Showing @ Glasgow Film Theatre, Fri 11 – Thu 17 Nov

Errol Morris/USA 2010/87 min

According to the baser gent, intelligent women are dangerous and beautiful women are deadly but combine the two and you have your quintessential siren, out to manipulate and mentally castrate any man they encounter. In the 1970s, page three was kicking off courtesy of The Sun, and the habits and lives of celebrities were becoming the fascination and obsession we see today. When former Miss Wyoming winner, the glamorous Joyce McKinney, who also had a 168 IQ, found herself involved with the man of her dreams, the frumpy Mormon Kirk Anderson, her life and actions became part of one of the first and biggest tabloid scandals the world had seen involving both Britain and the USA, changing the nature of journalism forever.

Tabloid traces the life of McKinney focusing on the case of the “Manacled Mormon” with interviews from her old friends, journalists and the woman herself. Daily Express journalist Peter Tory who was sent to woo McKinney and ensure exclusives to beat the Daily Mirror is particularly entertaining in his reminisces. Having spent three months in prison, fleeing the country with a fake passport and ending up with nude images of her being leaked to the Mirror McKinney’s own description of events is a deeply fascinating tale.

Unlike his previous more chilling documentaries, such as Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris’ latest feature is a decidedly upbeat and comic experience. Of course there’s more than a hint at the injustice that McKinney suffered after being endlessly hounded by the right-wing media hungry for flesh and sensationalism, but Morris’ choices of text, images and animation makes this piece much lighter than we’re used to from him. However, running through the entire documentary there is this fear of sex and female sexuality, whether it’s the hired pilot who was ogling her bare chest or the journalists who were desperate to take her photo or, more sinisterly, the Mormon attitude to the body. Images of their chastity belts and McKinney’s description of the troubled Anderson who after, or during, sex would start quoting from the Mormon bible and fearing punishment for feeling lust. It’s a tough case and at the end of the film you’re no closer to knowing the truth of the situation, but more importantly the history of the media, the tabloids and the attitude towards women that leaks from the pages of the Murdoch empire is given back its history.