"Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness" (2020) Review
Structure is crucial in a documentary.
Structure is crucial when you’re telling any kind of story, but structure doesn’t come up as much as you’d think it would when talking about documentaries. It’s a vitally important part of the process because it involves deciding not only what you’re going to show, but what you’re not going to show until later. While documentaries can use editing, music, and select clips to tell a particular story, they are using (mostly) real footage, and if you’re looking at a real story in its totality, choosing what information to deliberately withhold is one of the most important decisions you can possibly make.
To put it another way, the HBO documentary series The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst would have been a hell of a lot different if a certain interview clip in the final episode had been shown at the beginning. Simply put, building to key reveals of information is what damn good documentaries (and, especially true crime documentaries) do, and this one fundamental rule defines the power of Netflix’s Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness.
Tiger King is structured entirely around reveals that, in a normal documentary, would be the ending. It feels like Robert Durst’s hot mic moment happens roughly every 15 to 20 minutes during this series, which runs for seven episodes. Tiger King drops atom bomb after atom bomb, shattering every dynamic it’s established with such an efficiency that the concept of truth itself becomes murky. None of these narrators are as reliable as you’d like, and none of this story’s major players are heroes. Not one.
I’m getting way ahead of myself, but I’m not sure what I can even reasonably say about Tiger King without giving away its most gonzo moments, which is absolutely this diabolical clockwork machine’s greatest strength. I’ll talk a bit vaguely here, and if it seems like I’m leaving stuff out… You have no idea.
The “tiger king” of the title is a reference to Joe Exotic, a polyamorous gay man that runs a roadside zoo called G.W. Zoo in Oklahoma. Joe Exotic feels like a parody of a character that was rejected from a Christopher Guest movie for being too outlandish, and if you have any familiarity with him at all, it’s through the John Oliver show Last Week Tonight, where he was jokingly mentioned as a candidate for president in 2016 (which is covered in horrifying detail much later on in Tiger King). The G.W. Zoo is a bit ramshackle, to put it kindly, breeding exotic cats for zoos and collectors across the country.
The series tells you upfront that Joe Exotic is awaiting trial for attempting to hire a hitman to kill his rival, Carole Baskin. Carole Baskin runs her own organization called Big Cat Rescue, that specifically houses exotic cats bred in the U.S., and does not breed them. In fact, Carole supports legislation to ban the private ownership of exotic cats.
It’s easy to see how the two quickly became enemies, but there’s much more to their rivalry then you can possibly imagine. After all, this does end with one of them trying to hire a hitman to kill the other. What might not be as clear is just how massive, chaotic, and mystifying the entire “exotic cats” subculture of the United States really is, and Tiger King’s many deep tangents into this world are beyond illuminating.
You know a docu-series is completely batshit when a man who helped inspire the 1983 Scarface film is only featured for less than 10 minutes, and casually mentions that he used to smuggle cocaine into the United States by stuffing bags of the stuff into snakes. That is mentioned for roughly 20 seconds before the series has to move on and divulge even more unbelievable information, and at any time you think “This can’t possibly get any stranger,” it will.
The most shocking thing here is just how dark this story really is. While you can’t help but compare the real-life story of this series to something like a Coen Brothers film, there are very real casualties throughout the story, and not just neglected animals. There are human bystanders here that have endured terrible things because of their proximity to these lunatics, and there’s one in particular that feels like a portrait of a totally shattered mother. The last time I saw her face, I felt something awful in the pit of my stomach.
It also doesn’t help that each of the major players in this story is corrupted in one way or another. All of them have a shady past (and, in some cases, a shady present), and just when you start liking one of these folks, you inevitably learn some terrible thing about them. The players off to the side occasionally merit sympathy, but the big players invite the opposite, and constantly.
Still, it manages to be darkly humorous more often than not. Joe Exotic is such a fucking relentless bastard that you just can’t believe what he’s doing, even if you’re watching it. It’s one thing for me to tell you that Joe Exotic has several country music videos, it’s a whole other thing for me to tell you what one of those videos features. It’s one thing for me to tell you that an employee at his zoo has her arm mangled by a tiger, it’s another to see just how Joe Exotic tells his customers what’s going on. His behavior defies human logic and decency roughly a hundred times over.
If there is one key criticism to be made of Tiger King, it’s that it doesn’t exactly have some larger point beyond entertainment for the most part. It does engage in some tricky discussions of animal rights and conservation, but it only brings up the bare minimum (and the conservation angle is mostly relegated to the last minutes of the entire series). However, the whole story, and all of the grisly details, are so entertaining and so masterfully arranged, that you probably won’t notice that until you’re finished.
I won’t go into any more details here, at the risk of giving up too much. Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness is phenomenal entertainment and one of the best-structured docu-series out there. It’s my personal favorite Netflix docu-series to date, and since we all have a LOT of extra time on our hands, you could watch far worse things for nearly
