The Tiger King: Narcissism/Psychopathy on Netflix keeps us Entertained during Covid-19

The Tiger King is a documentary series that features the life, time, and crimes of Joseph Allen Maldonado-Passage (neé Schreibvogel); better known by his stage name Joe Exotic or his self-proclaimed title, the Tiger King.  Currently in prison, Joe is a very interesting character – one that is psychodynamically and, I think, politically intriguing.  He is also sensationally displayed in this series – and my ability to make sense of him as a person is necessarily compromised by his depiction – by the filters that the director has placed between him and us in order to tell what is a very compelling story.

The Tiger King has become a streaming sensation during the time of COVID-19.  Sequestered at home, caged, if you will, like wild tigers, we have become intrigued by Joe Exotic and the other private or “for profit” zoo leaders and zoos depicted in this documentary series.  The reluctant son was the first to recommend it, but one of my students in my now online Freud class wondered about what we, as a class, thought of it, so I became intrigued and convinced the reluctant wife to watch it with me.

We were struck by the parallels of the depiction of Joe Exotic and that of the character played by Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems.  Both seem to be best understood as severely narcissistic characters who might qualify as psychopathic.  Both are depicted as spiraling towards a tragic ending – careening from one bad decision to a worse one as they attempt to keep their increasingly stretched worlds – worlds that are stretched by their need to sustain their self-esteem – afloat.

The keeper of our local zoo – one that has some national renown – lives in our neighborhood.  As the reluctant son and I were on our nightly walk, he jogged by and we asked him about The Tiger King.  He has not seen the series, but he knows of and/or knows many of the principle characters, including Terry Thompson, the private zookeeper who apparently killed himself near here after letting his exotic animals loose, resulting in their deaths when police killed them to prevent people being harmed.

The zookeeper has empathy for these individuals.  From his perspective, many of them took in injured wild animals and nursed them back to health.  Once they became known for this, when people would discover an injured animal, they would bring it over and, before you know it, they had a menagerie that was increasingly difficult to maintain. 

Though not detailed in the documentary, this seems not unlike the origin story of Joe Exotic’s zoo – with the initial acquisition of a few animals, and then an increasing fascination with them combined with a limited knowledge of how to care for them (there is early footage of Joe Exotic transporting a snow leopard in an un-air-conditioned van across Florida at the height of summer with no apparent knowledge of the stress involved), but with Joe, this became combined with the lure of showing the animals – using them to create a circus like show where we could star both at home, and on the road with a travelling version of the zoo that went to malls.

As Joe added to his collection of animals, he also needed to add to his staff in order to manage the animals.  So in addition to collecting animals, he began to collect people.  His favorite place to do this seems to have been on the streets in the seedier sections of town.  He would pick up folks who were just out of prison, or down on their luck for other reasons, and offer them a meal and a place to stay.  They, like the audience, became fascinated with the animals and began working – apparently with little or no pay. 

Feeding the animals (and the people) became quite an ordeal.  Road crews learned they could bring road kill to the zoo, horses that were too old to be ridden were brought in and summarily executed and fed to the tigers and other animals, and Wal-Mart was convinced to send along the meat products that had passed expiration dates, and these were used to feed the animals – but also, apparently, the staff (Full confession – as the person in my family who will eat anything, and who believes that expiration dates are simply guidelines, I did not find this as problematic as those with more squeamish attitudes towards food might have).

Part of the economic problem of the zoo was that it attracted people to the gate by giving them the opportunity to have up close and personal encounters with tigers.  Putting people in a cage with a full grown tiger is not something that even Joe Exotic would attempt.  So the money was in tiger cubs who, for about three or four months, are cute balls of fluff that can be handled by and photographed with visitors who are willing to pay an arm and a leg for a unique representation of them with a wild animal.  Bonanza!  But then, once the animal is four months old or so and begins to become a wild tiger, it has to be retired from the petting trade.  But now it will live for another few decades…  Only so many tiger cubs can be sold off – and many that are end up being returned – feeding and caring for a full grown tiger is complicated business.  One of the allegations is that Joe would shoot and bury old tigers.

When my cousin was a student in Chicago many years ago, she lived down the street from Muhammad Ali.  Ali, according to her report, had a lion roaming his yard, which I’m certain had a high wall.  I’m equally certain that the lion, probably given to Ali by an African leader when he was in Africa, perhaps at the Rumble in the Jungle, was a very good deterrent to theft, and, perhaps for him a cheap security system.  But for most of us, managing a wild beast is expensive and time consuming.

The Tiger King found it expensive and time consuming to care for the animals – but it also fueled his wish to be on stage – to be important – and to be in charge.  His wish to be in charge was expressed politically as well.  He made a somewhat comical run for president, but then made a more or less serious run for governor of Oklahoma. 

The less serious part is that he hired a campaign manager (whose previous job was to sell Joe guns at Wal-Mart) who put together a platform that Joe did not care about or understand.  He went around to rodeos, fairs, and parades and glad handed, promoting the zoo and himself.  This, it seemed, was a lark and maybe not bad for business.

The serious part is that, though he came in third in the election, he garnered twenty per cent of the vote.  One in five Oklahomans voted for a man who had no idea what he would do once he got into office.  In so far as they were voting on the issues, the platform that the former Wal-Mart employee put together for him (who was much more thoughtful than my demeaning comment makes him sound) was a libertarian one, arguing for reduction in government.  In so far as they were voting on character, they were voting for a person who treated the electoral process as a joke that was not to be taken seriously. 

I have written recently about our wish to evade the mandate of the founding fathers to self-govern and have perverted their message into one of revolting to produce no government, but, after recently reading a political science text of the reluctant son’s on the populist movement, I have become convinced that being governed by others is what we come to feel like when the government is run by “elites”.  The elites are the kids who did well in school and made us feel like idiots because we didn’t know the answer in class.  And to see someone like us running things helps us feel competent rather than looked down on (or, in the left leaning populism, over looked).

Narcissism has been called the common cold of personality disorders.  Part of the reason for this is that we all have narcissistic issues – we all struggle to manage our self-esteem.  And we are all vulnerable to narcissistic injury – when someone devalues us or makes fun of us, it hurts – frequently quite deeply.  Management of our self-esteem is an ongoing, lifelong undertaking.  And when it gets out of whack, we can react by turning to others for reassurance. 

But when we are never quite able to actually feel competent – when the taunts of the other kids have cut too deeply and there hasn’t been enough reassurance from those back home that we are, in fact, OK despite what those mean kids say – we can build a seemingly unfillable reservoir of self-doubt that leads us to more and more frantically work to pour good stuff into that reservoir.  This pushes us towards more extreme activities that we imagine will finally, once and for all, fill the void.

Of course, we are also angry about having to do so much work to achieve the recognition that our hard work clearly should have earned for us.  I say “of course” as if that were the rationale and logic of a mature, thoughtful person.  But when we are feeling narcissistically depleted, we don’t feel rational, logical or mature.  We feel like a little kid who, once again, is not getting what he wants. 

Joe Exotic's anger gets focused on Carole Baskin, who runs an animal “rescue” park that mirrors Joe’s park in almost every way – including the “volunteers” that she collects who end up working full time for no money to care for the animals.  Her sanctimonious attacks on Joe are met with amazingly unmeasured responses – and we are drawn more and more deeply into a cat fight that is embarrassingly interesting.  We are like the rubber-neckers who slow down traffic on the other lane of the highway so they can get a good look at the aftermath of an accident.

Why are we more and more deeply drawn into this series as it becomes more and more primitive?  I came across an idea about this from an unlikely quarter in the class about Freud this week.  My co-teacher recommended an article about masturbation and Jane Austen by Eve Sedgwick, and in it, Sedgwick demonstrates parallels between pornographic medical descriptions of masturbation in the 1800s and scenes in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.  One of the hidden things that she points out is that the motivation of the scientist/physician and that of the pornographic reader are very closely related.

I think it is not just that, on one level I fancy myself one of the elites – and am slumming in spending time with Joe Exotic – I think it is also that Joe Exotic and the life he is leading parallels aspects of my life.  And I think this happens in multiple ways.  Joe’s immaturity mirrors my own.  Joe’s immaturity mirrors that of our current President – and so it is a spectacle on a smaller scale that may help us understand the larger one.  But frankly, Joe’s social world mirror’s some of the politics at my University – and probably within my own family, in ways that I find fascinating – both on a conscious, but also on many unconscious levels.  There is an unvarnished quality to this slick production that suggests that we are getting a look at the essential nature of “Trump’s America”. 

I think we need to be careful about thinking that we are tourists in that America when we watch this spectacle devolve.  It is not just about those who would use tigers to prop up their self-esteem, it is about my use of petro-chemicals, and the engineering expertise of Detroit and the real estate business to have external evidence of how powerful I am.  It is about the ways that I use the classroom and the consulting room – hopefully only some of the time – to prop up my self-esteem rather than teach my students and help my patients.  It is about how hard we are driven to work and to achieve without thinking about the cost of this to our families, communities and the planet.

I think that Joe, based on this video, has a very limited ability to empathize with others – the tigers and other animals in his menagerie, the people who work for him, the people who come to his park, and the men that he has married.  He is generous to some of these people – and to strangers.  He prepared a Thanksgiving dinner for the poor public every year and appeared to be genuinely distraught when he lost a husband.  And one of Sedgwick’s most undermining critiques is that my diagnosis of “psychopathy” should carry no more weight than the identity of being a “masturbator”. 

As one of the mothers of queer theory, Sedgwick was, I think, arguing that we are all queer.  Which, in this context, means that we are all fluid, and that we move from identity to identity as we move from moment to moment.  One of the questions that this series asks is whether Joe Exotic deserves to be in jail.  We can ask whether he committed the crimes that landed him in jail, and the series explicitly focuses on that.  But implicitly it is asking a much more important question.  Are we guilty if our “identity” accounts for actions that can’t actually be proven?  In so far as prison is neither a place to rehabilitate nor to punish, but a place to protect us from those who cannot be trusted to live with us, the series is asking, “When are we no longer queerly related to our identity – when have we become so closely identified with that aspect of ourselves that cares only about ourselves that it is unacceptable for us to live among others?"  In other words, when do we deserve to be caged for the protection of others?

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