Doc Watch: Call Me Miss Cleo (2022)

except, literally everyone knew she was a fraud and the network a scam?

Watched:  12/28/2022

Format:  HBOmax

Viewing:  First

Director:   

Celia Aniskovich, 

Jennifer Brea

I dunno.  

This doc is weirdly under-developed and under-researched for something that's getting a fairly well-promoted release on HBOmax.  If I was Perry White to this team's Lois Lane, I'd say "you have a lot of facts.  You haven't proven anything and there's no story.  Get back out there."  The doc feels like it's something handed in at a deadline, not something actually something complete, and the final bit that tries to give Miss Cleo absolution feels like the last great con a successful con-artist pulled from beyond the grave.

Maybe the spirits DO talk to us!

But you'll get more facts without any of the tediously dramatic build up out of the anemic Miss Cleo Wikipedia article.  Somehow the doc misses that she had a child?  

Look, I was not a youth when Miss Cleo first appeared - I was a 20-something guy winding up college.  She was part of the weirdness that was 1990's television, right there alongside all the other charlatans and hucksters from Jerry Springer to those twin little people guys who made you watch a 45 minute informercial.  It was a wild, trashy time of insta-celebs like Susan Powter and the Government Money Riddler-guy.  And you had to be a certain age or a certain kind of poor or a certain kind of insomniac (or, in my case, all three) to know the full cast of TV's Legion of Doom.

Miss Cleo was an obvious fraud and crank who was also the face of one of many psychic networks.  It would be post-9/11 that I would figure out how many people totally and completely believe in any fraud or crank who speaks with conviction thanks to the weirdly lucrative 9/11 Conspiracy movement.  But I did figure *someone* was calling Miss Cleo, and those people were kidding or hopelessly guileless.

What's weird about this doc is that it's about Miss Cleo but somehow the filmmakers can't seem to do more than Google some facts but don't include even the basics of Wikipedia.  There's nothing particularly revelatory about the contents, and it leaves all but a narrow window of Miss Cleo's life a Miss Cleo shaped blank spot.  

Do they uncover who she really was and how she spent her life aside from a stint in Seattle?  Nope!  There's some speculation, but they don't bother to find out where she was born, where she lived, who knew her, etc...  She appears in Seattle as a grown adult pre-Cleo using a different name, does some theater, maybe steals some money?  And then vanishes again until those people spot her a while later using one of her characters developed in Seattle as Miss Cleo.

The doc is... bad?  Lazy?  I don't even know.  For chrissake, if you can't find the info yourself, hire a private investigator.  Someone has her SSN and can trace it back.  But they literally choose not to do the basics - instead speculating and cobbling together a few scant details, saying "she probably had trauma that was never healed" and then use that as the supporting argument for why Miss Cleo was an a-ok person.  But there's no evidence of trauma - no smoking gun.  Not even any anecdotal evidence presented.  Just the filmmakers cutting in pieces of people speculating.

The very weird collection of interviews includes the ragtag collection of folks Cleo hung out with after the collapse of the Psychic Network (a patchwork of Floridians who have varying degrees of skepticism about her still assumed psychic abilities), theater colleagues from Seattle who cannot believe this shit 25 years later, Raven Symone for some reason?, and Debra Wilson for other reasons.  Folks who worked as psychics are also interviewed.

If you also thought psychic hotlines existed to separate fools from their money, you weren't alone.  If you want to feel better, one of those fools may be Miss Cleo as it's not clear she actually profited very well from the scam she was the face-man for for years.  

You do get a picture of how she went from paying the bills as a psychic for the network to becoming the face of the network, and there's plenty there about how the scam worked, and a reminder that we're all secretly very alone in this cold and unforgiving universe and sometimes it's so bad, we call obviously fake magic-wielders so someone will tell us it'll be okay (spoiler:  it won't!  But you'll get used to it or get on twitter.). 

Maybe the most interesting part isn't Miss Cleo herself, but the mechanics of a call-in Psychic Network, that works not at all unlike a phone-sex-line (we were all about landline-based stuff in the 1990's), who worked there, what the job was, etc...  

Ideas are thrown at us with minimal follow up.  Miss Cleo was Jamaican and handed off to not-her-parents as an infant.  Only - no.  Never happened.  She was a student at USC.  No, she was not.  She had multiple personalities (only mentioned by one person).  She was maybe actually psychic and believed it.  Or not.   

This person did not live 100 or even 50 years ago.  She just died like 6 years ago.  She has a footprint.  Someone knew her as a kid - but good luck seeing that here.

Once the network collapsed due to basically being a gigantic scam that was easily sue-able, Miss Cleo retreats.  And where this could be interesting, and kind of is - the doc really leans into the "maybe she was really Miss Cleo all along, inside, and not someone with a completely different name using a fake accent every day of her life for years".  One of her Seattle theatre-company colleagues basically says it outright "you White people buy any old bullshit", and it sure seems to be true.  And yet, the filmmakers go right along with it and work to torture reality into shape so they can have an uplifting ending about "yeah, she helped to scam people out of a billion dollars, but she was nice to people after that collapsed so...  Everyone remember her fondly."  Wait.  What?  Why?

I'm not saying you can't make that movie or it's not a story that could be told.  What I am saying is that this doc doesn't seem to be able to grasp what it has in its hands and do anything with it. It can't seem to grapple with the idea that possibly Cleo or whatever her name was was the same kind of toxic narcissist we see in politicians and CEO's everyday and you can't find her footprint because she wasn't good enough at what she was doing or rich enough to stay in one place for very long.  It feels like they wrote an outline and then just went and made that doc.  It's very strange.  Unless you're the type of person who believes in psychics and magic, and then...  then I can see how all of this feels magical and mysterious.