Tiger King
I watched this mostly because once the memes started cropping up, I wanted to understand what the fuck was going on.
Wow, what a show.
As I was watching this disastrous series of events, I couldn't help but think 'could any society other than the U.S.A. have produced this particular group of rogues, with these particular personality quirks and character traits?'
I don't think this scenario is possible anywhere else in the world. Yay us, I suppose.
The absolute ego of these people is so crazy that you couldn't make this shit up and have it be received as anything other than the blackest of comedy.
Burying Travis on the G.W. Zoo grounds beneath a pile of ATVs is like something you'd expect the Cohen Brothers to write. Same with Joe preying on Travis' desire to be cared for by telling him that liking big dicks in porn means you're probably gay-this is pure Cohen Brothers level stuff.
In fact, if you'd have told me the story of Tiger King before I knew this all really happened, I'd have said to cast Sean Penn as Joe Exotic, Danny McBride as Doc Antle, Kathy Bates as Carole (Fuckin') Baskin and Michael Emerson as Jeff Lowe.
It is so easy to get caught up in the drama, mesmerized by the clash of wills, bewildered by the desire to win and hypnotized by the swirling chaos of so many lies that you are legitimately unable to know the truth that it utterly beggars all belief. And, like everyone pulled into the abyss of this game of animal kingdom thrones, it's so easy to forget that the real victims in all this are the animals.
All of them are devious, cunning masterminds with long term goals with the exception of Joe Exotic. Hear me out.
I think Joe is very much like the bystanders and the audience. I think, at the start, he was the only one with a pure motivation. But you watch this guy go through all of this and you see just how alone and abandoned he felt from a young age . Being gay with his upbringing, in his environment, at his age, must have been an incredibly isolated experience. Everything he did was precisely because he had a lot of love in his heart wanted to be loved back.
The garish outfits. The country music (dubious if he's even singing it but I'm inclined to believe it if only because the show peeled back so many other layers of his life that if this wasn't real, it probably would have exposed this, too), the outlandish segments he filmed, the king's throne, cuddling with tigers and other big game and wild animals, seeking acceptance and love from vulnerable human strays that he took in. The politics, the desire to defeat Carole Baskin. All of it came from loneliness.
But as the walls closed in on Joe, he became more and more desperate and didn't see that he was becoming the worst out of all of them. Compromising every morel tenet that he professed to uphold because being successful and adored was more important than doing what was best for the animals and his workers. He was a bigger enemy to himself than any of the people he found himself pitted against. Pure Greek tragedy.
There was a lot of stuff to be learned from how big cats and other wild animals are treated at these places, how these businesses cut corners (like the Walmart meat donations) to stay open and of all the shady under the table shit (like selling off tiger cubs just to keep the money flowing). This show is an indictment on the way business is conducted in the American heartland in niche industries. It makes me wonder how any of these places are going to survive in a post-COVID world. Like many niche industries (like comic books, for example), they were walking the edge of economic collapse and were absolutely NOT buffered for this kind of financial downturn.
Even if you don't care about this subject matter, it is an utterly absorbing portrait into the human psyche.
I'm not saying it's the 'greatest documentary ever made', but it's one of the few that isn't specifically a history related subject that I was glad to have watched. I totally understand the hype.
Also, Carole Baskin 1000000% killed her husband and Joe Exotic, for all his flaws and mistakes, was totally set up by Jeff Lowe. And Doc Antle is the most evil out of all of them.
