The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
VICTORIA COREN MITCHELL HOW I SEE IT
Stifled by life in captivity? Spare a thought for the stars of ‘Tiger King’
Twenty years ago, I found myself in a confined space with a terrifying 10ft elephant. I was trembling with fear, armed only with a shovel. Technically, I didn’t need to be armed with more than that; I was there to muck out its cage. “Nothing to be frightened of!” shouted one of my fellow zookeepers. “These are the tamest elephants in the world! They love kids! They’ve had their photo taken with the Queen!”
Gingerly, I moved towards the giant creature. The keeper nodded reassuringly. A few months later, it trampled him to death.
So, I would ask you: what is “tame”? Nothing in the animal kingdom, that’s for sure. In the wrong mood, a gerbil could have your eye out.
These thoughts were uppermost in my mind as I settled down to watch 2020’s hottest series, Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness. This seven-part true crime documentary (billed as an eight-parter, but we’ll come to that) has been available on Netflix for just over a month and has already been seen by more than 65million people worldwide.
Of course, everything on telly has been getting bigger ratings
– it’s not just tigers who are living in captivity. But this particular show is a phenomenon, a blockbuster, a global event. It’s the other international talking point.
Tiger King is the kind of show that crosses over to provide subject matter and punchlines for other people’s programmes. By midApril, literally the only person on the planet who hadn’t heard of it was an anonymous media source who told me: “I haven’t heard of it. I think you might be overestimating its impact. You say everyone’s talking about it but the only person I’ve heard talking about it is you.”
“Well, you’re hardly talking to anyone else,” I pointed out. “And you inhabit a very particular echo chamber – it would be difficult for Tiger King to penetrate. You spent all yesterday listening to John Julius Norwich’s History of France on audiobook, and he’s unlikely to mention it. For at least two reasons.”
In case you plan to watch this series imminently, I won’t go into too much detail about the narrative content; it’s nice to be surprised. I will simply give you the warning I was given myself (the first episode seems slow, but stick with it), a new warning I wasn’t given (the “eighth episode” is terrible, but we’ll come to that) and the essential reason why it’s a smash: it combines the vast, intricate and lavish material of other American true crime hits, which have managed to record and edit literally years of footage, with a story about zoo animals! So it’s as densely plotted, far reaching and twist-filled as The Jinx or Making a Murderer, but it’s also got lions in it! And crocodiles! And, obviously, tigers. And anecdotes that begin: “I was buying a lemur with bogus paperwork …”
Or, to put it another way, it’s as visually interesting as all those British documentaries about zoos
– one of which, 20 years ago, is the reason I was allowed to be an elephant-keeper for the day and write about it – with added murder.
Although I suppose my story had added murder too, if you can attribute malice aforethought to an elephant. I’ve just googled the allegedly murderous Mya and I’m glad to learn she is still alive, now living in Italy, and has been good as gold ever since.
Zoos make a great backdrop for documentaries, because they are so ethically complicated. My own “temporary job” was at London Zoo, an internationally respected charity devoted to wildlife preservation, and one of my favourite places since childhood (they are pleading for donations at the moment, to help feed and take care of all the animals that nobody is now paying to go and see) but, even there, one can’t avoid the sadness of incarceration. The creatures are guaranteed medical treatment, regular food, safety from poachers and predators and destroyers of their habitat, in return for captivity; it’s a delicate deal but one that most of us accept, trusting the role of conservation and education.
But the deal crumbles as soon as you tip that balance a fraction more away from the animals’ welfare – and God knows, at the “wildlife parks” depicted in Tiger King there are anvils on the wrong end of that balance – so the addition of inter-human violence as a plotline really makes your head spin.
“This is my own little town,” declares Joe Exotic, the zoo manager and tiger king of the title. “I’m the mayor, the prosecutor, the cop and the executioner.”
Ah yes. That’s the main four, isn’t it, when you’re setting up a town.
The combination of weirdness, exotica, cruelty, death, visual brightness and human darkness, makes for a gripping seven episodes. The ending is terribly sad and thoughtful … and then comes “episode eight”, a sort of lockdown chat show in which an American comedian called Joel interviews all the characters from the documentary, over computers, with a jolliness so massively inappropriate that I think it might be the worst transgression we encounter in the whole series.
“We’re in the middle of a global pandemic,” he shrieks merrily. “Tiger King fever!”
I mean, I’m not always the most tasteful person myself. But this guy is not just making a dodgy corona-joke, he’s doing it in an interview with a homeless drug addict who’s reminiscing tearfully about years of animal suffering.
I’d skip episode eight, if I were you. Other than that, Tiger King fever is hot, hot, hot and I do hope you catch it.
The below authors were born in