Trigger warning: animal abuse, suicide, murder for hire, murder for free, violence, harassment, profanity, polygamy, fraud, firearms, explosives, substance abuse, meth mouth, mullets, eyeliner on men, terrible graphic tees, even worse neck tattoos, unpardonable facial jewelry, snakes getting milked, monkeys eating pizza, tigers eating people, amputees, cluster B personality disorders, amateur country music, public-access TV, Florida, Walmart, Applebee’s.
Anyone who says you can’t have it all has never met Joseph Maldonado-Passage, alias Joe Exotic, the controversial (that’s a euphemism for “incarcerated on federal charges”) Oklahoma zookeeper who seems to have resulted from cross-breeding Siegfried and Roy with Billy Ray Cyrus and The Orchid Thief’s John Laroche. Not since HBO’s Eastbound & Down or FX’s Baskets has a show so unmoored from the reality principle served as such a revealing portrait of American ego and appetite gone berserk. Thing is, Tiger King is 100% gospel goddamn truth.
You knew all that though. Joe Exotic and his archnemesis, the animal rights activist, Big Cat Rescue founder, and alleged mariticide Carole Baskin, are as famous as the coronavirus and at least as insidious, their feud our consolation prize for a month of confinement. Tiger King is one of Netflix’s most watched shows and is 93% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. The docuseries is so popular that critics hoping to stand out have resorted to asking the priggish, disingenuous question: “Should we really be watching this trainwreck?”
We should—for many reasons, some of them the same ones the scolds cite in condemnation. Tiger King depicts the maltreatment of big cats and primates. It tacitly encourages mob justice, insofar as much of America is convinced that Baskin fed her “missing” husband to tigers even though she was never charged and there is no evidence to support this (deliciously intuitive) theory. The show makes its principals look either ridiculous or clinically deranged.
Yes, Tiger King depicts cruelty. Among a lot of mesmerizing animal footage, we also see big cats provoked, drugged, caged, terrorized with gunshots, and carted around in earth-moving equipment as carelessly as luggage. We see exhumed remains of tigers “euthanized” by firearm and hear of cubs bred for show and put down when they’ve outlived their profitability. That such sickening disclosures emerge from such a sensationalistic series by no means cancels out the value of bringing them to widespread attention.
The Baskin question is thornier. Popular opinion is united against her. No less an expert than O.J. Simpson has proclaimed, “That lady’s husband is tiger sashimi.” Karen Kilgariff, of the blockbuster true-crime podcast My Favorite Murder, said, referring to Baskin’s corny catchphrase, “‘Hey there cool cats and kittens!’ is all the proof I need.” She must be guilty. It’s too perfect, from a narrative standpoint, not to be true.
When you put it that way, Baskin sounds like a victim. But she chose to appear in a documentary knowing how things would look—a big no-no, like acting as one’s own attorney. As O.J. Simpson knows, criminal court, civil court, and the court of public opinion have different standards of evidence. “You see how [tigers] go from so sweet to just wanting to tear your face off,” Baskin says. “It’s amazing to have that kind of range.” Forgive us, Carol, for reading admiration into that remark.
Those who argue that Tiger King is a latter-day sideshow miss a serious point. We’re free to be ourselves, but we aren’t in charge of how others react to us. Much of Joe Exotic’s appeal lies in how he grasps this and runs with it. A riotously gay polygamist (the scene in which he weds two redneck party boys is one for the books), a counterfeit musician (he lip-syncs through his sublimely unwatchable videos), and a histrionic showman who ran for governor of Oklahoma and president of the United States, his cards are on the table. And he’s loving it.
Filmmakers Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin hit the jackpot here, but they deserve abundant credit for their structure and storytelling. It can’t have been easy to “slow burn” a tale this gnarly, but each episode features a reveal that makes the preceding ones seem tame. The quick cuts alone are a smorgasbord—zookeepers barely escaping enraged tigers, men handling a fire hose-sized python, a pet lemur, prosthetic legs decorated with killer clowns, a hit man in his bathtub—and the interviewees seem like refugees from the pages of Charles Portis or Carl Hiaasen.
Tiger King grants us a rare entrée into a sordid world, and it’s a mistake to think there’s nothing to do there but gawk. The show is a crash course in abnormal psychology, in crime and the convolutions of criminal association, in what becomes of people who, for better or worse, don’t fit into straight society. To say as one critic did that it “turns into an increasingly empty exercise” is a far more callous dismissal of these people than laughing at them could be.
Besides, the show elicits less laughter than it does sheer incredulity. Who among us expected to learn that Bhagavan “Doc” Antle, a big-cat breeder in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, was keeping his young female employees as a harem? Or that Erik Cowie, Joe’s head zookeeper, had no experience and found the job on Craigslist? (“I miss Bonedigger and Cletus,” he moans, pining for tigers past in a moment of keen pathos.) Or that two of Joe’s husbands weren’t even gay but did love him? Or that Joe’s partner, Jeff Lowe, would swindle him out of a zoo? Or that Joe, who can seem as fragile as a snow globe, really did want Carole Baskin dead? Or that filmmaker Rick Kirkham, screwed over by Joe Exotic in the series proper, would return in a bonus “where are they now” episode and blow the lid off of Exotic’s extreme fear of tigers?
Tiger King is like a zoo. At its worst, it makes us complicit in nastiness, but at its best, it gives us humane insight into the creatures on display. They are and aren’t like us. They lead very different lives played by an altogether different set of rules (or none at all) at a different pitch of intensity and chaos. Beneath our laughter, there may even be something akin to envy. This is the frontier, the last vestige of the jungle: By comparison, many lives seem cautious and caged. But it’s nice to be reminded that, all things considered, we wouldn’t want to live there.