Other than the coronavirus and its daily consequences to society, if there’s any more vivid proof needed of Yeats’ line that “things fall apart, the center cannot hold,” it’s in the Netflix series Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness, which has become a recent lockdown viewing favorite in the States. Here, Filipinos might not know what to make of bleached mullet-wearing, gun-loving gay zoo owner Joe Exotic (aka Joseph Allen Maldonado-Passage), but the seven-part series is strangely addictive, with more real-life twists than a Coen Brothers movie, tracing how Exotic amassed a compound of 227 tigers in Oklahoma, his feud with animal rights activist Carole Baskin and others, and the bizarre world of self-styled zookeepers in America, whose businesses crisscross into drugs, cult-like recruitment of young volunteers for sexual favors, and murder-for-hire.
Yeah, there’s a lot more under the hood of your average homegrown American zoo than you ever imagined, and a lot of it comes to light in Tiger King, revolving around a flamboyant, charismatic media figure who develops such a vocal hatred for Florida animal rights figure Baskin that he devotes much of his online streaming program to threatening to kill her. Baskin, who shifted from the same kind of tiger-breeding-for-profit business that Exotic operates to heading a somewhat smug animal rights “rescue” operation, finds herself under the media microscope herself when questions arise about the sudden “disappearance” of her husband, Don Lewis, in 2007. (Joe Exotic claims she killed him and fed the carcass to her tigers.) All this is, as they say, “still under investigation.”
Surrounding this strange orbit of moving parts flying into mere anarchy are bit players who look like extras from the set of Better Call Saul: weird haircuts, missing limbs, soul patches, bad choices in boyfriends, bad tattoos, bad wardrobes. But despite its outward snideness towards a subculture we could easily file under the category of Trump’s America, Tiger King does draw sympathy for some of these characters, those who perhaps were trying to do less harm than others. They are con men and attention seekers, to be sure; but there’s also an inclusivity about Exotic and his string of husbands, his earnest cast of misfit employees, his fondness for tiger cubs and his unrelenting country music videos that act as a Greek chorus to the proceedings. Even running for president seems not so farfetched in this MAGA landscape, where people want what they want. “Is America ready for its first redneck, gun-toting, mullet-sporting, tiger-tackling, gay polygamist president?” Joe asks during his fledgling 2016 run. At Netflix, it appears they are.
As the deal unravels and unfolds over the course of seven episodes (it bears some resemblance to other Netflix series such as The Jinx and Making a Murderer), we come to feel that the only truly innocent parties in this menagerie of crime, bad habits and bad intentions are the wild animals, who only ever wanted to be born free.
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