Joe Exotic
is a mullet-wearing, gun-toting, openly gay Oklahoma zoo owner and would-be
country singer and political candidate. He comes into conflict not only with
his financial backer, Jeff Lowe, who claims that Joe misappropriated funds, but
also with Carole Baskin, the owner of Big Cat Rescue, who claims that Joe is
exploiting and mistreating his zoo’s tigers. Joe, in turn, accuses Carole of
hypocrisy and having a hand in her husband’s disappearance, and the two engage
in a long and acrimonious legal and media battle that culminates in Joe’s conviction
for trying to solicit his zoo’s handyman to murder Carole.
In recent
years, true crime docuseries have tried to reconcile lofty claims of truth-seeking
(see Making a Murderer) with presentations that invite criticisms of
bias, sensationalism, or both. In Tiger King, filmmakers Eric Goode and Rebecca
Chaiklin have stripped away any pretense of nobility. Given its larger-than-life
subjects, the show leans into its sensationalism rather than attempting to
downplay it. The results are compellingly entertaining if also ethically
disconcerting.
Joe is the
star of the show here, and both his charisma and his capacity for self-delusion
and antagonism radiate in nearly every episode. This lack of sanitization is
not confined to him alone. His role model, longtime animal trainer and wildlife
preserve owner “Doc” Antle, is shown as a self-congratulatory quasi-cult
leader, Jeff Lowe is portrayed as something of a con man, and would-be hitman Allen
Glover freely admits to spending the murder-for-hire fee on “partying.” These
are all, at best, deeply flawed people, yet Tiger King’s refusal to
sanctify or justify them is refreshing.
At the
same time, some of Goode’s narrative decisions are also quite dubious. He spends
the bulk of one episode prying into unsubstantiated rumors that Carole fed her
wealthy then-husband (missing and since declared dead) to a tiger, yet he pays
far less attention to meth use among Joe and his crew. Meanwhile, the tigers
themselves function as little more than living props.
Tiger
King, like Werner
Herzog’s Grizzly Man before it, casts animals in the unfortunate role of
targets of obsessive personalities. And as fascinating as those obsessions may
be to watch, we should not lose sight of the damage that they ultimately cause.
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