Tiger King: Why Our Favorite Distraction is Actually a Call to Reality
I was as relieved as anyone when Tiger King came out on Netflix. An eccentric zoo keeper goes to prison for murder for hire? An opportunity to cringe at something other than the federal government’s gross mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic? Count me in!
In case you haven’t watched, the Tiger King, aka Joe Exotic, is a bleach-blond mulleted zoo owner of murderous repute. At first, I thought: Wow, this bat-shit crazy, tiger breeding, gay polygamist who still finds time to star in his own country music videos is really, TRULY, living his best life. I even felt a pang of FOMO. Why didn’t I have a tiger? Or two husbands? Or a cache of pop country ballads to narrate my life in song? I felt it was a personal failing on my part. What Joe Exotic seemed to prove was that failure to achieve one’s dreams comes not from lack of intelligence or education or good judgement — clearly Joe Exotic had none of that. It was a failure of tenacity and drive. It was a failure to believe in yourself beyond your wildest limits. Reality be damned.
Joe Exotic isn’t the only big-cat-loving demigod in the pantheon of private zoos. Turns out Joe Exotic is just a low-rent Doc Antle, who has an even more sophisticated operation and a harem of wives. Then there’s Joe’s nemesis, Carol Baskin of Big Cat Rescue, whose operation looks about the same, minus the polygamy and illicit cat breeding. Carol Baskin is on an animal rights crusade to stop the domestic breeding of big cats and shut down Joe Exotic’s operation specifically.
The more we learn about these tiger kings and queens, the worse it inevitably gets. Not only are their employees grossly underpaid, each appears to be running their own breed of cult. Joe recruits drug addicts and recent ex-cons, Doc Antle prefers to hire 17-year-old virgins at $100 a week, and Carol operates her multi-million-dollar operation with an entirely volunteer staff. She also may have murdered her first husband and fed him to tigers. Allegedly. It just goes to show how far the cult of personality and buying into your own bullshit will get you, especially if you’re willing to prey on vulnerable people and animals along the way. I was disillusioned, sure, but still impressed.
And then Tiger King Joe Exotic commits the worst of many fatal errors and gets embroiled in legal battles with Carol Baskin. He spends half a million dollars fighting her lawsuits, and she spends twice as much pursuing him, until it more or less costs Joe the zoo. (He’s ultimately swindled out of it, when, in an attempt to hide his assets from Carol, he puts it in the name of pseudo-investor Jeff Lowe.) Amid his downfall, rather than trying to save the zoo and care for the animals, Joe embezzles money from the zoo to spend on farcical political campaigns for president and governor of Oklahoma. Turns out Trump was only the second most ill-conceived candidate of 2016.
Then shit starts to slide downhill real quick. Joe hatches a hair-brained plot to have Carol Baskin murdered. We learn that neither of Joe’s husbands are gay, just desperate meth addicts. Imprisoned by Joe and his addiction, one of them, 23-year-old Travis Maldonado, shoots himself in the head. And behind all that cuddly cub petting is the grim truth that while cubs are profitable, tigers are not. I’ll let you do the math as to why there are so many cubs, so few tigers.
In the end, Joe Exotic is imprisoned for animal abuse and attempted murder. As a sort of addendum, he vengefully lashes out at whoever he can, reporting other big-cat owners to the authorities, the desperate grasping of a drowning man bringing everyone else down with him.
What I had hoped would be a madcap distraction from reality was actually a gross metaphor for it. Tiger King is a cautionary tale about the latest iteration of the American Dream, exemplified by Joe Exotic and his high-powered analog Donald Trump, in which the will to succeed lies at the juncture between rugged individualism and megalomania. But no matter what we believe about ourselves and our destinies, no matter how many people partake in our collective hallucination, Tiger King proves that ultimately reality will not conform to our vision. Donald Trump is finally facing a reality he cannot spin or deflect: a virus whose destructiveness will prevail, no matter how he tries to downplay it, or claim that we’re invincible. Met with a reality he can’t negotiate, Trump simply eschews responsibility. Leave it to the states. At a task force briefing on Saturday, Trump admitted, “There will be a lot of death.”
The boundless egos of people like Joe Exotic and Donald Trump prevail at a direct cost to other people. Those who believed in the Tiger King were exploited, bankrupted, or driven to suicide. And who will have to pay for Trump’s early downplaying of the virus and current refusal to coordinate supplies and relief on a national level? It will be the medical workers who fall sick because they don’t have protective equipment. It will be the thousands in New York City who will die in the coming days if Trump continues to shrug off the state’s pleas for ventilators. And it will be the millions more who fall sick and die as the virus spreads to other parts of the nation, where stay-at-home orders and the wearing of masks, both deemed necessary by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, and the CDC, have been declared by the president as optional.
Trump won’t don a mask because of his delusion that he too is a kind of Tiger King. But Trump can afford to risk illness in order to appear superhuman, because if he contracts COVID-19, he’ll have every resource at his disposal. The same cannot be said for the people influenced by his cavalier attitude.
Humans are the only animals can leverage an inflated self-image to rise to the top of the food chain. The rest of the animal kingdom has to survive in the real world. At the center of Tiger King, what drives these private zoos and internecine feuds, is our obsession with these majestic predators. We admire lions and tigers for their raw power and wild, indomitable nature. We prize them for the very qualities we take from them when we breed them to live in cages and use them as playthings. Today, more tigers exist in captivity the United States than do in the wild. Breeding caged tigers will not revive the wild population, regardless of how many cats Carol Baskin rescues, or how many cubs Doc Antle euthanizes in his crematorium. The problem with saving the species lies outside the confines of our Netflix soap opera, out there in the wild, in the habitats we are destroying. The internal battles between the lords of the private zoos reminds one of billionaires competing to colonize space, instead of reducing their companies’ carbon foot prints or fighting climate change on Earth. There are real tigers to be saved, and they aren’t in the United States. There is a real world to be saved, and it’s the one we’re destroying.
That Elon Musk would rather escape to Mars rather than stay here and fight climate change with the rest of us reveals that social distancing is, in a sense, nothing new. In the late capitalist American Dream, success is defined by social distance from regular folks, who are becoming increasingly unable to maintain middle-class standards of living. This is why Jeff Bezos, richest man in the world, after receiving intense criticism for his dearth of philanthropic giving, has donated .08% of his 130 billion dollars to food banks to help during coronavirus. Mark Zuckerberg had the audacity to ask members of Facebook to donate to a COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund with a $10 million price match guarantee. When millions of Americans have lost their jobs or their retirement, Mark Zuckerberg wants us to meet him half way.
The problem is not only that people like Zuckerberg and Bezos and Trump exist, but worse, that many people aspire to be like them. Just like I thought it would be cool to wear Liberace shirts and run with the big cats, plural husbands by my side. But it’s all an illusion. The real shit is not in a zoo or on Mars, but here on our own Earth and its habitats, and in the everyday human interactions we’re now being deprived of. The American Dream in which we measure ourselves in degrees of separation is weakening our bonds with humanity, the planet, and reality itself.
The American Dream needs to be scaled back. The heights we aim for should be things like home ownership, debt eradication, and access to medical care. Instead of striving to tower above it all, we should find meaningful connection to the world and to each other. Because whether Musk or Trump or Joe Exotic exemplifies your flavor of success, the aspiration to be like them makes us dismissive of their wrongdoings. We are in this mess in part because of people who overestimated their self-importance and imagined themselves into roles they could not fill. We are placing our lives in the hands of people who have weak bonds to life beyond themselves. When social distancing is over, we need to get back to reality and the real world that is slipping through our grasp.
