Many years ago, a couple who operated an exotic animal zoo in a remote part of the county made an appointment to see me. I was a young lawyer, then, and wished to represent high profile clients. At the appointment, the couple were dressed in flamboyant western attire and the woman's hands were dripping with turquoise set in heavy silver rings. The ensemble of jewelry on her fingers looked less like adornment and more like some sort of weapon, brass knuckles with sharp protuberances. The people were locked in a dispute with county officials about their wildlife park. It was a dispute of longstanding duration and was described to me in terms relating the controversy to the personal characteristics of the county commissioners -- each of whom were provided with first names and a set of loathsome attributes. The couple had sacks full of correspondence, much of it with lawyers that they had retained and, then, fired and, as far as I could see, they lied about everything. I couldn't ascertain who owned what, whether there were corporate entities involved, or the history of the imbroglio -- although it could be reconstructed from some of the letters and court orders. The exotic animal zoo-owners struck me as totally detestable, corrupt, and unprincipled -- later, I think the animals became too expensive to feed and the beasts were just allowed to escape into the winter night. This provided much merriment for local law enforcement who were deputized for a brutal big game hunt. At the time that I encountered this man and woman, I was representing a child molester who had groped at four-year old girl at a trailer park. I greatly preferred the company of the child molester to the exotic animal folks.
As everyone knows, The Tiger King (2020) is an eight episode Netflix documentary that chronicles the blood-feud between a wild cat zookeeper in Oklahoma named Joe Exotic and a wealthy woman, Carole Baskin, who operates an alleged "big cat rescue-sanctuary" in Florida. As the film makes evident, both Joe and Carole are unscrupulous, lethal narcissists and, for all intents and purposes, there isn't an ounce of difference between their respective operations -- they both house huge felines in tiny pens, exploit the cats for profit, and aggressively promote their businesses on the internet. Carole Baskin is slightly more vicious, at least with respect to her so-called "sanctuary" because of her hypocrisy -- she sanctimoniously claims that she is "rescuing" the tigers and lions from maltreatment and isn't actively breeding the beasts, but it doesn't seem that she is any more compassionate than Joe about the animals who are purely instrumental to her, merely a means to her self-aggrandizing ends. Joe Exotic is a flamboyant homosexual who struts around in cowboy gear with six-guns holstered at his hips. His big cat and exotic animal zoo is spectacularly squalid, staffed by hoodlums and petty criminals. Joe's misfits include an butch Indian girl who has her arm pulled off by a big cat in the first episode and a hillbilly with no legs -- he ambles about on stumps in psychedelically colored prosthetics. (Joe's hoodlum animal-keepers are refreshingly honest and direct -- they seem to be the only reasonable and trustworthy people in the large rogue's gallery that populates this show.) Carole is trying to shut-down Joe's operation, enlisting the aid of naive animal rights activists at PETA. Joe responds by libeling Carole and accusing her of having murdered and fed her first husband to her tigers -- something that seems probable. Joe makes videos of a Carole look-alike (very convincing) happily feeding scraps of her dismembered husband (his head is on a platter) to her big cats. When he discovers a photograph showing Carole's minions with dead rabbits (they are planning to feed the bunnies to the big cats), he accuses her of rabbit-abuse. He even pickets her Florida sanctuary, dressed in a PETA bunny outfit stained with gore. Ultimately, Joe goes too far even by the bat-shit crazy standards of exotic animal fanciers -- he steals Carole's trademark and advertises himself as the one and only Big Cat Rescue. Amy and her husband, Howard, a saturnine fellow with the features of a small-town mortician, sue Joe and his enterprises. Joe is too dumb to conceal his tracks and, also, too dumb to protect his assets by any measure other than the most obvious fraudulent conveyances -- he transfers his zoo to his mother and drives his aged parents into bankruptcy. (In fact, it seems that the old woman, told to lie to the Federal judge about assets, comes very close to getting imprisoned herself.) When it's obvious that Joe can't sustain the charade of fraudulent transfers to secrete asset against collection, he begins to film himself destroying his own property by shooting things with his revolver and blowing stuff up with dynamite. Joe has hired a gaunt con-man to film his videos that he broadcasts on You-Tube and podcasts. The con-man, named Kirkham, also has contracted with Joe to produce a Reality TV show that he is trying to peddle to NatGeo or the Discovery channel. Kirkham has been subpoenaed in the Baskin v. Exotic litigation to produce to Carole's lawyers video and digital recordings and computer systems -- it's pretty clear that this evidence includes proof of the abuse of Joe's animals and other crimes as well and there's a whiff of blackmail in Kirkham's interviews on this subject. So, on the advice of a crooked lawyer, Joe burns down his studio, boiling alive seven alligators, and melting the computers and digital/video footage into slag. This ruins Kirkham. Joe, then, seeks "an angel"to salvage his failing enterprise. He's impressed by a fraudster named Jeff Lowe, a Vegas low-life who specializes in orchestrating orgies that involve tiger cubs. Lowe has all the trappings of success, a show-girl consort, a Porsche and a penthouse suite above the glittering Vegas strip, but he's also a crook and, at the end of Episode 4, seems poised to seize control of Joe Exotic's collapsing empire.
The documentary has a large cast of bizarre and iniquitous supporting characters, but the main contours of the dramatic action are clear: the conflict between Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin drives the narrative. And this conflict is presented in terms of social class that will resonate with most viewers: the sanctimonious well-spoken Carole is attractive and has vast amounts of money; although she's profoundly evil and probably murderous, she represents an elite class of people with more money than sense -- she has all the advantages over the working-class Joe Exotic and his cadre of toothless hillbilly underdogs. It's the American way to root for the underdog, Joe, the self-made man and entrepreneur versus the condescending and hypocritical Carole Baskin. The show exploits this dynamic with merciless show-business flair.
In Werner Herzog's great documentary Grizzly Man, the director comments on the growing insanity of his protagonist -- a man who identifies with grizzlies to the extent that he no longer fears them (with disastrous consequences) and who documents on video his interactions with the beasts: "I had seen this sort of madness before," Herzog portentously tells us, "on film sets." Herzog's point, pertinent to The Tiger King, is that the act of filming events controls how the events will play-out. It's the media equivalent of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: the act of observing alters outcomes. Here, the level of camera surveillance is mind-boggling. Joe Exotic has hired Kirkham to produce a series of videos promoting his operation -- these videos become increasingly deranged as the program proceeds. Kirkham has contracted with Joe Exotic to produce a Reality TV show about the embattled wild animal preserve that he runs. So Kirkham has another set of cameras operating behind the first set -- he notes that he is filming himself filming Joe Exotic's antics for the internet postings. Then, behind Kirkham there is the camera team filming under the direction of Eric Goode for the Netflix Tiger King series. Therefore, we are confronted with as dizzying mise-en-abyme -- that is, the French term for a recursive hall of mirrors: cameramen filming other cameramen, movies within movies within movies. There's no doubt in my mind that the continuous surveillance turns everyone in this film into a caricature -- the hillbillies are like cartoons of hillbillies; Carole Baskin is a nightmare figure: the worst, most narcissistic and self-aggrandizing bitch ever portrayed on film; Joe Exotic cavorts for the camera -- pointing his six-gun at the cameraman, growling, and, then, discharging the weapon in the air. It's obvious that participants are constructing their performances and their performing personae for the camera -- everything is a lie, fictional, a pantomime for the cameras ceaselessly recording the grotesque reality that the film presents. Of course, an argument can be made that the ubiquitous presence of the cameras makes the folks on-screen nonchalant and that we are seeing their true selves. The debate about reality TV of this kind dates back to the infamous American Family series that aired on PBS fifty years ago -- the progenitor of this form of entertainment. In American Family, the audience window-peeped on the Loud family and watched the marriage between husband and wife dissolve while the oldest son, Lance, admitted his homosexuality and came out to a viewing audience of millions. Debate raged then about whether the spectacle was staged for Tv or authentic. We've now progressed (if that word can be used) to an understanding that there's no real distinction between real and fictional in documentaries of this kind. Inevitably, the people involved perform for their audiences and, ultimately, their performances become so reflexive and in-grained that no distinction can be made between what is true and what is contrived for the camera. The presence of cameras (here a mise en abyme involving, at least, three layers of documentation) inevitably alters what is recorded and makes people into parodies of themselves.
Of course, Carole wearing a diadem of flowers in her tiger-print blouses and cougar slacks and Joe Exotic costumed, as if for Halloween, in cowboy clothes and six-guns, are already parodies, already cartoonish characters. The notion of unwitting (or witting) self-parody is on display everywhere in the film. Joe Exotic's cautious lawyer (he's not the off-screen thug who suggests arson) is prudently lawyerly. The hillbillies who work for Joe are like figures from a Li'l Abner cartoon strip. Other less important participants in the debacle on-film are equally bizarre and grotesque. There's a detective responsible for botching the murder investigation as to the death of Carole's first husband who seems to have darkened his eyes with kohl or some other kind of eye-shadow: this guy poses in a room full of monkey paraphernalia, including a plaster chimp fashioned as a full-size butler bearing upright a platter. A woman escaped from the cult-like group sex of one big cat petting zoo still is surrounded with feline knick-knacks although she's in Ames, Iowa where it seems to be perpetually snowing. Carole's third husband, the ultra-buttoned down, Howard (the small-town undertaker guy) poses on the beach with Carol during their honeymoon apparently on a leash, squatting on the ground like a monkey. (Carole had to fight off her abusive first husband by throwing "a potato at him.") The big cat people are beyond parody: they are uniformly grandiose, narcissistic, histrionic and anti-social. Doc Antle (first name Bhagavan -- which means supposedly "the Lord") makes entrances at his petting zoo on an enormous elephant. He has, at least, five wives and runs his enterprise like a harem -- it's his big cat sex-cult that the girl in Ames, Iowa has escaped. A Cuban big-cat enthusiast models himself on Tony Montana in Scarface -- he's a felon convicted of smuggling cocaine into the country in the guts of huge pythons that he has slit open and stuffed full of the contraband. Lowe, the vicious Vegas hoodlum, devises orgies involving Tiger cubs: "If you've got an big pussy, you can get all the pussy you want," he boasts as he poses with several cubs and a half-dozen beautiful young women. (The documentary doesn't have the guts to display the thousands of hours of sex-tapes involving orgies with big cats as participants that must undoubtedly exist.) The Vegas sub- plot casts a malign light on the scenes in The Hangover involving another thug, Mike Tyson, and his big cat. (And the relationship between carnivorous felines and sex has always been pretty obvious -- a porno-place in Owatonna near the freeway is called "The Lion's Den" and features in its advertisements the profiles of nobly maned big cats.) The ordinary rules don't apply to Big Cat people: we get a peek at Joe Exotic's marriage ceremony in which he weds, not one, but two dullard husbands. One of them is said to have "the biggest feet" that Joe Exotic has ever seen. A dog, of course, is a kind of slave, submissive and eager to please. Dog owners are law-abiding -- they take their pooches for walks always at the same time and following the same path. Anyone who has lived with a dog knows that canines are creatures of habit -- they like things to be exactly the same day-after-day. It doesn't take any charisma to dominate a dog -- the critters are naturally submissive. But a big cat is unpredictable, imperious, feral, and savage -- if a 1000 pound 12 foot long tiger is an emperor, then, what is the man or woman who controls the power and majesty of such an animal? You would have to be some kind of God. The world, the show demonstrates, is full of cruel beasts of prey -- and, then, there are the actual tigers and lions.
The Tiger King was made over five years and, as I have argued, presumably the creation of the film, the camera's relentless surveillance, plays an important role in what happens (and is made to happen.) The show is structured around an opening shot in which Joe Exotic places a call from a jail in Oklahoma, a weird-looking structure with the appearance of a modified grain elevator. (Even the buildings in this show are strange.) The question that the show answers is posed in a simple enough way: how did Joe end up in this plight? It's a fake conundrum -- given the massive illegality documented in just about every frame of the show, the question really should be how was Joe allowed to remain at large for as long he was?
Clearly, the filmmaker began this enterprise as an attempt to document the cruel conditions existing at privately operated big cat "experience" zoos -- essentially petting zoos where people with more money that intelligence get to maul and grope hapless lion and tiger cubs. (It's a pricy form of entertainment: Antle's cadillac big cat ranch charges $399 a patron for an hour abusing a tiger or lion cub.) However, the director quickly realized that the really awful and compelling narrative is only incidentally about the big cats. The people, as is always the case, are far more interesting than brute beasts. And, so, the film shifted focus into chronicling the blood feud with Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin. On all levels, the enterprise is founded on lying. Clearly, the director persuaded Carole and Joe that they would be portrayed in a sympathetic light in the film -- but Carole is shown strutting about in slow-motion while people accuse her of murder and Joe is pathetic on all levels. The abuse of trust that film inadvertently documents is also stunning -- although, probably, the principals are too vain to imagine that they are portrayed as preening monsters. The real tragedy, which the film shows only incidentally, is the way in which the animals are tormented. The huge felines that Carole says require a range of 400 miles are kept in tiny wire cages. (She tells us this while standing incongruously in front of a wretchedly small chicken-wire cage confining a tiger at her "sanctuary." In one scene, a tiger is giving birth while Joe keeps admonishing the camera-man to to "film her ass" -- the tiny cubs are unceremoniously yanked away from the mother using a sort of boat-hook. And when the Vegas crook, Lowe, stuffs a beautiful Siberian tiger cub into a Louis Vuitton suitcase to haul the little animal to one of his orgies, the only proper response is tears -- surely, this kind of thing ought to be illegal and. if regarded from the perspective of the livestock, it's all profoundly tragic. (Schopenhauer said that animals live in a kind of hell in which human beings are the tormenting demons.) At one point, Joe runs out of food -- he collects expired meat from Walmart to feed his animals. His chief zookeeper, a dimwitted yokel who seems like a decent man, is horrified by the fact that the animals are starving and he has nothing to feed them. Joe has tried to breed his way out of trouble with catastrophic consequences. Meanwhile, the avuncular Doc Antle, running the cult up in one of the Carolinas, is said to euthanize tigers and lions by the score to inflate market prices. Someone observes that there are more big cats in captivity in squalid exotic animal zoos than in the wild. Throughout the film, the viewer is rooting for the cats -- if these animals could savage Roy of Siegfried and Roy fame than why don't they tear apart Joe and Carole. (The one successful cat attack from the perspective of the feline, the assault on Joe's hapless Native American zookeeper resulting in the loss of her arm inflicts injury on the wrong target -- the tough girl is one of the few sympathetic characters in the show. And I should note that this figure, a transexual Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran identifies as male -- so read "he" for the pronouns used above.) In one scene, a big cat attacks Lowe -- you really hope that the animal will inflict some serious injuries on this guy. But he manages to fight off the cat with only a few scratches.
The show is justly celebrated. It's very funny and horrifying. My fear is that viewers are taking away the wrong message from The Tiger King. Donald Trump Jr. appeared on TV recently remarking that he was surprised that you could buy a big cat for about $2000 dollars and that he was considering acquiring a few.
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I have now watched the entire seven-part series. A few additional comments, perhaps, are in order.
The fifth episode is the most bizarre and, therefore, the most compelling. Episodes six and seven contain the obligatory prosecution and trial sequences and seem to me to be somewhat rushed, uneven, and confusing. Sinister new characters become predominant and, because cameras are not allowed in Oklahoma courtrooms, the visual element of the show suffers -- the pathetic and majestic large cats are mostly offscreen and Goode has to illustrate the complexities of the government case with reprises of earlier footage, courtroom sketches, bland TV news clips, and cliche flow-charts featuring maps, arrows, and mug-shots of the usual suspects. The trial outcome is never in doubt. Although the lady-prosecutor is appropriately steely and scowls at the camera, the proverbial 'ham-sandwich' could have convicted Joe Exotic on all counts -- as we have seen, everyone was filming everything and there were mountains of evidence against him relative to all charges. Furthermore, the prosecutors enlivened their case with 15 indictments relating to animal cruelty. As we all know, most Americans don't care about crime when its victims are adult humans (you choose your associates and if you choose wrong there are consequences), but torture of animals is a "hot-button" and the feds accused Joe of shooting five tigers execution-style and burying them on his property. He was also convicted of trafficking in exotic animals -- there was no doubt that he was guilty on this count. The controversial allegations involved Joe's scheming to murder Carole Baskin. But, if one ignores the broader context as required in a trial. Joe was obviously guilty of those charges as well. If you want to swim in the sewer of this series (which I recommend), spoilers follow.
Joes' best defense would have been some variety of insanity plea. Episode 5 establishes that Joe is probably bipolar with a grandiose manic phase interspersed with periods of despair, torpor, and impotent rage. Not merely queer, Joe was crazy as a coot. The fifth episode is replete with weird disclosures -- Joe's two husbands are revealed to be drug addicts and not homosexuals. Their attraction to Joe was based on methamphetamine supplied to them in tooth-enamel dissolving quantities and the various toys that gave them as gifts, most notably ATVs, trucks, machine-guns, and high-explosives -- after all, what more could a boy want. Joe admits that he has married two men who are "straight." (One of these guys even gets the receptionist at the zoo pregnant.) One of his husbands, the guy with the huge feet, kills himself. Like everything at the zoo, this is filmed live although the poor fool has stepped off-camera momentarily when he pulls the trigger. We see the aghast response of Joe's campaign manager, a character who would be regarded as seriously deranged in most contexts but here seems relatively sane and sober. Joe has a campaign manager because he runs for governor of the State of Oklahoma -- apparently, he got 19% of the vote. By this point, Joe has lost control of his zoo. The sinister Jeff Lowe has taken control of the enterprise and recruited two other thugs to assist in the operation. These men are characters who seem to have wandered over to Oklahoma from the criminal enterprises featured in the Netflix show Ozark. One of these guys is a fat strip club owner who is always identified in the titles flashed under his interviews as a "businessman." The term needs to be inserted in quotes, because it's highly unclear what business this guy actually operates -- we see him sitting under a huge sign that reads "check-out" in a store-front on one of the dismal, abandoned main streets in small-town Oklahoma. The store has metal shelves on which miscellaneous stuff is sitting -- it's unclear if the stuff for sale or rent or what. Can you rent a can of previously opened paint or a blender? (Maybe the place is a pawn-shop although it's certainly the spookiest and most depressing pawnshop that I've ever seen.) This guy, Garrettson, is not only a felon, but a snitch. The government recruits him to work with Jeff Lowe to engineer the entrapment of Joe Exotic on murder-for-hire charges. Scarier than Garretson is Glover, a fellow with the hardened demeanor of a professional criminal (he's also a felon) and has a little tear-drop tattooed under one of his eyes. Glover is deemed to be an assassin, although, in fact, he's just a crack-head with a shaved skull and a tough-guy swagger. There's no honor among these crooks and they quickly agree to become confidential informants against Joe. The idea seems to be to oust Joe from the zoo as quickly and decisively as possible by having him imprisoned. Glover is supposed to kill Carole Baskin, but he takes the $3000 fee from Joe and squanders it on drugs. This complicates the government case since the murder-for-hire efforts are farcically incompetent. Doc Antle, who seems to know about these things, scoffs that you can't hire a competent murderer for $3000 -- you would have to pay, at least, $30,000 he says with a wink and a nudge. Joe has embezzled funds from the zoo to finance his political campaigns. When he senses that Jeff Lowe and his henchmen are about to drop the 10,000 pound shit-hammer (to use Hunter Thompson's phrase) on him, he flees. We see him transporting hapless tigers in front loaders into nasty-looking trucks to hide the creatures at some undisclosed location in Oklahoma. Joe plans to re-institute his zoo at that place. But the net has closed around him and he ends up in jail. A lot of this is confusing: we don't know if Joe is released on bail or not. (If not, why not? The show implies that he's trapped in the jail during the entire pre-trial period -- undoubtedly a year or more.) We don't know what happens to the animals or the zoo that Joe plans for some "undisclosed" place in Oklahoma. He re-marries and his new husband is pathetically loyal to him -- the film represents him as genuinely loving Joe. The remaining husband from his earlier polygamous marriage is shown in a tattoo shop getting the tat on his belly that reads "exclusive property of Joe Exotic" replaced with a snarling big cat. There's a confusing coda in which we see a young Joe Exotic talking about animal conservation in seemingly sincere terms. At one time, he, at least, persuaded himself that he was acting in the animal's best interests and his pitch is identical with Carole Baskin's publicity about her operation. (Carole and her husband open a bottle of champagne and scarf down shrimp cocktails when Joe is convicted.) Jeff Lowe and his buddies have a falling out over their zoo, intended for the backyard of a casino on the Texas border -- it's not clear whether that place is ever built or opened. Jeff Lowe's girlfriend, Lauren, is pregnant and the loathsome Lowe colludes with the mother of his child to retain a pretty nanny that they can both fuck. There's a heartbreaking scene in which Joe, imprisoned now in a cage himself, muses about his two chimpanzees -- he kept them in tiny separate cages for ten years. When the chimps were rescued and taken to a large-ape sanctuary, we see the poor beasts embracing and kissing. "They were just loving on each other," Joe says, "and I kept them from being what they were, chimpanzees." This is very tragic, although Joe's sincerity is always in doubt, and the show lessens the impact of this revelation by surprising us with the fact that Joe even had chimpanzees.-- we've only glimpsed the primates a couple times in the preceding seven hours.
If a Martian came to earth, that being would conclude that tigers are creatures bred to be pets for human sociopaths in Florida and Oklahoma and other warm states. The Martian would conclude that a few of these cats have escaped and gone feral. There are as many as 10,000 tigers in captivity and about 4000 believed to live in the wild.
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