Tabloid (Errol Morris)

Last year's documentary Catfish was about a woman who wore a robe of lies with many loose strings which were slowly pulled until the robe came unraveled and the woman stood naked before the gawking filmmakers. There was discord between the wishes of her heart and the realities of her world, and the film's tragedy was in the revelation of that great divide.

But Tabloid is about a woman, Joyce McKinney, whose lies are inseparable from her construction of reality, and whose secrets are buried in the deepest chambers of her heart, which she guards with all her strength. If you've seen the movie you know she even places a guard dog, a literal guard dog, between the outside world and herself, and when the dog dies she clones it, and there come to be five guard dogs that protect her secrets. Each secret that could potentially destroy her love's integrity she protects with conviction relative to the extent the love's integrity is necessary for her existence. But is it really a love for Kirk Anderson, or is it a love for self?

Because I thought also about how Joyce McKinney referred to her years of dramatic training - she said she summoned her dramatic abilities for her court appearance on the matter of her notorious sex in chains scandal (rope, perhaps, but chains sound better, as one teller says). What I thought about was how the degree to which we expose ourselves to the tradition of drama and dramatic structure and dramatic interpretation warps our visions of ourselves: we cast ourselves as major players in the drama of our lives.

And good drama, in the traditional sense, is fueled by conflict. For some, I believe, conflict is the engine of a lifedrama which is indivisible from a personal conception of a meaningful life. I worry about this all the time because I watch so many movies and read some books - I talked about it a little in my entry on the melodrama - what if I harbor a desire to ink spectacular stories for my life? What if I attempt to fill my life with great drama because I incorrectly equate great drama with great importance?

Joyce McKinney is a US southerner as well, which links her narrative with that region's tradition of willed self-identity and bubbles of private fantasy. Her story's foundation of perpetual and romantic self-construction and idiosyncratic and homespun belief systems is the foundation of so many other memorable US south tales. Although I've always admired California as the birthplace of lifestyles, the truth seems to be that lifestyle ideology has always existed. I point to the US south as evidence.

And of course if you believe yourself to be a free-spirited self-styled wide-eyed individual like Joyce McKinney, it may very well be that it is not secrets you are guarding at all. Many theater goers were saying mean things about Joyce as the end credits were rolling, about how she was full of shit and all that, but most of us compose our lives from tiny lies which we do not even know to be lies. Isn't that the similarity between us and Joyce and the world of Mormons? She refers to herself several times as something like a good ol' American girl. Well, that's her Mormonism.

In a way everything about the film including the film itself is a lie. As sometimes happens to people thrust into the limelight, I do not believe Joyce ever stopped hungering for attention, and I believe her thoughts continue to dwell in the limelight. The film was another stage for her. Did she not seem to be working herself into tears at certain points? But if her life is a drama she creates, than the drama becomes her reality, and if her tears are symbols of a lie that constitutes her core being, then the tears are both real and not real. Joyce McKinney's personality is large, and forceful, and magnetic. Couldn't I categorize this documentary, a documentary of her life, as a melodrama?