Paper vagina

Tabloid 2010 (88 minutes) directed by Errol Morris.

A manacled Mormon sex slave and a vagina dentata; magic underwear, bondage, blow jobs, hot cinnamon oil massages; international fugitives in fat suits, dark glasses and a wig named Matilda; cloned Boogers: What the devil is Errol Morris up to here?

Tabloids—or the heart and essence of the tabloid story.

But rather than the usual Branjelina and alien fare one might expect while idling at a supermarket checkout, Morris found a celebrity- and alien-in-one in an Everywoman for whom one easily could imagine these stories are told: a self-absorbed, irony-proof bundle of sentimentality, folk mysticism and old wives’ tales informed by a vivid imagination:

Joyce McKinney.

McKinney calls herself an ‘incurable romantic’. Originally from North Carolina, she characterizes herself as a ‘small-town girl’ raised on beauty pageants. She said she had little interest in or experience with men and sex before she met Kirk Anderson, ‘the love of her life,’ at age 19 while she was attending college in Utah.

During a brief, evidently sexless ‘affair’, McKinney claims that the couple made plans to get married and start a family. Then, without a word to her, Anderson suddenly disappeared. McKinney later determined that he left her under pressure from his mother and the Mormon church of which he was a member. Morris tells us Anderson ‘refused’ to talk with him.  

After Anderson disappeared, McKinney ‘went to Los Angeles and worked three jobs trying to save enough money to hire a private investigator to find out what happened to him,’ she said. She discovered that he had been sent to do Mormon missionary work in England. She hired a ‘team’ to accompany her to England to ‘rescue’ Anderson from ‘the cult’.

Her half-baked attempt to spring Anderson smacks of the jumbled plots of bad romance and adventure movies—not to mention nutty tabloid stories. McKinney and an accomplice allegedly kidnapped the 6’3”, 300-pound Anderson at gunpoint and took him on a ‘honeymoon’ getaway to the Devon countryside, where he was chained ‘spread eagled’ on a bed and ‘forced’ to have sex with her all weekend long.

‘Do you think a woman can rape a man?’ Morris’ voice asks behind the camera.

‘No. I think that’s like puttin’ a marshmallow in a parking meter,’ McKinney says.

The story hit the British tabloids like a bomb. It took on a life of its own once law enforcement officials decided that the bizarre allegations under the ‘Manacled Mormon’ banner headlines demanded their action. But the case left the British legal establishment scratching its head.

The Daily Mirror’s Kent Gavin struck gold when his paper sent him to Los Angeles to look into McKinney’s background. The Real McKinney, according to The Daily Mirror, turned out to be something of a Roller Girl dominatrix operating under Bill Clinton’s definition of what constitutes ‘sex’…

But despite all the tease and titillation, there seems to have been little actual sex going on. It is doubtful that McKinney, who claimed to be a virgin, ever got more than Anderson’s guilt-ridden marshmallow in her meter in Devon. Her helpers and admirers claimed they never had sex with her, and she said that she has been celibate after her ‘relationship’ with Anderson ended in England.

The purported vagina dentata seems to have been a paper vagina.

Peter Tory, whose stories for The Daily Express portrayed ‘an innocent, sweet-natured woman…who was a victim of cruel circumstance’—the official line McKinney wanted publicized—said that ‘there was something in that story for everyone. It was the perfect tabloid story.’ 

Morris has fun recreating it with an unironic McKinney and a wry Jackson Shaw, one of the men she had hired to be a part of her team, tabloid reporters Gavin and Tory, and a lot of visual pizzazz suitable to his subject. The story ran in the tabloid press from 1977 when it first broke until 1984, when a distraught McKinney ‘fled’ an Atlanta hotel ‘in her nightie,’ eventually ‘disappearing’ across a busy freeway.

But that’s not all: the McKinney story has a second act. 

A dozen years later, Joyce ‘Bernann’ McKinney came into the media spotlight once more when she had ‘Booger’, her faithful pit bull, successfully cloned by Dr. Lee Byeong Chun in South Korea. The tabloid media frothed with malicious glee with its ‘Manacled Mormon’ woman back in the spotlight.

‘I don’t see any connection between cloned puppies and a 32-year-old sex-in-chains story,’ maintained the petulantly unironic McKinney, nonplused by the attention.

‘She’s not an evil person,’ Tory said. ‘I mean, she’s just a bit crazy, eccentric, self-obsessed, self-involved and manipulative, and barking mad, probably, basically, but, um—’

‘Barking mad?’ Morris’ question comes from behind the camera.

‘Yeah.’

“I wish we had that expression over here,’ Morris said.

‘You can have it,’ Tory said, smiling.

McKinney gets the last word, reading from the book she says that she is writing about her life and one great unrequited love:

‘Joyce is now a lonely old woman. Like Narcissus, she is pining to death, dying of a broken heart. That’s the conclusion of my book, but the love has never ended.’