What follows comes really late to the show, but I’m grading a mountain of student work right now. So much has been said about this ridiculous offering from the culture industry already, but maybe American intellectual history might have its little say. We’re always late to the punch anyway, otherwise we wouldn’t be historians. Anyhow, it seemed to me that our number might enjoy some silly—surprisingly dark now that I look at them—observations I wrote up about the Netflix “documentary” “Tiger King” a few weeks back. For those who don’t know what it is: It’s a sordid tale of love and hate among large-scale private exotic animal owners, the eponymous tigers in particular. I don’t have the heart to write much more than that.
“Tiger King” tapped into a dark vein of the American id. Our strange little democratic culture rebukes us with shows like this, being a cockamamie return of a repressed hyper individualism and its dark twin, loneliness. The loneliness appears here in the form of grotesque. Grotesques like the people on the show are the debris flaking off that constant grinding together of hyper individualism and loneliness in the USA. Of course, grotesques used to be things one might dig up in regions like the South especially (cf. Flannery O’Connor) often the expression of a corrosive provincialism characterizing certain elegiac notions small town life, that human flotsam and jetsam (cf. Sherwood Anderson—oh, how I long for “paper pills” nowadays).
The difference here is that Tiger King and any shows like it come merrily along with what I’ve come to call “psychotic late capitalism,” and in particular the simulacrum at its worst, where now the lords of Silicon Valley have given many the delusion they can all be celebrities in whatever little “platoon of society” they inhabit in a fractured world. (How’s that for a loose borrowing from Daniel Rodgers!) I had to cancel my Facebook membership a few years ago owing to the horrible pang of emptiness I felt when only a few people “liked” the latest picture of my cat Miles Davis. Miles didn’t deserve that. At least he didn’t know any better. And so one need only click and point one’s way, troweling around instantaneously in the dark loam of the American id. The stakes used to be lives of quiet desperation, but like Christopher Lasch figured, a culture of narcissism means looking into one’s reflection for a self and projecting the big empty back into the world. We laugh at Joe Exotic because he seems to lack self-awareness, but that’s totally wrong. He’s only too aware of his selfhood, and that selfhood is at best just Cooley’s looking glass self, but really it’s just that empty self made up entirely from basking in reflections and surfaces.
My Cat Miles, Who Knows the Score
We love Joe because he understands the surfaces, and he knows, like the others on the show, how he’ll be perceived. He also doesn’t appear to give a shit. Or, to be precise, he gives far too much of a shit about not giving a shit. He is Joe “Exotic,” which is a kind of pun, because he raises “exotics”–that’s his business–and he is “exotic,” a mullet-tousled, gun-packing, meth-head gay man in Oklahoma, out and proud. Good for him? His delusions are just fun house delusions of all of our delusions in a psychotic late capitalist “democracy,” in a world of social media where we desperately fish for “likes” and keep rapt attention on the narcissistic prosthetic selves we hold in our hands, so that being-in-the-world is aggregated onanism rather than any collective purpose. Joe is the ultimate “selfie.” He does virtual battle with another selfie out yonder in Florida, and they ensnare one another in sordid traps, especially “legal” ones, in a preposterous farce played out on the acting stage of this or that courtroom here or there. These are mostly “civil” cases, which in our country have far too often been dark parody of the give and take necessary for civic life anyway. To borrow some Buck Owens, eventually it was plain to see that Joe Exotic got a tiger by the tail. So the tortuous, tempestuous love affair between the selfies landed him in the hoosegow. He met “justice.” Am I supposed to feel better about that?
All this was depicted amidst a pandemic, where the lords of Silicon Valley now have us all by the you-know-whats, because we desperately need them. How else am I supposed to teach classes? How else am I supposed to visit my friends and family? Civic space, the one-to-one, that being-in-the-world with one another, had already been devastated by the smug libertarianism of these people. But we knew this already. The plague is only the fullest realization of their fevered dreams for a world lived virtually. You got what you wanted, yuh bastuds, so I really appreciate watching commercials where, say, Facebook overlords remind me that “we’re in this together.” Thanks. With no national leadership forthcoming from the narcissist-in-chief and his Twitter account, I guess you all can step in the breach. I almost prefer the silly commercials where the company doesn’t acknowledge COVID-19 and the world that had befallen us. It feels like sweet comfort from the death rattle of civic life I hear every time I see, say, that BMW commercial, where in a great act of beneficence, the well-heeled can wait ninety days (ninety days!) before they have to make a payment on a new car. Thanks. So to satiate us from horrible realizations like these, we get “Tiger King,” a paroxysm of psychotic late capitalism simulacra, a riot of presumed “democracy” where the notion of value itself has no value. I tried to do the postmodern thing and enjoy the whimsy of it, but I just can’t do it.
“Tiger King” is among the saddest things I’ve ever seen and also the most obvious, and yet I couldn’t stop watching it. There’s nothing extraordinary about these people other than they represent the worst logic of our cultural world over the last few years. But I’ve always had a staring problem, my friends and family tell me, and I guess a man with a staring problem can be occasionally forgiven for rubber-necking when a culture crashes.
So yeah, I thought about this as I watched it a few weeks ago. This is what I do for a living sometimes, sift through cultural trash and debris. By now the memes have compounded near ad infinitum in their iterations, doubling back into specific subcultures and narcissistic enterprises done up as layers of “irony.” Those are already “so over” man. Only middle-aged fuddy-duddies care to mark the passage. Tiger King was hilariously sad because it only took a day or two to wonder what made the memes all that funny anymore. We’ve lost the thread, but then again, a culture industry with speed as a singular value stretches already gossamer threads of culture only to break them, only to begin again, and again, and again.
Be well and be safe everybody. We’re in this together.
9 Thoughts on this Post
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Whatdya got against tigers, man?
I think this is a pretty spot-on take (down) of the documentary. The sadness really struck me. And what was infuriating was the lack of awareness of the documentary itself. It tried to shoehorn something profound at the end, but unsuccessfully.
There was also a hint of hostility towards Joe and some members on his team. Almost as if we were being welcomed to laugh at him, pity him, but never see him for much more than a clown. It had class conflict written all over it. But I suppose making fun of lower-class folks is a rite of passage for many Americans.
Yeah. The “documentary” definitely had that feel about it. But don’t get me started, Iaian. The other issue is, whatever Joe’s working class affect, he’s a brutal capitalist. He exploited and abused his workers to incredible lengths, on down to some of his employees eating the spoiled meat they fed to the cats just to get enough to eat. If the “documentary” did anything redeeming, it did point out the exploitation of workers in every single one of these private “zoos.” But this is hardly redeeming, because that problem gets mostly covered up by the shenanigans designed to make us ridicule all of these human beings. The one voice of reason in Joe’s operation, who points out the exploitation, interestingly enough if I recall correctly (I’m not looking it up, because I’m not watching any of it again) has the last name “Cowie.” (cf. Jefferson Cowie, Staying Alive, etc.) That was just too much to take.
And don’t get me started on the treatment of the animals in these places.
I watched the first few episodes, was intrigued, but at the same time, felt a little slimed by the experience. My teenage son consumed on his phone in a couple of days. He said he found it “funny.” I let that comment be, deciding it wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have with a dependent during quarantine. Still, I kept thinking about the claim Joe Exotic or one of the other Svengalis made that being photographed with a big cat confers power. Sometimes symbolics are too obvious to pursue. I decided to watch The Plot Against America instead. It was painful but ultimately worth it. It would be good if this series gained the same cultural cachet.
I know nothing of this program as I’m an adherent of broadcast tv (read, too cheap to pay for cable). It has its “reality” tv of course but from my snobbish position these programs shout awful before one needs to actually watch. Your post caused me to remember an old movie, I think from the 1930’s, called Freaks. Movie aficionados will recognize this title. I saw this back in the early 70’s so my memory is not strong but it was about a circus freak show. The eponymous characters are physically deformed human beings performing stunts before crowds and are cruelly “kept” by the circus ringleader who eventually is given his cumuppence by the said performers. The movie is a mix of gratuity and satire and I wondered if you had heard of it and whether you saw any commonality with Tiger King.
It’s been years since I’ve seen “Freaks” but I do remember it some. The look and purpose of the shows are very different. I’m just going to go out there on this one. Weirdly enough, I’m going back over Merleau-Ponty’s chapter on “Freedom” from Phenomenology of Perception right now and this comes up:
“We are often amazed that the disabled person or the person suffering from a disease can bear their situation. But in their own eyes, they are not disabled or dying…Consciousness can never objectify itself as a sick-consciousness or a disabled-consciousness; and even if the elderly man complains of his old age or the disabled person of his disability, they can only do so when they compare themselves to others or when they see themselves through the eyes of others, that is, when they adopt a statistical or an objective view of themselves; and these complaints are never wholly made in good faith: in returning to the core of his consciousness, everyone feels himself to be beyond his particular characteristics and so resigns himself to them. They are the price we pay, without even thinking about it, for being in the world, a formality we take for granted. And this is how we can criticize or own face and yet not wish to exchange it for another” (Phenomenology of Perception, Landes trans., 459).
This is complicated I suppose. There seems to be a certain generality about consciousness, yet there’s a second order kind of knowledge that I have about my being-in-the-world, taken up from others or from a “statistical” attitude. But I can’t help but carry that with me. It informs how I hold myself in the world, my gestures, intentions, and projects, even though at the same time I somehow know there’s something general about my consciousness that can’t be determined by such things. In a way, I “choose,” but that’s far too simple a description for what he’s getting at.
So “Freaks” it seems to me is about the “gaze” or objectification, and in a certain way, so is “Tiger King.” It does something to us as viewers. It has us adopt that “statistical” or “objective” attitude toward the world according to which we compare ourselves to others. “Well, at least I’m not like that” someone might say. If there are any fine differences, I don’t know that Merleau-Ponty would find them terribly convincing. We could begin from the premise that “freaks” has to do with bodily difference in terms of morphology/look, (they can’t “help” how they are) while Tiger King seems to be about behavior (they can’t control themselves, they *can* “help” it). But “Freaks” had us objectifying bodies and behaviors different from others in statistical terms, and so did Tiger King. The experience of watching either one shares something fundamental, it allows us to represent our particularity amidst our generality to ourselves. It would be good if we could also recognize how the consciousness of the others we see there are entangled in the same way by virtue of being in the world too.
Of course the tone, look, and emplotment are totally different, if I remember Freaks right. But you ask an interesting question. I had started writing this with some dawning horizon of intention to underscore difference, but I ended up elsewhere, which is good I think.
Thanks for this considered response Peter. Your quote from Merleau-Ponty and the further discussion recalls the way blind people use the verb see or saw. I live across the street from a camp dedicated for the blind where I’ve worked off and on for last 5 years. Many often use see or saw in its common colloquial usage and I once asked a man, who would often go into great detail about something or somewhere he had recently visited using “see” or “seen”, how he was using the word. He said the image is in his minds eye. That the experience, as shared by others and through his other senses, has formed a picture in his mind of where he had been. Not only that, but that there’s a clear emotional connection to what he had “seen”. This seems to give that “statistical” attitude an even broader meaning when one realizes the shared social experience of “seeing”.
The show was spectacular, in every sense of the word, and I found it wildly entertaining, occasionally hilarious, and deeply sad all at once. It was utterly, amazingly human, as was the collective response to it, from the humor to the think pieces.
So many of us are just a high school diploma, a clean criminal record, and/or a serious addiction away from fitting right in with that crew at Joe Exotic’s zoo. Heck, I grew up around extended family every bit as broken and heart-breaking — great uncles and second cousins and aunts and their crowd in and out of jail, on and off heroin, getting picked up for drunk driving, raising hell in bars, getting in drunken brawls and stabbing each other, getting in fistfights at weddings, and the like. At a funeral or a wedding or a big holiday gathering — Easter, Christmas, Fourth of July — the hell-raisers and the straight-laced church-goers alike would gather and mingle on common ground, most often the shaded front lawn of my grandmother’s home. We were not quite alike, but we were kin.
My takeaway after watching the whole series was this: I am not a bit better than any of these people, but I had better opportunities. And I was mostly shielded from the very worst and most dangerous behaviors and choices of those family members — often by those wild kinfolk themselves.
People are complicated.
That said, I’m pretty sure Carole Baskin slathered that husband of hers with sardine oil and fed him to the tigers.
I really appreciate this response. It’s good to hear your story. As you might know, I grew up in a part of the Midwest where I had similar experiences to yours. I’ve also been on both sides of the fence, so to speak, depending upon the years, spent a little bit of time locked up (county jails, never prisons) for being on the wrong side. Of course, I was also lucky and frankly, privileged not to end up in prison like the guys I used to teach. I suppose the big difference is that my screw ups happened outside of my family, a few seasons of rebellion I suppose, prodigal son type stuff. I wasn’t one of those people who wanted to get out of my small town and the rural areas around it. I wanted to “go native” so to speak, be accepted, which meant doing crazy things. I also lived near the North Texas border with Oklahoma for a good while, and saw how drug use in particular just destroys lives, including some whom I happen to love. But you know about that better than most.
So I loved the equanimity of your response here. People are complicated. And I realize this post is a screed, but the show did get my goat more than anything else, especially upon reflection. I guess I objected most to the way the show was framed and sequenced, how exploitative it was to those depicted and those watching. I also love animals, and that was awful to think about. And I worried over context, of what it meant for this show to be so “viral” in the life-world of COVID-19. Ridicule seems thin gruel for togetherness.
Anyway, yeah, I’m with you, Carole Baskin fed that dude to those tigers.
What I recall about Freaks is that the sideshow characters are shown to be responsible citizens imbued with “universal” sentiments expressed in the charity they show to a man in trouble who merits assistance but significantly also in the execution of justice upon a malefactor whose selfishness threatens the social contract. Both the character they assist and the character they punish are “normals,” so the storyline reaffirms social contract as transcending the differences between citizens, including physical appearance. I haven’t brought myself to watch Tiger King yet. It feels like I probably should. But from the discussion, the idea that a social contract binds citizens into a community would be entirely foreign to the experience the filmmakers intend for their viewers.