Like many people, I have spent several hours of my quarantined experience watching Tiger King, the Netflix docu-series that has captured the world’s attention these past few weeks. I found myself simultaneously riveted and revolted. The series draws you in with its depiction of eccentric characters, led by the irrepressible Joe Exotic, and takes you deeply into a sub-culture you probably didn’t even know existed.

 

Upon reflection, I still can’t decide if the whole series is a train wreck or a masterwork.

 

As someone who has spent hundreds of hours studying and writing about documentary films (http://www.siupress.com/books/978-0-8093-3009-6), I have many reservations about the ways in which filmmakers Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin constructed the whole series. One can easily make the case that the subjects were exploited, misrepresented and manipulated in the name of a provocative story. There is another case to be made that the ostensible subjects of the documentary—the animals themselves—are doubly mistreated by their zoo keepers, as well as the filmmakers, who do nothing to intervene, even when they witness abusive behavior.

 

On the other hand, can Goode and Chaiklin be faulted for simply turning their cameras on this outlandish crew of human misfits?  Like other cinéma vérité filmmakers, their enterprise is simply to record the story as it unfolds. Is it their responsibility to stop their blabbermouth subjects from incriminating themselves? (I can only imagine what lawyers watching this series must think.) Should they talk the humans out of presenting themselves as drug-addled, frequently incoherent morons, prone to acts of retribution and violence? Did they have an obligation to report illicit activities to authorities? These are some of the ethical dilemmas that non-fiction filmmakers have grappled with for years.

 

The other challenge they faced was that the original intent of their project—shedding light on the frequently illegal exotic animal industry—morphed into a tale of “murder, mayhem and madness” as the film’s subtitle announces. What may have started as a laudable exposé of a seedy industry (Goode has a long record of animal conservation work), shifted right before their eyes. As Goode has described in various interviews, “truth was stranger than fiction” in this case, and they followed the story where it led. In another interview, Chaiklin notes that “we never in a million years thought it was going to take this whole true-crime twist. It was just never in the cards when we started out. So there were a lot of unexpected turns in this process.”

 

The cesspool in which we find ourselves immersed in this series was different and arguably more compelling than the one the filmmakers were assuming they would find. They understandably chased their new-found subject: showing us people with questionable ethics who “created their own universe” and who convinced a gullible public they were doing right by the animals in their care. Yet, I worry they ultimately chased the wrong story, or at least became seduced by the more sensational one. In the end, the humans overtook the other animals in the film and, just like Joe Exotic, demanded that we look mostly at them. Today the film’s subjects are social media stars, and Exotic’s zoo, now run by one of his many ex-friends, Jeff Lowe, is receiving record numbers of visitors (at least pre-pandemic).

 

Contractually, Netflix obligated the filmmakers to deliver what they had, even though so many storylines were left open, and legal challenges still pending. Can a sequel therefore be far behind? The humans we came to know will still be around. So will the tigers.