If you think that your life is terrible right now, then Netflix has the perfect antidote. Their latest documentary series Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness lives up to its full title. It has plenty of everything, including footage of tigers wandering around as Joe “Exotic” Maldonado-Passage (formerly Schreibvogel) sings his environmentally conscious country songs about how animals deserve to be loved and respected in front of a green screen.
If the blonde mullet wasn’t enough to suggest that something was different about Joe Exotic, then you just need to stick around for a few minutes, because this is one of those shows that almost demands you to have remote in hand, asking “Wait… what?” as a flippant comment reveals some other dark and horrible secret about the animal sanctuary industry in the United States. You need to believe that you didn’t just hear half of the stuff across these seven episodes. It never feels normal. It just becomes weirder, making you question humanity’s ability to so much as exist alongside nature without screwing it up. This is the show built for the self-quarantine era, where you tell your friends over Zoom about the latest plot twist only to interrupt yourself and say “Oh yeah, and then there’s the time Joe Exotic’s gator sanctuary burned down with animals and incriminating evidence inside.”
Yeah, Tiger King basically exists as a masterpiece of shocking twists. It ranks alongside the likes of Robert Durst in The Jinx (2018) or Anwar Congo in The Act of Killing (2012) where the cameraman gets unprecedented access to a genuine madman. To cover every reason why he is in jail isn’t enough to include why he should’ve been in jail years before. He is the loose cannon, unafraid to take on his enemies with vulgar tirades on his public access show. All he wants is to run an animal sanctuary and introduce audiences to the wonderful wildlife. He pulls baby tigers out of cages and watches as people become enamored by the cuteness. It’s all a ploy to get them to save their natural habitats. At least, that’s where things start.
Depending on how much you believe Joe will determine how you see everything past the first episode. It’s strange to know that at the start of the series, him being a gay gun nut with multiple husbands seemed like the strangest thing. By the end of the next episode, there’s so much more that overwhelms the imagination. There are the figures in Joe’s life, which includes acquaintances that run competing sanctuaries. One goes so far as to create an exotic image by marrying women and forcing them to change their names to some weird ballyhoo. Everyone is being manipulated within the industry in very different ways, and yet… it keeps getting weirder. It’s easy to see why Joe becomes a madman by the end, though how mad he was at the start will depend on how you feel about him walking up to a grown tiger and lovingly pet it. If you find it adorable, there’s something to Joe’s complicated psyche. If you find it crazy, it’s the start of a long journey.
The show’s main catalyst comes between Joe and animal rights activists. No, I’m not talking about P.E.T.A., but Carole Baskin of Big Cat Rescue. With over a million fans on her Facebook page, she has targeted Joe specifically for his treatment of the animals. There’s a back-and-forth as to who cages their animals better, but one thing is clear. Carole is not ready for the fight that Joe will bring. In Joe’s reality show, Joe Exotic TV, he spends over 100 episodes attacking Carole. He’s not civil about it either. At various points, he incorporates everything from murdering and molesting a blow-up doll in her name to using a photo involving dead rabbits as an attack against her.
It’s a petty feud that goes so far as to include Joe's attacks against one of Carole’s more controversial aspects: her dead husband Don. There’s plenty of reason to believe Joe, especially if Carole was in it for the millions that Don made. Joe believes that Don was murdered and that his corpse is buried under a septic tank. It’s a point that he just will not let go, and it may be the start of his bigger madness. If nothing else, it’s what inevitably gets him as the feud drains his income and finds a desperate man questioning how he’s going to take care of cats who require so much food just to get through a day.
Basically, Joe is screwed.
If I told you every small piece of information about the supporting cast, you would find it hard to believe. This is a documentary that feels purposely designed for ultimate shock value. Nobody feels real, or at least decent. Carole is arguably the only character in a grey area depending on if you believe Joe or her. Still, she proves that her wealth can keep her from falling victim to Joe’s slander. We get so little look into her perspective, only getting the tirades from Joe to make us believe that she is evil. Why? Because she caged animals improperly. Then again, does Joe cage them any better?
One of the big problems with everyone in Tiger King can be equated to the tale of Icarus. One day he flew too close to the sun, and his life was never the same again. That is what it feels like to hear everyone share their defenses about owning and selling exotic pets. They even go so far as to lure in people under false pretenses, believing that because they control wildlife that they have all the answers. They roll grown animals around in luggage bags around Las Vegas just to make quick bucks off of them. Everyone is flying too close to the sun here, and the more that they believe they’re in control, the more likely they are to come across as deranged.
It doesn’t help that this all feels like a bigger commentary on caging animals in general. Who is really right in this situation? The story ends with a somber moment from Joe thinking back on gorillas he owned. The story has largely been about his time with tigers, but at this moment he expresses regret. For 10 years, he kept the gorillas caged up and never let them so much as touch each other. When they were finally freed, the gorillas immediately hugged each other. There was a sense of return to peace. It’s also the only time in the whole documentary that you don’t question the sincerity of Joe’s emotions. He regrets holding them back, itself an irony given that he’s now sentenced to 22 years in prison. In some ways, he’s a caged animal now after years of abusing his power.
But to look at this solely as the story of one man threatening to murder a woman is to not see how crazy the story gets. In a lot of ways, Tiger King’s power comes in what happened to Joe as a person. If you believed that he was sane at the start (though how could you), there’s little reason to doubt that he was far gone by the end. He no longer had control over his life. Gone is the guy who simply posted death threat videos online. He’s not even Joe Schreibvogel anymore. He’s changed his name based on the two husbands he would marry following the financial turmoil of his business. In fact, everything would change about Joe Exotic following his public stance as “The Tiger King,” sitting atop a throne in the middle of a tiger’s den. He didn’t care how crazy he looked, he was wanting to present an image of power at the exact moment he was losing it all.
To his credit, Joe used to seem like a competent park manager. That’s how this whole story starts. By the end, he’s something else. He always loved guns, but in his final days at the park, he is seen shooting at people for his own amusement. He is out of control, and the worst part is that he wanted it all on camera for Joe Exotic TV. His producer Rick Kirkham had to make it look like Joe was sane, but that was nigh impossible. The conspiracy that somebody burned down the alligator sanctuary to hide the incriminating evidence from Carole’s law team seems crazy until Joe is later seen dousing old computers in gasoline and recording his employees’ conversations without consent. He begins the series of paranoid, but by the end, he is something else.
That’s not just because of the revelations that come out. One of his husbands commits suicide. The other suggests that Joe was a manipulative man who gave them drugs, no better than the other men who had several wives. He was playing a game to prop himself up as this powerful man when in reality nobody so much as liked him. When his business G.W. Zoo went under, he pretty much began to lose everything in quick succession, including his sanity. He had no choice but to continue attacking Carole in more aggressive manners just for the attention.
There is something to be said about how he handled his bankruptcy. He began in 2016 by running for president. With his candid personality, he immediately got TV coverage from the likes of Last Week Tonight and was mocked. He was insane. He next tried to run for governor of Oklahoma and lost. He ran on the Libertarian ticket but knew next to nothing about it. He almost seemed to do it because it offered him the chance to ride atop a van and wave to a crowd applauding him. He needed that justification, even if by that point he was a very dangerous, pathetic joke.
Then there was the long and arduous task of changing his name from Joe Schreibvogel to Joe Maldonado-Passage. While never directly addressed, his name change was likely the last chance to escape the legal attacks of Carole. It started with him changing ownership of G.W. Zoo every other day it seemed before him doing the act of a desperate man. The police department knows that “Screibvogel” is a notorious name in the county, and Joe Exotic escaping it was his last chance. If his marriages and name changes represented anything, it was him trying to fix his image. The only issue was that everything was going wrong and even the tigers he loved turned on him due to a lack of food. He even tried to do one up on Carole by renaming G.W. Zoo as “Big Cat Rescue” in one of the most dubious acts of plagiarism since Vanilla Ice’s “Ice, Ice Baby” ripped off Queen. Still, it only made him sorrier.
The show is such a morbid decline of Joe Exotic’s legacy that you almost hate to watch it. First off, the sight of caged animals becomes an uncomfortable and recurring motif, being dragged into the nonstop fights between Joe and Carole as other people become presented like symbolic pets for these people. Everything is a power game to them, and Joe was not ready to be caged up like his tigers. It’s why he went to jail for a murder-for-hire plot. It’s all a dark circus of events which would be funny if it wasn’t so true and full of abuse. The true irony is that Joe probably loved tigers at one point, but by the end, he was only in love with his image.
For those who love true crime documentaries, there’s a good chance that you’ll want to get on board with Tiger King before the dramatization gets put into turnaround. Otherwise, it’s a story that feels stranger than fiction, and one that is so full of hostile undertones that it will question your morality. While some think that Joe Exotic deserves to be freed from jail, it feels like he shouldn’t. If anything, he got away with different kinds of proverbial murder due to his own arrogance, chasing targets that only lead to danger. The best that can come out of this isn’t the freedom of Joe, but the realization that animals and people aren’t accessories. They can’t just be wheeled into a Las Vegas resort and affectionately played with for top dollar. It’s exploitation at its worst, and it makes the whole thing uncomfortable. With the fortunate distance of a Netflix documentary that can be stopped and started anytime, it doesn’t hurt as much. Still, to know that this exists and somebody thought it was a good idea shows how doomed humanity is, especially if anything more comes of this case.
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