Illustration from a US postage stamp titled "Family Planning", 1972
Documentarian Errol Morris is interested in interesting people - the majority of his films (and all the best ones) focus on a single exceptional individual or a small group of fascinating eccentrics. So it's no surprise that Morris was drawn to Joyce McKinney - she's a former beauty queen, bondage model, tabloid scandal star, and cloning-technology pioneer. However, this is the first of Morris's movies where I find him to have focused TOO much on a single individual - for better or worse, Tabloid is an engrossing, often hilarious, and occasionally frustrating portrait of Joyce McKinney.
In 1977, McKinney went to England looking for Kirk Anderson, a young man she'd previously had a relationship with. McKinney found Anderson working as a Mormon missionary in Surrey. She took Anderson to a secluded farmhouse for several days, after which they went to London together. McKinney had been reported missing in the interim period, and he subsequently contacted authorities, telling them that he'd been kidnapped and tied to a bed for three days, molested repeatedly by McKinney. McKinney was arrested, and the case became a media phenomenon, commonly known as the "Mormon Sex in Chains Case".
The problem with Tabloid's retelling of the case itself is that Morris is only peripherally interested in it, as it relates to McKinney's life experience and worldview. Few others are given any chance to weigh in on the case - in addition to lengthy monologues provided by McKinney herself, Morris interviews one of McKinney's accomplices (the only reliable witness provided in the documentary), two tabloid reporters, and a gay-rights advocate who was a Mormon missionary when he was younger. The case is a classic "he said/she said", but Morris never really provides a run-down of the matter's objective facts. He also seems quite uninterested with the whole "Mormon" aspect of the case, with an adversarial former Mormon being the Church's only representative speaking to the "Mormon perspective". When McKinney gets to the part in her story where she fled England after getting out on bail, Morris drops the kidnapping case entirely from the narrative, only mentioning the case's final disposition in the film's postscript.
If you just let go of the idea of the "sex in chains" case being the movie's premise, there's plenty to enjoy in examining Joyce McKinney as a person. I'd guess that Morris avoids having credible counter-arguments to McKinney's wild claims and versions of events because it would become too easy to dismiss McKinney entirely - it's much more fun to let her indict herself by revealing, a bit at a time, just how disconnected from reality she is. Her eloquence is only matched by her lack of self-awareness - I could listen to her delf-deluded chatter at great length (which is lucky because that's what Tabloid is). At a certain point, though, you have to admit that Joyce McKinney is no Robert McNamara - she's a very sad lady with a tenuous grasp on reality as others experience it. That's what gives Tabloid a slightly seedy, exploitative feel to it that it wouldn't have if it were actually more of an examination of the famous incident or the questionable ethics of the tabloid media. The movie itself is a little too "tabloid" for its own good.
"Tied Up in Chain" by the Chills
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