Errol Morris’s Tabloid invites audi­ence participation.

The audi­ence is tasked with the job of ques­tion­ing the subject’s reli­a­bil­ity as a nar­ra­tor.  Sub­jec­tiv­ity emerges as an inevitable theme through­out Mor­ris’ body of work as a nat­ural exten­sion of the Inter­ro­tron for­mat, where the sub­ject deliv­ers the nar­ra­tive in their own words while look­ing directly into the cam­era lens, mak­ing eye con­tact with the audi­ence.  Part of Morris’s bril­liance is his con­fi­dence in the audience’s nat­ural skepticism.

Take a lesser doc­u­men­tary for instance, Jesus Camp, whose mak­ers had the good for­tune to hap­pen upon some great copy: fun­da­men­tal­ist zealots indoc­tri­nat­ing chil­dren to pray for George Bush and con­demn Harry Pot­ter as lib­eral Wic­can pro­pa­ganda.  That footage could’ve edited itself.  But rather than let the viewer draw its own con­clu­sions about the moral ambi­gu­ity of forc­ing dogma on impres­sion­able minds, the mak­ers chose to point their cam­eras at an out­raged mod­er­ate Chris­t­ian talk radio host who expressed exactly what’s wrong with forc­ing dogma on impres­sion­able minds.  The work is prac­ti­cally done for us.

Mor­ris offers no such easy dis­am­bigua­tion.  In Tabloid, we are pre­sented with two sides of a story.  On the one hand, we have Joyce McK­in­ney, who allegedly kid­napped a Mor­mon mis­sion­ary with whom she was obsessed, shack­led him to a bed in the Eng­lish coun­try­side, and forced him to eat southern-fried chicken and fuck seven times over the course of three days.  Accord­ing to Joyce, she was only try­ing to depro­gram the Mor­mon brain­wash from his mind with sex.  The hand­cuffs were just a cura­tive for the impo­tency. She fondly rec­ol­lects the long week­end like it was her hon­ey­moon.  Even if we give her the ben­e­fit of the doubt on that one, she doesn’t make much of a case for why she flew to Eng­land in a pri­vate plane, armed with a fake gun and a bot­tle of chloroform.

On the other hand, we have two deli­ciously unapolo­getic rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the British gut­ter press who cov­ered the story for the Daily Express and the Daily Mir­ror.  To hear them tell it, well, who gives a god­damn if the facts were straight?  This story had a rib­bon on it.  And that’s even before she genet­i­cally cloned her puppy.

So through door num­ber one we have a woman whose idea of a hon­ey­moon involves forcible restraint, and through door num­ber two we have the paparazzi, the only pro­fes­sion on earth that scores below politi­cians on the trust-o-meter.  Where’s a lev­el­headed radio com­men­ta­tor when you need one?

The sub­jects them­selves acknowl­edge the view­ers’ dilemma.  In one story, she’s a saint. In the other, she’s a whore.  The real­ity was prob­a­bly some­where in-between.  Prob­lem is, we don’t know what really hap­pened.  And Errol Mor­ris spins that prob­lem into a great cin­e­matic riddle.

      

But you knew that already.  This isn’t the direc­tor of Heaven’s Gate, it’s the direc­tor of Gates of Heaven.   If he ever makes a bad film I’ll eat my shoe.  You don’t need me to tell you that the sky is blue, some­day you’re gonna die, and Errol Mor­ris is a genius.  I do, how­ever, have some­thing worth shar­ing about Joyce McKinney.

Early in the film, McK­in­ney says, “I never saw much of the world, until I went to Utah.”  To the audi­ence with which I screen the film, at the Museum of Mod­ern Art in Man­hat­tan, this is funny.

The rolling guf­faws are so intense they drowned out the next two lines of dia­logue.  Every­thing my con­ser­v­a­tive uncle had to say about my adopted city is revealed to be true.  We really are con­de­scend­ing.  We really are evil.  And I’m no bet­ter, because I catch myself laugh­ing at McK­in­ney a moment later when she extolled the virtues of beauty pageantry.

I men­tion this because Mor­ris has a rep­u­ta­tion in some cir­cles for hav­ing fun at the expense of his sub­jects.  He lets his sub­jects squirm in the hot seat and dig them­selves as deep a hole as they can for the express pur­pose of prov­ing his intel­lec­tual and moral supe­ri­or­ity over them.  This doesn’t apply to Robert Mac­Na­mara (whom some say Mor­ris let off the hook) or Stephen Hawk­ings, because in those films Errol Mor­ris is telling us that he finds his intel­lec­tual equals at the pin­na­cles of our soci­ety.  But when we bear wit­ness to Fred Leuchter’s stu­pe­fy­ing anti-Semitism in Mis­ter Death, or Rick Rossner’s com­pul­sive need to engage in do-overs in One in a Mil­lion Tril­lion, we are sup­posed to know that they’re no match for the man on the other side of the lens.  In other words, Errol Mor­ris wants you to know that he has a big dick.

Pro­po­nents of this the­ory will find no rejoin­der in Tabloid.   With the excep­tion of the South Korean genetic biol­o­gist that elec­troshocks canine skin cells into spon­ta­neous life, Errol Mor­ris prob­a­bly is smarter than every­one on screen.  He prob­a­bly knows it, too.  To make mat­ters worse, he has made a very funny film about these peo­ple rather than a sober case study.  He’s telling you it’s okay to laugh at them because he’s laugh­ing at them, too.

I don’t buy that bull­shit.  Mor­ris shows bot­tom­less empa­thy for his sub­jects.  When Rick Ross­ner explains that he hasn’t dropped his com­plaint about being given a bum ques­tion on Who Wants to be a Mil­lion­aire?,  Mor­ris doesn’t pass judg­ment when he asks, “Why not give it up?”  It seems like he wants to under­stand why Ross­ner is tor­tur­ing him­self.  He doesn’t even seem to hate Leuchter for being a Holo­caust denier, and you are allowed to hate some­one for being a Holo­caust denier.

The point of Mis­ter Death, One in a Mil­lion Tril­lion, and, I would argue, Tabloid, is to show you how to empathize with some­one that seems below your thresh­old for empathy.

So the lights come up.

The way to the exit is blocked.  It seems the entire crowd has grav­i­tated towards a large blue sin­gu­lar­ity towards the back of the the­ater.  Then, faintly:  “I didn’t want you to rec­og­nize me when I came in so I wore a pair of sun­glasses and a hat.”

The cos­tume had been dis­carded.  There she is, the fleshly incar­na­tion of our col­lec­tive gaze for the past ninety min­utes, Joyce McK­in­ney, in all her glory.  If she didn’t want to be rec­og­nized, it seems an odd deci­sion to wear what was very nearly the same dress she wore on camera.

That’s the first thing that goes through my head.  Even though she insists that the tabloids ruined her life, there’s still a part of her that des­per­ately needs to be in the spot­light.  But never mind the moti­va­tion, Joyce McK­in­ney has come to the Museum of Mod­ern Art to set the record straight.  She is going to sue Errol Morris.

As I drag my girl­friend through the crowd to get a bet­ter view, I try to imag­ine myself in her shoes, sit­ting in the back of that the­ater.  One moment she has the entire audi­ence in stitches because she wasn’t well-traveled enough for their lik­ing, and the next a tabloid jour­nal­ist calls her ‘bark­ing mad,’ with­out rebut­tal from his inter­roga­tor.  Joyce prob­a­bly found Errol Mor­ris to be a sym­pa­thetic ear, but this final prod­uct must have felt like a betrayal.  What if Errol Mor­ris was laugh­ing at her?  A hot twinge of guilt creeps up my spine. I never had occa­sion to con­sider how, for instance, Fred Leuchter felt after see­ing Mis­ter Death, but the thought is inescapable now.  This lady is crying.

A high pitch feed­back loop from a hear­ing aid drowns out the voice from across the room as I turn to see an old woman turn a screw in her ear with her fin­ger­nail.  “Whaaaat’s going on? Who is that?”

I kneel down to her and whis­per, “It’s the woman from the movie, ma’am.  She’s in the the­ater right now, and she has some­thing to say.”

She looks at me with an expres­sion that could fry an egg.  Appar­ently, the prospect of spend­ing one more minute in the com­pany of the sub­ject of the pre­ced­ing abor­tion is about as appeal­ing as a ham­mer to the face, so she pushes past me towards the back of the crowd in search of a fire exit.

Joyce wipes a tear from her cheek and holds up a fray­ing Mead folder, yel­low with zig-zagging stripes, that con­tains signed con­tracts, indis­putable evi­dence, a paper trail that she would be all too happy to show you before she tucks it back into her purse.  “One of my worst faults is that I am too trust­ing of people.”

I real­ize I like Joyce McK­in­ney.  In the movie, Mor­ris asks her if she believes it is pos­si­ble for a woman to rape a man and her response is, ‘That’s like putting a marsh­mal­low in a park­ing meter.”  Not every laugh was at her expense.  And even though I don’t really believe every­thing she said, I want to.  Here’s a woman that just wanted to tell a very spe­cial love story, but it was per­verted into a med­i­ta­tion on obses­sion.  Maybe Errol Mor­ris did mis­rep­re­sent her, parade her as another attrac­tion in his unfold­ing freak show to be scru­ti­nized through a lens and then dis­carded as a liar and a sex­ual deviant like she was so enthu­si­as­ti­cally por­trayed by the British gut­ter press.

I sud­denly become the head cheer­leader in the Joyce McK­in­ney booster club.  Ball’s in your court, Joyce.  Tell me why I shouldn’t trust Errol Morris.

It all started when she was con­fronted by Show­time to do a tele­vi­sion show.  Did you know that Pent­house mag­a­zine once offered her two thou­sand dol­lars for her pic­tures?  She sur­vived a hur­ri­cane.  Her poor mother just died.  If you slow down the film, you can clearly see that they pasted her head onto another girl’s body.  They told her that Errol Mor­ris won an Acad­emy Award.  Chil­dren and dogs love her.

It goes on like this for a while.  She breaks down into tears, then abruptly laughs as quickly as she changes sub­jects.  The crowd grows rest­less and thins.  One man accuses another with a British accent of being a reporter for the Daily Mir­ror.  My girl­friend inches towards me and del­i­cately grasps my fin­gers.  “Do you want to stay?’” I do.

A woman asks Joyce why she ever agreed to sign the releases.  Joyce warns it’s quite a story, but dog lovers might not want to lis­ten.  She had a dog that was in a cage on death row.  A man climbed over her fence and shoved a stack of papers in her face.  He cru­elly dug a ball-point pen into her hand.  “You can still see the scars.”  Joyce takes a deep breath.  “And he said– par­don my lan­guage, Lord for­give me– ‘Sign that god­damn con­tract or that dog is gonna die.’”

Now I feel guilty again, but for a dif­fer­ent rea­son this time.  Lis­ten­ing to Joyce is exhaust­ing.  My girl­friend asks me again, “Should we stay?” I don’t know what I want, but I have a clearer per­spec­tive than before.

Joyce McK­in­ney felt that Errol Mor­ris twisted her words and turned her into a freak because it made for a more inter­est­ing story.  The truth is, Errol Mor­ris did twist her words.  He sifted through them, what must have been a mul­ti­tude of them, and stitched them back together to present the most truth­ful Joyce that Joyce could be.  He made her witty, lik­able, and roman­tic.  Above all, he made her a tragic fig­ure of her own invention.

The edit­ing of Errol Morris’s Tabloid was an act of empathy.

A MoMA admin­is­tra­tor pipes in.  She’s sorry, but they have to close the museum.  We’ll have to take this out­side.  Joyce doesn’t mind.  She cheer­fully offers, ‘You can fol­low me to my limo, and I’ll show you the clones.’

With that, my girl­friend and I agree that we’d drunk our fill, but while I waited for a secu­rity guard to retrieve my back­pack from the bag check, I saw Joyce one more time.

Most of the crowd had dis­bursed, but some remained, smok­ing cig­a­rettes by the back door and exclaim­ing how what they just wit­nessed was ‘insane!’  Joyce emerged through a plate glass door with some of her more enthu­si­as­tic boost­ers that hung on to her every word.  She had had a long day and was walk­ing in her nylon stock­ings, two-inch heels in hand.  Not to put it indel­i­cately, but while, in her youth, Joyce was ‘as tiny as a pout,’ in her cur­rent phys­i­cal con­di­tion, she had grown quite a bit bigger.

One of the strag­glers, a man in green and brown jun­gle print pants speck­led with bright red flow­ers, broke away from his group and cir­cled around Joyce to her back.  Joyce didn’t notice him.  She had a huge smile on her face and waved her arms wildly as she went on about her dogs to a cap­tive audience.

The man qui­etly slid his iPhone from his pocket, turned on the cam­era, and dropped to one knee.  He slowly extended his arm and framed up a shot of Joyce’s ankles.  They were knobby and bloated, and he had a good look at them with­out the shoes on. Click.

When he stood up, he saw me look­ing at him and we made eye contact.

‘Really?’ I said.

He gave me a fuck-you scowl and stomped off.

If I wasn’t a cow­ard, I could have kicked the phone out of his hand. I didn’t, so I’m no bet­ter than him: just another spec­ta­tor in the the­ater of human mis­ery.  I won­der if there was another man behind me, and I won­der if he felt the same dis­gust for me as I felt for the picture-taker as he watched me watch­ing him watch­ing her.

Joyce left.  The atten­dant returned my back­pack and my girl­friend and I exited the build­ing.  Across the street, a crowd had formed around a black Lin­coln Town­car.  I told my girl­friend that we should check it out.  She asked why, and I said, ‘Maybe we’ll see the dogs.’

We approached the crowd.  Joyce was smil­ing, but I didn’t see any dogs.  As we left for the sub­way, flick­ers of light hit Joyce from every angle, but there were no flash­bulbs.  They came from milky white LEDs, built into the backs of cel­lu­lar phones.

I wished my phone had a flash.

Scott Cipu is a free­lance film critic.