80 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 13, 2020
“Tiger King,” a kaleidoscope of terrible taste, is prestige trash.
ON TELEVISION
WILD THINGS
“Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness,” on Netflix.BYDOREENS T. FÉLIXILLUSTRATION BY PAUL WINDLEW
ho deserves the directing credit
for “Tiger King: Murder, May-
hem and Madness,” which, in the long
last week of March, became Netflix’s
most popular title? The answer isn’t
straightforward. True, it was the docu-
mentarians Eric Goode and Rebecca
Chailkin, along with a team of presum-
ably traumatized editors, who tamed
five years’ worth of footage, new and
found, into this outrageous and outra-
geously viewable seven-part true-crime
series. But the subject of “Tiger King,”
Joseph Maldonado-Passage, who was
born Joseph Schreibvogel and goes by
Joe Exotic, is at least as responsible for
bringing a unity of vision to the show.
I might have passed over “Tiger King”
had not so many memes appeared on
my timeline, including one, framed as
a “coming out of quarantine” fantasy, in
which Exotic, pacing with the aid of a
crutch, a big cat behind him, says, mat-
ter-of-factly, “I’m broke as shit,” and
“I’ve had some kinky sex. I have tried
drugs.” Eyes circled with kohl, silver
hoops like binder rings in his lobes, Ex-
otic is a Scheherazade of country Okla-
homa stock, a lonely cult leader in the
fetching getup of a zookeeper. He is
also an outsider artist with an ability to
hold hostage many species—big cats,
boyfriends and husbands, employees
and documentarians.Goode, a wealthy conservationist,
once ran his own menagerie, the infa-
mous Manhattan night club Area, where
he partied with Madonna, Warhol, and
Basquiat in the eighties. Goode and
Chailkin were originally planning to
make a film about the underworld of
endangered-animal smugglers when, in
2014, as they searched for collectors of
rare reptiles in Florida, other charis-
matic megafauna caught their attention.
As Goode recently told Rolling Stone,
“What fascinated Rebecca and I was
the ‘Best in Show’ aspect, where the
people are almost more interesting than
the exotic animals they’re keeping.”
Goode’s choice of inspirational com-
parison—a mockumentary—is telling;
in “Tiger King,” from the edge of the
frame, he delights in the near-unbeliev-
able eccentricities of his subjects. “Oh,
she’s dressed perfectly,” he murmurs
when Exotic’s nemesis, Carole Baskin,
the proprietor of Big Cat Rescue, a Flor-
ida animal sanctuary, first appears, draped
in her signature leopard print.
The World Wildlife Fund estimates
that there may be more tigers living in
captivity in the U.S. than in the wild.
The creatures at Exotic’s Garold Wayne
Zoo, a park near Wynnewood, Okla-
homa, are caged and fed roadkill; the
employees, among them drifters fed on
Walmart dumpster meat, fare about as
well. There is a dark comedy in the doc-
umentary’s elliptical form, which pairs
older footage of Exotic’s acolytes along-
side more contemporary interviews. Since
leaving Exotic, John Finlay, Exotic’s for-
mer husband, who is inexplicably shirt-
less in interviews, has had his pelvis tat-
too—“Privately Owned Joe Exotic,” in
large script—covered up. Human suffer-
ing is dangled before the viewer like raw
meat; one former animal handler has a
missing forearm that goes, for an agoniz-
ing forty-eight minutes, unmentioned.
Rick Kirkham, a former reporter for
“Inside Edition,” decamped to the G.W.
Zoo to shoot what he and Exotic hoped
would be a hit reality show, “Joe Exotic,
Tiger King.” “He was like a mythical
character living out in the middle of
bumfuck Oklahoma,” Kirkham says.
Kirkham’s cast might also have included
Exotic’s fellow-zookeeper Bhagavan
(Doc) Antle, a burly tiger enthusiast
who styles himself as a guru, and who,
depending on whom you ask, has three,