Errol
Morris' Tabloid: A study in one-dimensional
editorializing
By K. M. Zwick
By K. M. Zwick
(Originally appeared in The Weekly Digest in September 2011)
It is July 30th. I just came from a screening of Tabloid at Chicago's Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema.
Here's the very-short gist: In 1977, Joyce McKinney, a young 20-something American former beauty pageant queen, traveled to England with a bodyguard, a pilot, and a male friend to help her (this next part is up for debate) kidnap a Mormon man - Kirk Anderson - with whom she professed being in love, take him to a "love cottage" in Devon, tie him to a bed and rape (or have consensual sex with) him. Then, Mr. Anderson escaped (or was let go as he wished), went to the police, reported he'd been kidnapped and raped, and Ms. McKinney was arrested, as was her male friend accomplice. The British tabloids - most notably The Daily Express and The Daily Mirror - had a field day with this odd tale, and Ms. McKinney, apparently, lapped it all up and fanned the flame of the tabloid passion for her sad and bizarre story, becoming an overnight celebrity for a brief period of time. She was released on bail, fled the country back to the U.S. and has been living in the U.S. ever since.
I should mention that just as one tabloid built her up by printing a story “in her own words,” another tabloid tore her down, exposing her as an alleged call girl/dominatrix and plastering its widely read pages with partially and totally nude "found" photos of Ms. McKinney. It was after this unrepentantly scathing series that Ms. McKinney's life appeared to be essentially beyond repair.
Mr. Morris' film relies heavily on the talking head of Ms. McKinney herself – now in her fifties - as well as those of Kent Gavin and Peter Tory, the two then-tabloidists from the British papers mentioned above, one of her unknowing accomplices Jackson Shaw (who quit the gig before the kidnapping actually occurred), and one contemporary young ex-Mormon radio host, to tell the details of this complicated and titillating tale.
However, despite the engrossing first-hand accounts, this film should decidedly not be thought of as a well-rounded 'documentary' plumbing an interesting subject and a strange series of events in the '70s. Morris editorializes all along the way, openly mocking Mormonism and McKinney herself while positioning Gevin and Tory as the ultimate in trustworthy sources of truth-seeking. Morris consistently uses these two men to shed light on McKinney's outlandish behavior and her supposed history of sexual advertising, juxtaposing their stories with McKinney's tearful rendering of her albeit crazed love for Anderson.
That Morris chose to use only these tabloidists to counter McKinney's story reveals a fundamental flaw of this film: it utterly lacks context.
Ms.
McKinney's decision to chase Kirk Anderson across the world to kidnap (or
"rescue," by her account) him, with wedding bands already engraved
and an accomplice - only to tie him up in a cottage for three days engaging in
sexual acts that were potentially not consensual - did not erupt fully formed
from within a social, familial, and psychological vacuum. Yet Morris feeds the
audience the line that it mostly did.
The context that Morris does offer is lackluster and one-dimensional. He lets the viewer know McKinney was a beauty pageant queen in a flimsy attempt to suggest that her self-obsession and good looks are the major explanations for her deranged behavior. He leaves out any potentially relevant social context of the times. There were many fascinating things happening in mid-'70s America that might have been related to Ms. McKinney's story. But one of these is the sexual revolution and its aftermath, the budding confusion and glee around women's sexual liberty progressing in America, and the impact that may have had on women McKinney's age straddling the divide between their parents' more repressed generation and this new one of an albeit somewhat flawed invitation to open sexual exploration, radical public exhibitionism, and self-empowerment through sexual agency. There is an incredible amount of social context to draw on to at least partially unpack the climate in which Ms. McKinney grew up, to make no mention here of race, class, and the part of the country she was raised in, all of which may have had an impact on the choices that McKinney was making as a 20-something stalker. In the film, there were no sociologists, media impact experts, psychologists or feminists remarking on an understanding of Ms. McKinney in her time, leaving the viewer to believe that this allegedly crazy sex-obsessed woman was an individual without community, culture, family or status to influence any of her choices.
Morris leaves out any exploration of McKinney’s childhood and how she was raised. A woman as possessive singularly obsessed and as pathologically anxiety-free about it as Ms. McKinney appeared to be did not come out of the womb that way. There was no mention in the film of how she may have been treated in her home, what her relationship with her parents was like, and no information provided that the three primary subjects (all subjectively involved in the events in question) did not tell.
Don't get me wrong - it is not my desire to excuse what is apparently very unhealthy, harmful and potentially criminal behavior on the part of Ms. McKinney by seeking to contextualize her. However, the lack of any serious consideration of contextualization from a seasoned documentarian like Errol Morris gives me pregnant pause regarding Mr. Morris' agenda in the making of this film.
No doubt, Morris is an exceptional story teller with his editing, directing and multi-media choices, slicing in photos of times gone by, cutesy vintage pics of darling deco damsels, and clips from old films to illustrate what is essentially one woman telling her story and three guys making fun of her. Morris seems like the fourth.
Morris' title - Tabloid - suggested to me I might get a taste of a critical exposé of tabloid culture, which includes the readership as much as it includes the tabloidists, and how it ruined one woman's life (not to mention Mr. Anderson's).
Instead, this film is itself an extension of that tabloid culture: it takes every shot it can at Ms. McKinney, at her expense. That Morris spends the last 20 minutes of the film showing us how much she loves her dog and how she had him cloned again seemed to suggest a "laughability" about her character, further dehumanizing her rather than contextualizing her. By that point in the film, I was so fed up with the sensationalist, one-dimensional style of Morris' conveyance, I felt incredible sympathy for a woman who appeared quite sad and likely had been from a very early time in her life. Women who are healthy, self-possessed, happy and believe they have viable choices in life for fulfillment do not kidnap Mormons in England and then gleefully create a tell-all of their entire sad and confusing lives to become one-hit celebrity wonders who are discarded just as quickly as they are clung to by the media and total strangers soliciting them for sexual favors.
Morris' other major failing in this film is the dismissive manner in which he approaches the alleged rape of Mr. Anderson. Besides a one-liner from McKinney in which she claims you cannot rape a man, Mr. Morris does not touch that incredibly painful topic with a ten-foot boom mic pole. The fact that the possible reality of this story - that Ms. McKinney seems a disturbed individual, who may actually have kidnapped an unassuming man she was obsessed with, tied him to a bed, and raped him for three days - became a mere backdrop to the tabloid-esque laugh fest at Ms. McKinney's retelling that Mr. Morris chose his film to be is perhaps the gravest of missteps. In this, Mr. Morris is no better than the men at The Express and The Mirror. He is feeding his viewers the lines they want to hear to make them laugh, drop jaws, point fingers and snicker at a woman we will never know personally and about whom we know nothing deep, nuanced or intimate, because Mr. Morris chose to turn his head the other way and give his wink aside to his audience instead.
The context that Morris does offer is lackluster and one-dimensional. He lets the viewer know McKinney was a beauty pageant queen in a flimsy attempt to suggest that her self-obsession and good looks are the major explanations for her deranged behavior. He leaves out any potentially relevant social context of the times. There were many fascinating things happening in mid-'70s America that might have been related to Ms. McKinney's story. But one of these is the sexual revolution and its aftermath, the budding confusion and glee around women's sexual liberty progressing in America, and the impact that may have had on women McKinney's age straddling the divide between their parents' more repressed generation and this new one of an albeit somewhat flawed invitation to open sexual exploration, radical public exhibitionism, and self-empowerment through sexual agency. There is an incredible amount of social context to draw on to at least partially unpack the climate in which Ms. McKinney grew up, to make no mention here of race, class, and the part of the country she was raised in, all of which may have had an impact on the choices that McKinney was making as a 20-something stalker. In the film, there were no sociologists, media impact experts, psychologists or feminists remarking on an understanding of Ms. McKinney in her time, leaving the viewer to believe that this allegedly crazy sex-obsessed woman was an individual without community, culture, family or status to influence any of her choices.
Morris leaves out any exploration of McKinney’s childhood and how she was raised. A woman as possessive singularly obsessed and as pathologically anxiety-free about it as Ms. McKinney appeared to be did not come out of the womb that way. There was no mention in the film of how she may have been treated in her home, what her relationship with her parents was like, and no information provided that the three primary subjects (all subjectively involved in the events in question) did not tell.
Don't get me wrong - it is not my desire to excuse what is apparently very unhealthy, harmful and potentially criminal behavior on the part of Ms. McKinney by seeking to contextualize her. However, the lack of any serious consideration of contextualization from a seasoned documentarian like Errol Morris gives me pregnant pause regarding Mr. Morris' agenda in the making of this film.
No doubt, Morris is an exceptional story teller with his editing, directing and multi-media choices, slicing in photos of times gone by, cutesy vintage pics of darling deco damsels, and clips from old films to illustrate what is essentially one woman telling her story and three guys making fun of her. Morris seems like the fourth.
Morris' title - Tabloid - suggested to me I might get a taste of a critical exposé of tabloid culture, which includes the readership as much as it includes the tabloidists, and how it ruined one woman's life (not to mention Mr. Anderson's).
Instead, this film is itself an extension of that tabloid culture: it takes every shot it can at Ms. McKinney, at her expense. That Morris spends the last 20 minutes of the film showing us how much she loves her dog and how she had him cloned again seemed to suggest a "laughability" about her character, further dehumanizing her rather than contextualizing her. By that point in the film, I was so fed up with the sensationalist, one-dimensional style of Morris' conveyance, I felt incredible sympathy for a woman who appeared quite sad and likely had been from a very early time in her life. Women who are healthy, self-possessed, happy and believe they have viable choices in life for fulfillment do not kidnap Mormons in England and then gleefully create a tell-all of their entire sad and confusing lives to become one-hit celebrity wonders who are discarded just as quickly as they are clung to by the media and total strangers soliciting them for sexual favors.
Morris' other major failing in this film is the dismissive manner in which he approaches the alleged rape of Mr. Anderson. Besides a one-liner from McKinney in which she claims you cannot rape a man, Mr. Morris does not touch that incredibly painful topic with a ten-foot boom mic pole. The fact that the possible reality of this story - that Ms. McKinney seems a disturbed individual, who may actually have kidnapped an unassuming man she was obsessed with, tied him to a bed, and raped him for three days - became a mere backdrop to the tabloid-esque laugh fest at Ms. McKinney's retelling that Mr. Morris chose his film to be is perhaps the gravest of missteps. In this, Mr. Morris is no better than the men at The Express and The Mirror. He is feeding his viewers the lines they want to hear to make them laugh, drop jaws, point fingers and snicker at a woman we will never know personally and about whom we know nothing deep, nuanced or intimate, because Mr. Morris chose to turn his head the other way and give his wink aside to his audience instead.
Thank you to Marjorie Jolles, PhD,
for her contributions to the discussion on this topic.
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