Tiger King is the series the whole world is talking about. Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton, Sylvester Stallone, Cardi B. and dozens of other film, television and music stars pay homage to the Netflix docusery, Edward Norton, Taka Waititi and Dax Shepard they would like to play the protagonist in a biopic, even Donald trump had to stop a press conference on Covid 19 to answer a question about Joe Exotic, protagonist of the success of Tiger King. How is it possible that a documentary series managed to drive the whole world crazy in a few weeks?
King of tigers
A first easy answer can be obtained by looking at him, Joe Exotic, in the century Joseph Allen Schreibvogel Maldonado-Passage. At first glance, it seems like the parody of an Oklahoma redneck, with his mule, his passion for weapons and explosives, his improbable clothes. But there is even more: he is gay, polygamous, has released country albums, has run for President of the United States and more seriously as Governor of his State. And then there are the tigers, of course. Hundreds of tigers and other big cats, exhibited in his Wynnewood Zoo, pampered like kittens and adored like children.
Joe could have been just a side note in history that the documentary filmmaker Eric Goode he meant the trafficking of large reptiles in the United States. In 2014, in an interview with the owner of a rare pet store, his attention was drawn to a customer who claimed to have a newly purchased snow leopard in the van.
What was a snow leopard doing in warm Florida? Curiosity led Goode to seek information on the many big cat lover which seemed to appear almost everywhere, and its first stop was Wynnewood, one of the largest private themed zoos in the United States. From the first meeting with Joe, it was immediately clear that he should have been at the center of his new story.
A “classic” American history
That of the Tiger King could also have been “alone” one of the great stories of American revenge: a very young rape victim, refused by the family after his release and surviving a suicide attempt, Joe found in animals a new reason to live and hope for the future.
Together with his brother Garold, he ran a pet store in Texas for over ten years, despite some problems with the law due to his extroverted personality, and when his brother died in an accident, he decided to open a zoo in his memory: Garold Wayne Exotic Animals Memorial Park. Joe recruited most of the zoo’s employees from the socially excluded, the least of them, the homeless and the addicts who had nowhere else in the world. Despite living conditions on the verge of deterioration and many accidents everyone seemed to love him, his charisma was undeniable as well as his inventiveness, which led him to organize. show with puppies across the united states, to set up an improvised web TV, to look for any possibility of impersonating an artist, in the hope of snatching a smile from those in front.
The great enemy
But Joe Exotic obviously also has a dark side. There is drugs, there is the difficulty of discovering yourself and having a sincere relationship with others but above all there is the great enemy: Carole baskin.
Billionaire after the mysterious disappearance of her husband, founder of an animal sanctuary, Carole Baskin is the face and the soul of the Big Cat Rescue, which is responsible for exposing all those who exploit big cats in the United States for profit. Another character with more shadows than lights with whom it is almost possible to show empathy, but whom Joe Exotic made a real obsession: he made constant teasing, threats, defamation, until the attempt to organize a murder which at the end becomes the central element of the documentary, and for which Joe is now in prison.
A series of events
The real secret of Tiger King is that it manages to highlight a world that seems too absurd to be true, and that exists not only, but it is also bigger than you think and dotted with a thousand other characters who do not become protagonists simply because that the folly of Joe Exotic he constantly went a step further.
y Doc bhagavan, a kind of sacred polygamist also, seduction of very young girls who end up working in his zoo and become his wives and who become in a way the respectable face of the owners of big cats. y Jeff Lowe, swindler swindler who first seems to support Joe and finally manages to steal his business, there is the former drug trafficker who now has a secret zoo watched by dozens of armed guards, there are ex-convicts hired killers and zoo staff who have neither arms nor legs, there are absurd suicides and desperate love affairs. y a whole human circus that even tigers and leopards seem to look incredulous from their cages.
And even that would not be enough to build a docuserie with such success if there was not also a story so tight, so concentrated, so coherent. The great thing about Tiger King is that all this immense park of follies is told with a regular impulse, who cannot even deviate from this chaotic alternation of events.
Tiger King has raised criticism from those who have claimed that the series leads to sympathy with a criminal guilty of a thousand crimes, but the fascination of the charismatic madman this is nothing new in this docuserie, and when you look at it, the narrative tries to focus on something different. If Eric Goode does not fully condemn Joe Exotic and his movement, without acknowledging any of his faults, it is because his implicit condemnation is addressed elsewhere: to a society which makes all this possible, which he even feels normal, this that makes it flourish such tragic and grotesque realities.
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