Tabloid

Director Errol Morris
Country USA

Unless you believe in reincarnation, this is your one chance to live a life your friends and family will recount to nervous laughter at your funeral. If you’re Joyce McKinney those tales will include kidnapping, manacling and sexually ravishing an overweight, brainwashed Mormon, hopping between continents disguised as a nun, a Mexican bandito and Cher to escape the law and papparazzi, cloning the dog that saved your life from your other dog, and generally living the life of a unicorn. What’s more, you’ll do all this before you’re fifty so you can appear in the documentary of your life.

In 1977 McKinney wet the pants of countless tabloid editors with her ongoing farce. The country was enthralled and appalled in equal measure. Tabloid, a pacey, racy, relentlessly funny documentary features McKinney in person, delighted to have another streak in the spotlight, and completely failing to realise she is the butt of every joke, as well as several of the original players of this epic absurdity, including journalists who helped stir the pot.

She is clearly more bananas than a monkey’s buffet, and I felt sorry for her, especially given the monstrous cynicism and malicious sneering of the journalists reliving their favourite headlines. On the other hand, and crucially, McKinney did all of this to herself, and here she is spinning a fresh shitstorm. She hasn’t learned a single lesson, despite claiming a 168 IQ (assuming IQs actually mean anything). However, one definition of genius is the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts or beliefs in your head. Perhaps the flip side of genius is to hold no contradictory notions. When the papers realised that the Skiing Down Everest With a Carnation Up Her Nose KcKinney of ’77 and the Cloned Puppy Quintuplet McKinney of ’08 were one and the same and resumed hounding her, McKinney shrugs. “I really don’t see the connection”.

Thank goodness. It is so refreshing to have media scandals reaffirm the beauty of human stupidity rather than getting bogged down with reiterating how pointless it is to have faith in anything.