Exotic, warts and all
Despite the troubling times, fans flock to dark docuseries, Chris Bennion writes.
Comfort viewing, we’re told, is all the rage. As many of us cower in our homes, listlessly traipsing about in our pyjamas, we huddle around our televisions binging on Friends, The Good Life, Gavin & Stacey, Disney cartoons and other such undemanding, nostalgic, feel-good fare.
Who could blame us? And yet the must-watch show of the Great Isolation 2020 is about as relaxing as a stroll in your local jogger-infested park. Why have so many of us hungrily gobbled up Netflix’s exceedingly stressful Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness?
If you’ve been living under a rock these past two weeks — understandable under the circumstances — you might not have heard the lurid tale of Joseph Maldonado-Passage, born Joseph Schreibvogel but best known as Joe Exotic, the flamboyant, drug-taking, gun-toting, unhinged zoo owner from Oklahoma. The seven-part series, from filmmakers Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin, is a surreal, nauseating and totally gripping ride through the U.S. “big cat” scene, with a seemingly never-ending cast of grotesques, each more extreme and less likable than the last, and enough stranger-than-fiction plot twists to keep Hollywood in business for years.
Exotic is scarcely believable as a character. Part redneck hillbilly, part Liberace, part Breaking Bad’s Saul Goodman, he presided over the thoroughly depressing GW Exotic Animal Park, home to hundreds of caged tigers and lions, as well as a host of other exotic animals, where he revelled in being a one-man entertainment show. Desperate for fame, Exotic ran his own TV channel from the zoo, pumping out increasingly bizarre and offensive online videos, as well as attempting to film his own reality TV show. He is now serving 22 years in prison for, among other things, plotting to have killed the animal rights activist (and fellow big cat zoo owner) Carole Baskin.
Baskin herself has been subject to scrutiny. The cat lady to end all cat ladies, she runs Big Cat Rescue in Tampa, Fla., a grotty little sanctuary that makes Exotic’s look like paradise by comparison. While her campaign to make the private owning and breeding of big cats illegal in the U.S. is admirable, Baskin is another gaudy attention seeker, running a profitable big-cat sanctuary. Exotic, and many others in the big-cat world, have accused Baskin of murdering her first husband. She has denied this claim for many years.
Goode stumbled across these big-cat owners by mistake, but, my, what a teeming pond he found. The result is an irresistible tale of greed, envy and violence. It’s almost too much, as if a computer algorithm has been forced to watch every episode of Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends and then come up with a documentary series (indeed, Exotic was once one of Theroux’s subjects). Tiger King is a palate cleanser. While it’s true that the world suffers with COVID-19 and each day we hear more unspeakable stories from our hospitals, the tone most of us are projecting is upbeat and positive, with perhaps a little gallows humour thrown in. We’re writing poems and learning cross-stitch; we’re rediscovering the clarinet and educating our children; we’re making do and mending and growing our own; we’re applauding and we are sharing. But that isn’t any more the real world than the horror of coronavirus is.
Tiger King reminds us that humanity isn’t all health-care angels and delivery driver heroes, that in these dark times we also want to see the worst of us too, the vulgar, the profane, the immoral, the seedy. As we struggle to recover our normal world, it is important for us to remember what that normal world looks like, warts and all. All hail the Tiger King.