The Reason Why Tiger King Is So Addictive

Joe Exotic in Tiger King. Image courtesy of Netflix.

Netflix has a new hit series out called Tiger King - and seemingly everyone is binge-watching it this week while in self-quarantine. But just what it is that makes Tiger King so damn good? I have a few thoughts.

One is that the story is so incredibly absurd that it’s pretty much impossible to look away from. The series is a documentary that digs into the world of big cat and exotic animal collectors in the United States, a world that until yesterday I never really knew existed nor had thought much about. But apparently, every single person who collects big cats is fucking bat-shit insane. The focus of the show is Joe Exotic, aka the Tiger King, a charismatic, flamboyant gay redneck running a zoo in the middle of “bum fuck Oklahoma” with 227 tigers in it. Joe is, in a word, indescribable. I don’t think it would be possible to convey in writing what kind of person Joe Exotic is - you just have to witness it for yourself.

Then there is Bhagavan “Doc” Antle, another big cat collector and zoo owner in Florida who is also operating a kind of cult where all the animal handlers are buxom females who are also his sex slaves. His doctorate, by the way, is in mystical science. Joe Exotic’s nemesis is a woman named Carole Baskin, who runs a big cat rescue operation and has been trying to get people like Joe shut down for engaging in animal cruelty and illegal profiteering from the breeding of tiger cubs.

She would, under normal circumstances, be the heroine of this story - except that her husband mysteriously disappeared in the 1990s, and she may or may not have been involved (after the show aired, Carole issued a fairly coherent blog post refuting most of the issues raised in the series, but it’s still all very weird). The most normal of these big cat collectors is a former cocaine dealer named Mario Tabraue who may have been the inspiration for Tony Montana in Scarface and at one point describes how he sort of accidentally became involved in dismembering an ATF informant. He was sentenced to 100 years of prison time but only served 12 after winning on appeal, at which point he returned to his “animal habit.”

With so many utterly bizarre characters how could this show not be compulsively addictive viewing? And we haven’t even gotten to the part where Joe runs for president and then governor, or when he hires a hitman to kill Carole (although it seems probable he was set up by a villain who is introduced during the tail-end of the series). There is also an onscreen, possibly accidental suicide. My point is that, if we just take the events portrayed in the series at face value, we already have the kind of trainwreck reality show type soap opera, filled with ridiculously out-sized personalities, that is impossible to look away from.

But that is merely the surface-level stuff. There is actually something much deeper and more profound that this show gets at obliquely, something which is at the heart of the American experiment. Why exactly are there a bunch of rich weirdos - mainly in the American Midwest and Florida - buying and selling and hoarding big cats and other exotic animals? Most of them are doing it to turn a profit, running these zoos and illegally breeding, selling and transporting tiger cubs around the country. They buy large tracts of land, hoard guns and ammo, and then they basically just do whatever they want and are rewarded based on the depth and skill of their marketing. By and large, the authorities leave them alone.

This is, in a way, a very simple and accurate reflection of the American Dream in microcosm. One of the pillars of American myth-making is this idea that people should be left to their own devices to pursue whatever interests and ends they wish. If there’s a market for it, then they can enjoy the profits. Well, when you create such a loosely regulated incentive structure than yeah, of course all the weirdos, freaks and geniuses are going to come out of the woodwork and try anything under the sun. It turns out that breeding and selling and exhibiting exotic animals can be one such lucrative niche idea, if you’ve got the marketing chops for it. I think that is why most of these big game collectors are such bizarre, ego-driven trainwrecks.

But who is going to stop them? That is the unspoken question in this series. Carole Baskin purports to be trying to stop them, but she is also profiting from these animals; she’s just branded herself differently. The ending title card informs us that there are more privately held tigers in the United States than in all of the wild. A remarkable statistic, considering tigers are an endangered species. But I think ultimately that is what makes this series so resonant. Yes, on the surface it’s extremely salacious, full of colorful characters and more pulp melodrama than even the writers at Days of our Lives could probably handle.

But it also captures a natural outcome of American style capitalism and individualism, wherein people who are shameless and charismatic enough can do whatever they want on privately owned land to turn a profit. And the state stays out of it, and people even applaud them for it, rewarding them with money and fame and followers. That is what is so deeply interesting about Tiger King, aside from the obvious stuff. It very skillfully reveals to us the thin line between the American Dream and the American Nightmare, and you never quite know which one you are in.