Tabloid

Tabloid (2011) is a jaunty and tremendously compelling documentary ostensibly detailing a lurid tale of sexual scandal that occurred in 1977, the picturesquely named affair of the “manacled Mormon.” Errol Morris, the director of the film, has persuaded Joyce McKinney, a brash, agelessly attractive and tirelessly garrulous witness, to discuss in the graphic detail her role in kidnapping, shackling, and subjecting a Mormon missionary to her sexual ministrations in a cottage in the Devonshire, England. Morris uses his Interrotron, a device for filming interviews, to stunning effect, wresting incredible testimony from the various surviving participants in the scandal, including Miss McKinney’s accomplices, two rival British tabloid editors, a homosexual apostate from the Mormon church who waxes eloquent on that cult’s more outré beliefs (magical chastity underwear and the Melchizedek Priesthood, for instance), as well as a jovial Korean doctor who specializes in cloning pet mastiffs. The film is very funny and mutates from a Rashomon-style inquiry into the facts associated with the so-called “shackled Mormon sex slave” into almost indescribably peculiar and mysterious territory. We see Joyce McKinney protesting that various pictures showing her naked and engaged as a dominatrix in a bondage-for-pay enterprise were photo-shopped: “Obviously, my head has been spliced onto some other woman’s naked body,” the loquacious Ms. McKinney, who was formerly Miss Wyoming, announces: “look at the chest,” she says, “I have a lot more up front than this model. Those breasts in the picture are nothing more than fried eggs, just fried eggs.” McKinney, who one tabloid editor says, is “barking mad” – claims to have been eviscerated by a dog maddened by an overdose of prednisone, asserting that she was saved from hideous death by her plucky hound named “Booger” an animal whose death rendered her so bereft that she had the little beast “cloned” (in Korea by the jovial mad scientist), resulting in five more little Boogers that she has dubbed Booger 1, Booger 2, etc. Miss McKinney remains startlingly seductive and persuasive, although she is clearly insane. And, in the end, the film leaves you with not just one, but with several insoluble mysteries: what really happened in that Devonshire cottage – the Mormon missionary’s silence on that subject actually enhances the enigma at the center of the film – was McKinney really a thriving LA dominatrix at the time of her adventure in England? Why did her accomplices follow her so enthusiastically on her mad project? What explains her attraction to the rather dull-looking and dowdy Mormon? It’s a bottomless puzzle only complicated by the surreal story about the cloned hound. My only criticism of this short and fascinating film is that Morris tricks out his fantastically compelling “talking head” interviews with various intentionally kitschy scenes interpolated from the 1950’s advertising and sex-hygiene films – it’s unnecessary; the stuff that he has captured in his interviews is more than enough to satisfy the audience and, although Morris has made some surprising finds in his objet trouve footage, those images tend to be a distraction from the extraordinary confessions and fibs told by his witnesses.