Tabloid: You'd Hardly Beleive It, Cause She Doesn't Either

Tabloid

Written and Directed By: Errol Morris

Featuring: Joyce McKinney

Director of Photography: Robert Chappell, Editor: Grant Surmi, Original Music: John Kusiak

Rated: R for many nasty things you’ll be dying to hear about.

            It comes as no surprise early in the latest Errol Morris film Tabloid that its main subject, Joyce McKinney, used to be a beauty pageant. While now in her 50s and lacking some of the beauty of her youth, Ms. McKinney still has the spirit, charisma, and energy that defined her younger era. And just by watching her, you get the sense that Ms. McKinney cannot do anything but perform (as she did recently at a screening of the film where she rallied against it). She loves her stories, telling it her way, and wrapping you up in what she sees as a love story, and Mr. Morris sees as darkly comic horror.

            And thus we have Tabloid, a wildly outrageous and highly comical flick from the master documentarian. Mr. Morris’ last two films took on bold and dark subjects; The Fog of War put former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara front and center to defend his actions in Vietnam, and Standard Operating Procedure challenged the way we perceive the atrocities of war, particularly the photos from Abu Ghraib. The calm severity that dominated the tone of those previous features has dissipated from Mr. Morris’ palette, as he sweeps into the black hole that is the highly absurd story of Joyce McKinney—one that may lack the psychological or political depth of his best work, but is his most frothy and entertaining docs yet.

EXCLUSIVE: Subject of New Errol Morris Film Claims Fabrication

Joyce McKinney, in blue, talks about Errol Morris's Tabloid

UPDATE (6/28/2011): Mark Lipson, a producer for Tabloid (as well as a few other Errol Moris films, including The Thin Blue Line), has responded to the story as told below. Lipson notes that Showtime is indeed a partner on the film, remarking, "Showtime is in fact a partner in the enterprise of Tabloid." As for the other allegations, Lipson prefered to stay on the sidelines for now. "I agree at some point it would be worth addressing all the various questions. But for now.. certainly for the next couple of months, I would like the movie to speak for itself."

Does this mean that some of the movie is in fact fabricated? My gut says if yes, only by a small bit, as Morris' film is about the impossibility of ever reaching the truth. My take on the story is that McKinney simply beleived that having seen how Morris has created sympathetic portraits of people like Robert McNamara in The Fog of War or the soldiers from Abu Ghraid in Standard Operating Procedure that she would get off with the same sort of nice light on her. The film is somewhat sympathetic in the end anyways, though it certainly allows the other side to have its way as well. Thus, only time will tell if McKinney will have her way.

THE ORIGINAL STORY

            Audiences were in laughter and applause tonight at the Museum of Modern Art for an early screening of Errol Morris’s latest film, Tabloid, but they got a second story after the film had ended. Tabloid is the latest documentary from the filmmaker behind The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War. It follows the strange story of Joyce McKinney, who snuck into tonight’s screening in New York, lambasting the film’s validity during the credits and beyond tonight.

Tabloid recounts the story of McKinney, who followed her Mormon boyfriend from Utah, who she believed had been brainwashed by the Mormon Church and sent to the United Kingdom. The girl went with a couple companions to England and stole him back, and then claimed to have three days of passionate sex in a Southern English cottage, some of which included ropes and chains. But Morris shows the sides from others involved in the story, including the reporters that made her a tabloid sensation, which instead reveal kidnap, rape, and other kinky stuff. McKinney escaped charges in court by fleeing to the United States while on bail, but remains a tabloid sensation for years to come.

The Question Man Questions Our Intellegence

            Errol Morris is one of those guys that has an interest in the most unique of subjects. Take a look at any of his documentaries—Gates of Heaven follows the strange owners of a pet cemetery, The Thin Blue Line is an entire documentary made to prove a random convicted man innocent, and The Fog of War put one of the most controversial figures of US history front and center. Even his documentary on the Abu Grahib scandal was not about the atrocities, but the nature of photography and how they distort reality. Morris asks questions, and a lot of them, because he’s interested in things that most people have no idea about.

            Which brings us to Morris’s latest work: a five part essay in the New York Times on our ability to not know things, or the scary thing that he describes as the “unknown unknowns” (a phrase taken from Donald Rumsfeld, but with admiration instead of the condemnation the press gave him). Morris began by researching Dunning-Kruger Effect, an idea that is so obvious that…well…its stupid. The basic premise is this: the awareness of your intelligence correlates to your actual intelligence, meaning if you are smart, you are aware of what you don’t know (Socrates says in Plato's Apology that true wisdom is admitting one knows nothing. When you are stupid, you are completely unaware that you are actually making unintelligent decisions. As Cornell Professor Dave Dunning puts it in an interview with Morris, “If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent.”

            In the essays—now three parts in (which you can read here, here, and here)—Morris explores different types of anosognosia—a disability in which we are unable to become aware of a specific disability we have—and while it may not be a film, the findings are often funny, strange, and always insightful.