Why Has The Tiger King Captured The World's Attention?
If ever there was a winner in these dark days of Covid-19, it would have to be the producers of Netflix’s most talked about show, The Tiger King. If you’ve never heard of it, then you may want to crawl back to that rock you’ve been living under for the past three weeks, because you can’t currently move without seeing a meme, or hearing someone refer to ‘that bitch Carol Baskin’. In fact, if you haven’t watched it then stop reading this blog right now and go and do it. Firstly, there will definitely be some spoilers and secondly? It’s the best damn thing to hit our screens in a long time.
You get the feeling that the major viewing platforms currently - Disney+, Amazon, Netflix - all sat down and thought about what they could do to make life under lockdown that bit more bearable. Disney+ generously released Frozen II early (it’s currently on in our house for the 2,798,529th time), and Amazon really upped their game with new releases onto Prime. And what did Netflix do? Well, they leant back, cracked a beer and said, ‘Let me tell y’all about a little show we’ve been making called The Tiger King…”
Not since Making a Murderer has a low budget (relatively) documentary made such a splash on the social consciousness. But why? What is it about gun-toting, gay-lovin’, sequin-wearing, polyamorous rednecks who make a living exploiting some of nature’s most magnificent animals that’s got us so engrossed? Never mind…I just read that back. Throw in some drugs, a arm ripped right off, a psychopathic con-man, a cub-killing (allegedly) zoo-keeper who also appears to be running a sex cult and that fuckin’ bitch Carol Baskin and it’s the perfect storm for ratings-smashing TV.b Truth is, as they say, stranger than fiction and that has never been more true in this instance.
It’s hard to find characters you actually like in the documentary barring perhaps one of the only employees of Joe Exotic’s who doesn’t appear to be addicted to meth, John Reinke. All the others seem to be caricatures of characters that the Coen brothers would have created if they collaborated with Quentin Tarantino and the writers of The Birdcage. Joe Exotic is, by far, the most charismatic and endearing but it’s hard to balance his outlandish charm with the fact that he’s sexual predator who gets straight man to fulfil his sexual fantasies by plying them with meth. The fact that he marries 3 of them (two of them at the same time) does nothing to hide the fact that it’s all a bit fucking weird.
Dr. Bhagavan Antle is a shocking excuse for someone who claims to love animals with a zoo full of fat tigers, lions and, yes, ligers (wtf?), a backyard stuffed with the dead bodies of baby cubs who got too expensive to keep once they were too big to pet (allegedly) and a bevy of vulnerable women who he expects to work 27 hours a day before they get to shag him silly. The fact that he rides around his park on an elephant serves only to reinforce what an absolutely cock-womble this man is and, without any of the charisma of Joe Exotic, he’s forever confined to the history books as a massive twat.
Of course, there’s also that bitch Carol Baskin who, frankly, is the worst of them all. While the others at least own their shit and admit to be doing it because they think big cats are cute and can make them a shit tonne of cash, ’that bitch Carol Baskin’ hides behind a creep AF veneer of ‘conservation’. The fact that her tigers, lions and ligers are still in cages and that she still charges people to come a see them, appears to be an irony that’s lost on her and while Joe Exotic at least pays the people who work on his zoo ($100 a week), Carol exploits her staff who work all hours god sends, including Christmas, by calling them volunteers. It wouldn’t feel like quite the kick in the teeth it does if she didn’t spend all day riding around on a fucking bicycle, wearing a cat hat and shouting, “Hello all my cats and kitties…” to everyone.
I’m just surprised one of her workers didn’t hire a hit man first.
And that’s the supposedly the point of the documentary: who hired the hit man to kill Carol Baskin? Joe Exotic has gone down for it (22 years!) but there are other bit-players in the documentary. Jeff Lowe and his goon side kick Allen Glover are almost 100% responsible for the hit and for framing Joe - who may be magnetic to watch but will never be accused of being the sharpest tool in the shed. But actually, it really doesn’t matter who killed ‘that bitch Carol Baskin’ (well, it probably does if your Joe Exotic) but what really matters is the practise of private zoos in America and the astonishing fact that there are only 4,000 of these creatures living in their natural habitat but up to 10,000 being kept as ‘cash-cats’ across the USA.
TO LISTEN TO MORE ABOUT THE TIGER KING, CHECK OUT MY PODCAST.