ClobberBlog | Mormonism, Evangelical Christianity

I finally caught up with Errol Morris’ Tabloid (2010), a documentary about Joyce Bernann McKinney and the 1977 “Manacled Mormon” case in the United Kingdom. The topic is a fond one for me since it provided the fodder for some of myearliest posts as a blogger and earned me my first angry comment. (I have no way to prove it, but I now believe “eb” was McKinney herself.) Morris decided to make Tabloid after McKinney resurfaced in 2008 with news stories about her cloned dog.

The story goes that McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming with Christian roots, met Kirk Anderson in Utah in the mid-1970s, where they had some kind of a romance. Anderson left the United States (and ostensibly, McKinney) to serve a Mormon mission in the United Kingdom. McKinney and a male acquaintance, Keith May (d. 2004), hired a pilot to fly a private airplane to follow Anderson to England and track him down. They found him on the doorstep of an LDS meetinghouse where May, posing as a potential convert, approached Anderson.

At this point the accounts diverge dramatically. According to McKinney, Anderson willingly got into a car with her and May, drove 200 miles away to a cottage in the English countryside, and had consensual sex with her for three days. They returned to London to get married only to find that Anderson had been reported as a missing person. After departing from McKinney and May, Anderson claimed to his ecclesiastical leaders and the police that he had been abducted, taken to the cottage, tied to a bed, and forced to have sex with McKinney. Between the Wyoming beauty queen with the eccentric personality, the Mormon missionary, the bondage, and the curious claim of male rape, it was the stuff of British tabloid dreams.

Tabloid’s biggest asset is that McKinney herself was a willing and eager participant. Much of the movie consists of simply letting her tell her story and not questioning or interrupting her, even when she’s obviously lying. Watching her on camera for the first time, I can see how the world was mesmerized by her when the scandal first broke. The years may have ebbed away at her looks and her beauty queen figure, but there’s still a certain magnetism behind that Southern drawl as she punctuates her account with jokes and quotations of who said what. It may be the product of an unreliable narrator, but it’s still an intimate and intriguing look at the events that transpired.

Other clues to the puzzle are provided by Peter Tory, “Gossip Columnist, Daily Express,” and Jackson Shaw, the pilot who flew McKinney across the Atlantic before pulling out of her operation. Shaw especially provides a counterpoint to McKinney’s account, explaining that he abandoned the operation when he learned that Anderson was not being held by the Mormons against his will, and when McKinney revealed that she was packing a bottle of chloroform along with a fake gun (“for protection”). The film later interviews Kent Gavin, the photographer for the Daily Mirror who dug up McKinney’s past as an escort girl in addition to a windfall of nude photos of her. McKinney claims that the photos were photoshopped, but the film displays quite a few of them—some of them in positions that would have been difficult to photoshop. Gavin snorts at the photoshop charges, claiming that the Daily Mirror had the negatives of some of them, though they’ve since been lost.

Despite the conflicting accounts, interesting corroborations occur. For example, McKinney insists that she was a virgin until she had sex with Anderson, and that she only accomplished that with the aid of a Christian sex book for newlywed virgins. Gavin discusses how he got his lead on the nude photos of McKinney from an ex-boyfriend. When he asked the ex-boyfriend if he’d ever had sex with McKinney, the ex replied, “NO ONE has sex with Joyce.” Gavin believes that McKinney spent time working as an escort, posing nude for photos, and offering oral sex to clients, yet he still provides a detail that would corroborate McKinney’s own claim that she saved her virginity for Anderson.

The film moves at a brisk pace and, thanks to McKinney’s past as a beauty queen, Morris has plenty of visual material to work with as the interviewees give their accounts. The editing is punchy and playful. Morris also managed to dig up some interesting documents, like the ad McKinney placed in the local newspaper when she was seeking a pilot (“help a lovely fox fulfill a sexual fantasy”) and the ad where she allegedly advertised call girl services under the pseudonym “Joey.” Where no documents or video footage or photographs are available, Morris tends to rely on scenes from old films depicting similar events to what the interviewees are describing.

I would rate the film as having two weaknesses. The first is that it isn’t particularly fair to Mormonism. The main voices on Mormon belief and practice are McKinney, who spouts the c-word frequently and describes Mormonism as a dark and menacing presence, and ex-Mormon and gay rights activist Troy Williams. It isn’t so much that they get things wrong as that they tend to describe LDS beliefs and culture in the worst possible light. Talking to a practicing Mormon or someone who is more sympathetic to the LDS church would have provided much-needed balance to what McKinney and Williams have to say. The film also uses clips from the animated segment of the anti-Mormon film The Godmakers when Williams and McKinney are describing LDS beliefs, and I wish I were making that up. This may not impact the entertainment value of the film, but it does impact the “fair and balanced documentary” aspect.

But by far the biggest weakness of the film is that it neglects to spend much time on Kirk Anderson’s side of the story. Anderson is seen only in a scant number of photographs and some very brief footage of him from the 70s and 80s. While the film notes at the end that Anderson declined to be interviewed—and one can hardly blame him for avoiding this mess (and by extension, McKinney)—I find it difficult to believe that Morris was unable to locateanyone to interview that could have provided more insight into Anderson’s claims. This leaves the audience with the conundrum of reconstructing a potential sexual assault victim’s plight from the words of his attacker and a few bemused, unbelieving onlookers. Morris could have done better than this.

Weak points aside, Tabloid still stands as one of the most enjoyable documentaries I have seen. McKinney states at one point in the film, “You know, you can tell a lie long enough—until you believe it.” She means for it to refer to Kirk Anderson’s sexual assault claims against her, but it’s a double-edged sword. Whatever the truth of what happened in that English cottage in 1977, Tabloid drips with lies told for so long that the tellers have begun believing them. Who’s lying, who’s telling the truth, and does it matter—so long as we’re entertained?