detective.
What unfolds is a tale of sheer oddity, as each crazy act is somehow topped by the next. The story of a young female model’s forbidden love for a man involved with a church that forbids him to be alone with her, quickly turns into a tale of broken hearts, descending then into a sordid tale of kidnap, rape and bondage. From there, the focus is on a duel between the British press, a career in pornography, and a Korean doctor who clones dogs. As odd as this description sounds, it doesn’t do an ounce of justice to sheer insanity of this woman’s life.
Morris’s strength as a documentary maker lay in never allowing the viewer to feel either comfortable or in any sort of control. There was never a single, solitary moment during the entirety ninety minute running time of Tabloid where I could speculate with any degree of confidence as to what was coming next.
Of the six or seven subjects interviewed, of which the manic and frenzied McKinney is one, no one serves as the moral compass. Every single person either appears nuts, sordid or guilty of something; none of them have their hands clean, or decent motives for doing the weird things they’ve done.
As with all great documentaries, Tabloid doesn’t force the issue upon the viewer. Instead, Morris lets the oddities and idiosyncrasies of the story unfold one at a time, until you are left bewildered as to what is real, what is fake and how these people actually exist. Most notably, it succeeds in demonstrating that McKinney somehow managed to out-weird the Mormon Church, which, if nothing else, is an impressive act in itself.
Tabloid was shown at Screen 22 on Monday15 September as part of Scalarama.
Scalarama site
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