Tiger King Analysis

Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness

Directed by: Eric Goode, Rebecca Chaiklin

Streaming on Netflix.

The reason this documentary series feels so weird and wacky is because, the character Joe Exotic – is so contradictory, multi-layered and unapologetic. Apart from the character, the world of the show – it is about people who own zoos of big cats, conservationists of big cats and people who work there and for some reason this world has so many characters who are visibly messed up in some way or the other. This world and setting is something that I have never even known before – so it was interesting for me to watch this show.

Joe Exotic is unapologetically narcissist, he is passionate for his work and he does it in his own way, he wants to change things in the world – irrespective of the understanding of his abilities to do so. One admirable quality about Joe Exotic is, if he wants to do something, he’ll go for it without caring about the odds, without caring if he’d make a joke of himself and he just does his own thing. Joe Exotic’s character is portrayed in a way that whether or not he hired someone to kill Carole Baskin, doesn’t really make a difference in our understanding of his character – it might make a huge difference in legal terms but by the way we see him, nothing much changes for us. This, I think, is a character study in the most human and accurate way possible – because we see different accounts on him, we see him talking and behaving, we see what choices he makes, we see what he could be capable of and luckily, he had a reality show where he unabashedly talks without any censor.

Carole Baskin is another character, but we see her primarily from the perspective of Joe and hence I didn’t feel like I could make some sense of her from my own perspective. She has a mystery in her own life as well, but we can’t easily come to conclusions about what kind of a person she might be out of that. The docu-series feels like a fictional TV show, it has several dramatic events happening and it’s a good choice they made to make it into a series rather than a documentary feature. Apparently, during the research process for an intended feature, is when they discovered that there’s lot more content to explore and hence a series.