The legendary Errol Morris arrives at the London Film Festival with the wonderfully fun and trashy ‘Tabloid’. In 1977 Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming, was arrested in Devon for the kidnapping, rape, and false imprisonment of a slovenly, overweight Mormon missionary, Kirk Anderson. To this day, McKinney claims that they were lovers, and that she had flown to England to help her beau escape from the powerful grasp of the Church of the Latter Day Saints. The ensuing court case was something of a farce, as the stunning and voluptuous McKinney received thousands of fan letters from men begging her to kidnap and rape them. McKinney eventually escaped back to the USA, where she lived in obscurity for many years… until she became the first woman to have her pet dog cloned by a Korean doctor! McKinney found herself pasted across the front page of the world’s tabloids once again, as baffled editors joined the dots and realised that their favourite pin-up girl had once again handed them a gift of a story.
This is not so much a documentary about tabloids as a tabloid documentary. Headlines stamp themselves across the screen to highlight painfully obvious ‘hit’ words such as SCANDAL, LOVE, SEX, etc. At one point this has humorous consequences when our loopy heroine struggles to describe the wooden cabinet in her hotel room with a lock on it… MINIBAR appears silently on the screen, stamping out her tiny human voice with its typographic rigour. In an age where celebrity has become a bloated and meaningless concept, McKinney is a hysterical breath of fresh air – she might be completely insane, but no one can doubt that her motives were sincere, and that she committed these acts out of passion rather than a calculated attempt to reach the front page of the Daily Mirror.
The tabloid investigators and journalists are not vilified for their part in the story. They conducted themselves with all the greedy, immoral, selfishness we have come to associate with this valueless industry; yet somehow we forgive them because they seem as bewildered as everyone else. They are caught up in the whirlwind of McKinney’s story, and it is difficult to blame them without secretly feeling like a hypocritic.
This is not a moralistic film in any sense – Morris is far too intelligent a filmmaker to bother ascribing blame or innocence in this debauched scenario. Joy is not portrayed as a mad woman or a martyr, but she is clearly a bit of both. And as our image of her skips between innocent martyr, malicious spinster, passionate romantic, meek victim, etc. we come to recognise the essential shortcoming of ‘tabloid’ reporting… there are no simple answers in real life, and things only appear black and white when they appear below a red banner.
This is not so much a documentary about tabloids as a tabloid documentary. Headlines stamp themselves across the screen to highlight painfully obvious ‘hit’ words such as SCANDAL, LOVE, SEX, etc. At one point this has humorous consequences when our loopy heroine struggles to describe the wooden cabinet in her hotel room with a lock on it… MINIBAR appears silently on the screen, stamping out her tiny human voice with its typographic rigour. In an age where celebrity has become a bloated and meaningless concept, McKinney is a hysterical breath of fresh air – she might be completely insane, but no one can doubt that her motives were sincere, and that she committed these acts out of passion rather than a calculated attempt to reach the front page of the Daily Mirror.
The tabloid investigators and journalists are not vilified for their part in the story. They conducted themselves with all the greedy, immoral, selfishness we have come to associate with this valueless industry; yet somehow we forgive them because they seem as bewildered as everyone else. They are caught up in the whirlwind of McKinney’s story, and it is difficult to blame them without secretly feeling like a hypocritic.
This is not a moralistic film in any sense – Morris is far too intelligent a filmmaker to bother ascribing blame or innocence in this debauched scenario. Joy is not portrayed as a mad woman or a martyr, but she is clearly a bit of both. And as our image of her skips between innocent martyr, malicious spinster, passionate romantic, meek victim, etc. we come to recognise the essential shortcoming of ‘tabloid’ reporting… there are no simple answers in real life, and things only appear black and white when they appear below a red banner.
Posts
No comments :
Post a Comment