Those who are unschooled in the ways of our cultural élites may
find it somewhat strange that Errol Morris (The Thin Blue
Line, Mr.
Death, The
Fog of War) has titled his new documentary,
Tabloid. I hope you will not think it presumptuous of me
if I undertake to explain what I take to be his thinking in doing
so. The movie tells the story of one Joyce McKinney, a former
beauty queen from North Carolina who was also blessed with spirit
and determination but, alas, not very good judgment. She briefly
became a tabloid sensation in Britain back in the 1970s — I was
living there at the time and remember it well — on account of
having (allegedly) kidnapped her Mormon lover, Kirk Anderson, who
had left her back in the U.S. when he went to do his missionary
service in the U.K. According to the tabloids, once she had
abducted Kirk with the help of one or more hired goons, she whisked
him off to an isolated cottage in Devon where she kept him as a
“sex slave” who was “spread-eagled” and “chained” to the bed until
he somehow managed to escape and alert the authorities.
It was, as one of Mr. Morris’s interviewees put it, “the
perfect tabloid story,” and this is borne out by the probability
that “sex slave” and “spread-eagled” and “chained” were all most
likely journalistic inventions. Likewise the pleasingly
alliterative “Manacled Mormon,” as Mr. Anderson was known to the
British papers during his brief period of notoriety. Miss McKinney,
not surprisingly, says to Mr. Morris’s camera that the whole thing
was pretty much a tabloid invention and that it is not possible for
a woman to rape a man. Employing a now-venerable witticism, she
says that it would be like putting a marshmallow in a parking
meter. According to Mr. Morris’s lengthy interviews with her and
others, there seems to be some doubt as to whether there was even
any penetrative coitus between them.
Among the others interviewed for the movie are two of the
tabloid journalists who were most involved in the Manacled Mormon
story at the time, Peter Tory of the Daily
Express and Kent Gavin of the Daily Mirror, to
explain their roles in it and that of their papers. Mr. Tory and
the Express were involved with Miss McKinney herself, paid
her money for exclusive rights to her story and did a great deal to
protect her from the law, curiosity seekers and, of course, other
tabloids, while Mr. Gavin and the Mirror instead
cultivated a relationship with a former boyfriend who provided them
with photos and other evidence suggesting that Miss McKinney had at
one point earned her living as a nude model and prostitute, though
perhaps one whose sexual services were unusually limited.
Naturally, all that made the perfection of the tabloid story even
perfecter.
But neither these two gentlemen nor any of the others that
Mr. Morris managed to interview are half as interesting as Ms.
McKinney herself who, in presenting her side of the story, is much
less interested in her treatment by the British media of the 1970s
than Mr. Morris is — or, I might add, than most people would be
after so many years have passed. As a result, he himself sometimes
seems to be assuming the role of the sensationalizing tabloids,
although he would doubtless argue that he has taken more pains than
they ever did to get the story right. He is thus able to justify
the expenditure of so much time and energy on a trashy bit of
30-year-old gossip on the grounds that it is somehow a critique of
the others who have told the story rather than a competing
narrative to theirs. People like him need to dip themselves in the
prophylactic waters of ironic distance in this way in order to
justify to themselves their slumming with us intellectually
challenged proles who read stories like Miss McKinney’s merely
because we are interested in them.
What brought this extraordinary woman to the attention of
Mr. Morris was the completely unrelated story of her seeking out a
Korean geneticist named Jin Han Hong to have her deceased pit-bull
Booger cloned. Though she used a different first name, she was soon
identified as the same Miss McKinney who had figured in the British
tabloid scandal all those years ago. Mr. Morris saw an opportunity
to replay it with the dog-cloning as a satisfying coda, even a way
of cementing Joyce McKinney’s place in folk history. Joyce herself,
who appears admirably uninterested in the kind of celebrity Mr.
Morris has to offer her, tells his camera that “I didn’t see any
connection between cloning dogs and a 30 year old sex-in-chains
story.” But the kind of people who watch movie documentaries will
readily see it. It’s that tabloid touch which allows them to enjoy
her account of her life while feeling superior to her.
And not just to her either. For it is a part of Mr.
Morris’s technique to use a simulated home movie screen to show
snatches of contemporary films, commercials, cartoons and what
appear to be actual home movies as if through a porthole in the
middle of the big screen. He does this, I would say, in order to
make Joyce McKinney stand for a whole vanished world — that of
what Philip Larkin called “those old-type natural fouled-up guys”
like Larkin himself who had not the benefit of the easy moral
certainties of the post-1970s generation. In other words, this
picture belongs to the genre, as someone once said of Mad
Men, of “now we know better” — at least if you assume that
the “we” includes all those not a part of that tabloid,
trailer-park, redneck world where people are still allowed to be
fouled up. I don’t know if Ms. McKinney’s IQ is, as she proclaims
it to be 168, but she is at least smart enough to have figured out
that, however genuine she may seem before Mr. Morris’s camera, he
is making fun of her for the benefit of those who, like himself,
will look down on her. Accordingly, she has taken to protesting
against him and his film at festival screenings. Not that it will
do her any good, but more power to her.
