The internet produces viral phenomena in our time in much the same way that Pogs or those Coca Cola branded yo-yos were a playground phenomenon for all of five minutes when I was but a wee bairn. OK, maybe not that wee, I was always a bit of a chunker. Nothing causes as much hilarity in these modern times as banding together with our electronic brethren to chuckle heartily over a video of an animal engaging in normal animal behaviour to which we assign human attributes because we're desperate to not be the only species on Earth that acts like jackasses for no apparent reason. A dank meme (as the more interweb savvy amongst you undoubtedly never say unless it's ironically) has the power to bring whole online communities together, usually at the expense of some poor sap who was just going about their day. At the moment though, it appears that we are free to blame everything on that bitch Carol fucking Baskin.
Of course I've watched Tiger King on Netflix; I didn't even do it for the blog; my wife put it on out of curiosity and we ended up bingeing the whole lot over the space of two days. Finally, a positive to come out of social distancing. The trouble is that there is very little way of talking about what makes Tiger King so compelling without spoiling those very is nigh on impossible.
Netflix is host to about a million documentaries, predominantly concerning serial killers and true crime it seems. A lot of these are sensationalist toss, some are quite effective investigations of their subjects. Tiger King somehow manages to fall spectacularly into both categories, partially because if you wrote this as a script for a movie, there isn't a reputable Hollywood producer who'd touch it with a barge pole. If there was some sort of award for Limited Series Documentary Which Manages To Get Increasingly More Insane With Every Episode, then Tiger King would be a shoo in.
On the surface, and for the better part of the first episode, Tiger King would appear to be a fairly straightforward Big Cat owner versus Conservationist fly-on-the wall documentary between Joe Exotic and the afore-mentioned Carol Baskin. It's pretty clear form the outset that this pair are not on good terms, but more on that later. Joe Exotic (unsurprisingly not his real name) owns a private zoo somewhere in the backwaters of the Southern States of America which comprises of more lions, tigers and bears (oh my!) than Dorothy could shake a reasonably shakeable stick at. He does all your fairly common morally dubious stuff like selective breeding and controversial cub-petting tours whilst Carol owns a substantially smaller sanctuary for former pets (apparently there are more big cats in captivity in the US than wild in the entire world. Way to go 'Murica). She doesn't like his unscrupulous business practices, he doesn't like the fact she's trying to put him out of unscrupulous business, so far so what? Hold on to your leopard print britches because the ride is bumpy.
To call Joe flamboyant would be a disservice to flamboyancy; Joe sports one of the finest throwback mullets you will ever see, performs country music songs with a degree of accomplishment and dare I say even flare, some of his zoo gift shop's best selling items are brightly coloured, animal print, lamé budgie smugglers, he's never seen without his trusty sidearm, and would appear to have done at least one professional photo-shoot topless with both of his polygamous husbands (in which we can see he has some pretty terrible tattoos including some bullet holes in his chest). Carol on the other hand comes off as a slightly jittery Earth Mother with bug-eyes and a penchant for giggling at inappropriate moments. Polar ends of the spectrum. The supporting cast are all just as fascinating; a former magician with massive superiority complex who changed his name to the Hindu for Lord, the toothless redneck who is at least honest about being a bit of a dick, the possible gangster who is easily 50 but still dressing like the host of early 2000s MTV Motobike-pimping programme, and an impressionable youth who seems genuine but is probably going to find out soon nothing is straightforward in Joe Exotic's world. At what point does this start getting really crazy? Well, I don't want to ruin it for you but the following are all things: copyright infringement, allegations of boots laced with a substance to incite an tiger attack, provocative country music videos, passed-sell-by-date meat by the truck load, a missing husband who may or may not have been fed to a tiger, podcast death threats, exploited animals, exploited workers, exploited volunteers, massive drug use, plenty of guns and explosives, someone losing an arm, an awkward interview with a completely intoxicated former zookeeper, an equally awkward interview with someone having a bath, a convenient arson, a suicide, a weird sex cult, a murder-for-hire investigation and enough conspiracies to fill three more seasons, at least. It's exhausting.
The main takeaway from all this is that it would appear that if this is an accurate representation of large-scale exotic pet owners in America then they're all assholes to some extent. Nobody comes out looking squeaky-clean at the end but I'll let you make your own mind up on that; Tiger King is a thing that needs to be seen to be believed, and even then you might not believe it. Just sit back, relax and maybe you'll find out why suddenly everyone on Facebook is calling Carol Baskin a bitch.
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