Tiger King Proves We’ve Learned Nothing From Trump
Tiger King mania has swept the nation.
The reality show masquerading as a documentary is about the “crazy” world of exotic pet handlers. The story centers explicitly around Joseph Allen Maldonado-Passage (stage name Joe Exotic). He owned the Greater Wynnewood (GW) zoo in Oklahoma and had an intense hatred for Carole Baskin — a woman he tried to kill because she wanted to regulate his industry.
Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness is a text that delves into a lot of complicated intersections. Joe Exotic is a gay, polyamorous, conservative, gun-toting private zoo owner who desperately and shamelessly wants to be famous. There has been a lot of ink spilled over what this text represents for the various identifiers to which Joe Exotic contradictorily clings too, but today, we are going to focus on why the show is so popular with Americans.
Put simply, it’s popular because we do love our drama. We are a nation that not only uplifts awful people for the sake of our entertainment but equalizes everyone in their orbit as “the same” so as not to ruin the fun.
It’s a formula that creates binge-worthy television and a broken political system as well.
A sickening trend in Tiger King is that the majority of the exotic pet owners on the show are not just bad people, but active sexual predators (note — that I am not referring to the handlers who manage the day-to-day maintenance of these zoos, but owners like Joe Exotic). The show explicitly details how these players used the lure of baby tigers to bring women and men into their orbit to have sex with them, and often these relationships were abusive.
The Myrtle Beach Safari owner, and mentor to Joe Exotic, Mahamayavi “Doc” Antle, for example, is described in episode Two (“Cult of Personality”) by a former staff member as controlling and manipulative. He allegedly selected staff members on attractiveness and then had them work long hours with little pay. This staff member further claims that Antle used his position to sleep with many of the female staff members there and that she was personally pressured to get breast implants and to change her name to something more exotic (“Bala”).
Antle has denied these claims, though his accuser has further expanded her position in her own words in an essay released by Elle. We may never know the extent of his abuses, but it’s clear that Antle is manipulative. It’s hard to trust a man with an ego so inflated that he describes himself as such a popular person that animal rights activists are jealous:
“I am popular. I am so well known as ‘big cat guy’ around the world, that people who are against having relationships with animals, period, want to destroy me because I am out there in the forefront so known of being this guy that is in love with big cats and has them love him back.”
There are other sexually abusive players on the show as well. Trainer Tim Stark admires Doc Antle’s set up, or as he puts it, “the way he had them women trained.” Jeff Lowe, the man who would take over the zoo from Joe, used baby tigers to set up a penthouse in Las Vegas for him and his wife to swing. He is the person who says the Intenet meme: “A little p*ssy gets you a lot of p*ssy.”
Joe Exotic, like the rest of the players here, is also quite predatory. He traps several men on his compound — men that are described as aimless with nowhere to go — and ropes them in with the allure of his lifestyle and drugs. As employee Joshua Dial says of his boss Joe:
“There are people out there. They will look at a person who is in desperate, dire need of something. In Travis’s case, he was addicted to meth, and they take that need and they fulfill it until they become the only person that can fulfill that need.”
All of Joe’s three husbands would leave him by the time he entered prison. His husband John Finlay ends up partnering with another woman, and Dillion Passage silently fades away into the background (after one or two TV appearances). His partner Travis Maldonado feels so suffocated by Joe’s abusive behavior (he is not allowed to get a job or leave the compound) that he ends up shooting himself in the head while cameras were rolling nearby.
Joe Exotic is not a good person. He ended up hurting a lot of people in his life, both on and off the screen. Rather than highlight the intersections of poverty and power that trap people like Travis into abusive relationships, the show wants to keep its focus on the eccentric behaviors of Joe Exotic. As a reporter covering the story, named Sylvia Corkill, said of his persona:
“Joe Exotic was someone that makes good TV, makes good news. Even if it’s a train wreck, you can’t help but look.”
Tiger King revels in Joe’s perspective, often letting Joe or his closest supporters speak their minds, unchallenged in closeup monologues. This focus on the spectacle of Joe’s unsubstantiated, hate-filled ramblings leads the show to explore some very uneven dead ends. Every demonization of Joe’s rivals is taken seriously, such as the unfounded conspiracy theory that Carole Baskin killed her former husband in the 90s.
Everyone gets dragged down in the mud, which means bedazzled Joe Exotic looks stunning by comparison. We are left with a perspective that is ultimately quite humanizing of him. Tiger King ends with characterizing him as an empathetic person who used to care about the animals but somewhere along the way lost his direction. As JoeExoticTV producer Kirkham lamented in the last final minutes of the closing episode (“Dethroned”):
“I truly believe that Joe started the zoo for good purposes, good reasons. But as the money rose, I think his care for the animals declined.”
We have no evidence that he ever cared, but the humanization of Joe is vital to the show’s success. It’s doubtful that anyone would binge Joe’s antics or make plans to cosplay him for Halloween if he had been described as a malicious sexual predator from the getgo (which, again, he is).
This alchemy of transmuting awful people into bingeable trainwrecks has been happening a long time in America, and it is not a harmless process.
We can pretend like the worship of characters such as Joe Exotic is a new phenomenon that began when we all got trapped indoors by the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s been happening for a long time.
In America, we are willing to forgive someone for a lot as long as they are entertaining from afar.
An example of this is the cult classic The Room by director Tommy Wiseau. This B-movie is beloved by a lot of people for being “so bad that it’s good.” Much like the Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), fans enjoyed the 2003 film in midnight screening decades after its initial release. Tommy Wiseau played the lead character Johnny, and part of the fun watching the movie comes from reveling in the bad dialogue and acting. As Jusef Conesa writes in Why I Love Movies:
“Wiseau didn’t set out to make this a cult classic, “so bad it’s good” movie, but watching the fandom grow and the joy spread has a been a treat. The Room is one of the few movies of its ilk that has been cemented in our Zeitgeist and after you finish watching it you will know why.”
Tommy Wiseau was a real person, though. He was a man of unknown origins with seemingly bottomless wealth, and that insulated him. The reason the script and dialogue were so bad is that he was such a flagrant narcissist that he didn’t listen to any of his colleague’s suggestions (a fact parodied greatly in the movie The Disaster Artist (2017)). He went forward with a suboptimal script to make a film that, despite spending over $6 million (maybe?) of his own money, gives the impression it cost only $600.
There are a bunch of so-bizarre-they-are-funny scenes in The Room, but it starts to become uncomfortable when you dig into the history. Wiseau yelled at actors on set, showed up late consistently, and reportedly refused to pay for air conditioning, which led to one cast member (Carolyn Minnott) to faint from heat exhaustion.
The character Lisa (Juliette Danielle), the person who comes closest to being the film’s villain because she cheats on the main character, is, in retrospect, framed in a way that is quite misogynistic. She has an infamous and uncomfortable sex scene in the film, and her character is routinely mocked in screenings for it by fans, some of which contact her about it over social media.
In an interview with Uproxx, Danielle described the fallout from this film as “a very negative part of my life. It’s something that forced me to hide.” She was diplomatic in saying that not all fans contributed to that sense of dread, but it cannot be ignored that Danielle took a break from acting while Wiseau has continued to make admittedly bad movies. Wiseau is by no means considered the auteur he imagined, but he has continued to thrive, and fans' reaction to The Room is part of the reason why. As Aja Romano wrote in Vox:
“Had The Room not come packaged with so much internal befuddlement, a legendarily strange production experience, and a mysterious man at its center, it would have been destined for obscurity.”
We like movies such as The Room because of their backstory, but we are careful to never dig too deeply.
From the works of Woody Allen to Alfred Hitchcock, there are plenty of texts that are only enjoyable if the viewer ignores the awful reality underneath. Reality television was built on the foundation of treating real people like fictional characters, and Tiger King is no different. We have to ignore a lot to enjoy the spectacle of Joe Exotic.
We talked about how abusive Joe was to his partners, but that applies to pretty much everyone in his life. He paid staff so poorly that they scavenged a Walmart expired meat truck meant for the tigers for food. The trailers that staff lived in had no running water. He placed the park in everyone’s name, including his parents, which put them in the middle of a contentious court battle that drained their savings.
Yet, on the show, Joe is narratively depicted as someone who falls from grace, or a tragic hero, which means his enemy — animal rights activist Carole Baskin — is the villain. The editing of the show takes great care to depict Carole and her husband maliciously. Whether it’s ominous music playing in the background as they pose with cat ears or the fact that they brought out champagne and brie to celebrate Joe going to prison, Tiger King wants us to associate Carole Baskin with elitism and manipulation.
While she is far from perfect, Baskin is not in the same league as the other players on the show. She is a noted activist whose facility, Big Cat Rescue, is accredited by the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries. Joe not only fails to meet these standards but his facility was, by all accounts, atrocious to both the animals and people inside it.
He is also a well-documented harasser of Carole’s and played plenty of cruel pranks on her. He, for example, mailed to her (either directly or through his followers) live snakes. He has made multiple videos threatening to kill her, and in one, he shot a sex doll he named Carole with a gun.
He also, you know, unsuccessfully hired someone to kill her.
Of course, she’s popping champagne bottles when he goes to prison. I would too if I were in her position. And yet by the time the series comes to a close, we are meant to think that she is just as bad as the other private zoo owners on the show. When GW zookeeper Saff (who is misgendered by everyone in the series) describes the situation in the last episode, he paints the battle between Carole and Joe as a pointless endeavor that was detrimental to the animals involved.
“Nobody wins. Everyone involved is a so-called animal advocate. Not a single animal benefited from this war. Not a single one.”
This flattening of morality for the sake of entertainment should sound very familiar to anyone who has paid attention to recent history. When we glorify entertaining people, it doesn’t just harm those in their orbit but also gives them power too.
In episode five (“Make America Exotic Again”), we learn that Joe Exotic ran for President, and then when that failed, governor. His race was treated like an oddity, and he ran a campaign that highlighted that spectacle. He passed out condoms that said things like “vote for me or you need this cause you’re screwed.”
In the end, he failed to win the Libertarian Primary, finishing off in a distant third. We would like to think this is where people like Joe naturally end up — that the American public chooses sanity over absurdity — but that doesn’t always end up being the case.
In fact, we are a nation that’s obsessed with the idea of awarding entertaining people with public office.
The state of California — the entertainment capital of America — has elected several former-actors to the office of mayor, governor, and even President. Actor Clint Eastwood was elected mayor of Carmel, California in 1986. Ronald Reagan rode to high office after being a famous actor as well as serving as President of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) — a union for actors. Arnold Schwarzenegger of Terminator fame was governor of the state from 2003 to 2011.
Other famous celebrities turned politicians include singer Sonny Bono in the House of Representatives (1995–1998), former wrestler Jesse Ventura as governor of Minnesota (1999–2003), and Law & Order actor Fred Thompson as a US senator for Tennessee (1994–2003).
Joe Exotic’s desire to pivot his celebritydom into high office is very much rooted in recent history. If you are a man, especially a conservative white man prone to saying outrageous things, then it’s not far-fetched at all to expect to be able to turn that social capital into political power.
The most obvious example of this rule is the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump. The real estate tycoon-turned-reality TV star built up a persona on the NBC show The Apprentice as America’s businessman. He was the person that yelled “you’re fired” at people, and then returned home to gaudy rooms laced in gold and inlaid with marble. He may have been a terrible person who lobbied to have the Central Park Five executed and falsely accused President Obama of not being a US citizen, but he sure was an entertaining person that always made the headlines.
Post-2016, there was a lot of time spent analyzing why he was elected president over Hillary Clinton.
Did he tap into some legitimate economic or racial angst?
Was he a political savant?
Is he a symbol or cipher for some burgeoning political movement?
The most obvious explanation was that he was entertaining. He ran a subpar campaign with a lackluster ground component, but according to a study from mediaQuant, he received billions of dollars in free media attention. This coverage was overwhelmingly negative, often in reaction to something ridiculous he said, but it didn’t really matter. As one author wrote of Trump’s negative press coverage for a study released by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy:
“The news is not about what’s ordinary or expected. It’s about what’s new and different, better yet when laced with conflict and outrage. Trump delivered that type of material by the cart load. Both nominees tweeted heavily during the campaign but journalists monitored his tweets more closely. Both nominees delivered speech after speech on the campaign trail but journalists followed his speeches more intently. Trump met journalists’ story needs as no other presidential nominee in modern times.” — Source
The attention he gave them was enough, and while no single factor ever determines an election, it was a huge one.
We must remember that the attention that reality TV stars gain while wooing America does not always start and end on the small screen. Reality TV stars have capitalized on their 15 minutes of fame to become wine entrepreneurs, start fashion lines, create health empires, and in the case of Donald Trump, become President.
In early April of 2020, a reporter asked President Trump if he would consider pardoning the Tiger King, who is currently serving a 22-year sentence in prison. Trump, who at that point had not seen the show, joked in his typical “maybe-I’m-not-joking” fashion that he would look into it.
It’s unlikely that Joseph Allen Maldonado-Passage will receive a presidential pardon (though stranger things have happened), but it underscores how far-reaching cultural moments like this can become. Our celebrities wield a lot of raw power in their hands — a fact that Donald Trump is at least partially aware of every time he rants on Twitter.
We don’t know yet who, if anyone, will be able to translate Tiger Mania into actual political power. These things do not always happen the way we think they will. If you had asked me four years ago who the first reality TV president would be, I would have guessed either Omarosa or Kim Kardashian.
That was then.
Now the one thing I can say with certainty is that we have to be more careful about whom and to what we give our attention to. History has shown us that yesterday’s funny idiot on TV could be tomorrow’s dictator.
Who will you spend your time watching?