Call Me Miss Cleo
The greatest sin a documentary can commit is subjectivity. Sometimes, a subject cannot help but demand a certain lens, but a documentarian should always strive to stick as close to objective facts as possible, let partisans do their thing, and craft their piece to incorporate all sides.
Call Me Miss Cleo certainly tries to do that … occasionally … when it has no other choice. Because what it wants to do is extol the virtues of the woman behind the worst Jamaican accent you’ve ever heard. And I’m not going to sit here and say she didn’t have positive qualities. She was an LGBTQ+ activist. She clearly had a large circle of friends. And in her role as the spokesperson for the psychic scan line she was famous for, she was exploited just as much as the callers were.
But, apart from the Florida attorney who prosecuted the case, nobody seems to want to hold her accountable for her role in it. Everybody wants to assume she was either naive or gullible or had no awareness whatsoever, which all amounts to saying she was an idiot. I don’t buy that. People want to forgive her for scamming performers at an AA theater in Seattle because she’s … charming? People want to wash it all away because she was evasive about her past, even though she was constantly caught lying about it, which makes everything she said questionable. There’s just a bit too much hero worship and fawning here for a person that clearly had no problems screwing people for her own gain, and at best a passing knowledge of the truth.
There is an interesting story here. Her rise and fall has something to it. Her post-fame life is sad and short. She was more than the terrible racist caricature she used on TV. She had feelings, dreams, ambitions. But she also had a dark side, a side that was wholly untrustworthy, a side with slippery morals, and this movie isn’t just afraid to reconcile them, it actively wants to excuse them. The bad she did isn’t the whole story, but neither is the good, and one shouldn’t outshine the other in a documentary.
Call Me Miss Cleo certainly tries to do that … occasionally … when it has no other choice. Because what it wants to do is extol the virtues of the woman behind the worst Jamaican accent you’ve ever heard. And I’m not going to sit here and say she didn’t have positive qualities. She was an LGBTQ+ activist. She clearly had a large circle of friends. And in her role as the spokesperson for the psychic scan line she was famous for, she was exploited just as much as the callers were.
But, apart from the Florida attorney who prosecuted the case, nobody seems to want to hold her accountable for her role in it. Everybody wants to assume she was either naive or gullible or had no awareness whatsoever, which all amounts to saying she was an idiot. I don’t buy that. People want to forgive her for scamming performers at an AA theater in Seattle because she’s … charming? People want to wash it all away because she was evasive about her past, even though she was constantly caught lying about it, which makes everything she said questionable. There’s just a bit too much hero worship and fawning here for a person that clearly had no problems screwing people for her own gain, and at best a passing knowledge of the truth.
There is an interesting story here. Her rise and fall has something to it. Her post-fame life is sad and short. She was more than the terrible racist caricature she used on TV. She had feelings, dreams, ambitions. But she also had a dark side, a side that was wholly untrustworthy, a side with slippery morals, and this movie isn’t just afraid to reconcile them, it actively wants to excuse them. The bad she did isn’t the whole story, but neither is the good, and one shouldn’t outshine the other in a documentary.
Mini Review: The greatest sin a documentary can commit is subjectivity. Sometimes, a subject cannot help but demand a certain lens, but a documentarian should always strive to stick as close to objective facts as possible, let partisans do their thing, and craft their piece to incorporate all sides. Call Me Miss Cleo certainly tries to do that … occasionally … when it has no other choice. Because what it wants to do is extol the virtues of the woman behind th...