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When Joyce McKinney was a little girl, she believed she would have a fairy tale romance with the man of her dreams when she grew up, but it didn't quite turn out that way. She did meet someone who fitted the bill, and he was Kirk Anderson, a Mormon who she felt an instant attraction to the moment their eyes met as they stopped along a highway in traffic. Neither of them knew that this relationship would soon become a sensation in the news, and all because Kirk decided to leave Joyce without telling her where he was going...
The title of this, you wil notice, is not "McKinney" but Tabloid, as if director Errol Morris was more interested in the media blitz around his subjects than he was in the wellbeing of the woman herself, but actually when you watched it you began to get a fairly balanced view of her story, and what a story it was. It would be easy to dismiss McKinney as absolutely nuts, and indeed that's the impression many took away from the film, which was probably why she ended up suing Morris for her portrayal, all in spite of the most damning material coming from her own side of the tale, but at worst you could view her as an eccentric.
Well, maybe not worst, at worst you could view her as a kidnapper and stalker, due to her reaction to Kirk abandoning her back in 1977 to go on his "Mission". In truth the Mormons don't come out of this too well either, thanks to Morris filling in the backstory with an interview with an ex-Mormon who goes into detail about the weird stuff they believe and how sexual guilt is a prime motive in that belief system, something that a girl like Joyce would not be compatible with. Basically, if Kirk were to go off with her and marry her he would not get his salvation - or his own planet in the afterlife (!?), so that goes a little way to explaining why he was so keen to leave his girlfriend behind.
What it does not explain was what exactly happened in that Devon cottage that McKinney and her accomplice spirited him away to; if you accepted the sensation-hungry British tabloids' version she captured him at gunpoint, chloroformed him, and chained him to the bed whereupon she "raped" him repeatedly to bring him back around to the idea that marriage with her was a great idea. She had another version to tell, that Kirk (who refused to be interviewed) had been brainwashed and she was trying to break through that, and the back and forth between these two viewpoints provides much of the drama, so much so that by the end you're not quite sure of what the hell was going on which brings about the throwing up of hands in the face of it all and the opinion that ex-beauty queen Joyce was indeed crazy.
But then there's the tabloid angle, the one which exposes how the editors and reporters use such extreme personalities to sell a lot of papers and make a lot of money out of them, as it was in their interest to depict McKinney as lunatic as possible. Not that she was wholly innocent of such charges with her disguises, self-publicising ways, and shady past which the journalists took great glee in revealing to the scandal-obsessed public, and Morris appears to acknowledge that much of what he showed here was feeding into that even at this late stage in the game. The sexual slant on this was enough to excite the public's endless appetite for prurience, and there are moments here where you can't help but laugh at how ridiculous this is getting, but then there's a stage where you recognise these were real people involved, not actors playing roles for your entertainment - the photographer chuckling at Joyce's suicide attempt is a sobering instance of that. The last act, where McKinney re-entered the headlines later in life, shows that she has not grown any less idiosyncratic. Music by John Kusiak.
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