Review of 'Tiger King'

“The 'content' of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind,” Marshall McLuhan famously declared in Understanding Media back in 1964. The content of Tiger King, the runaway global hit documentary on Netflix, are the tigers and other animals in Joe Exotic's Oklahoma zoo, thrown pieces of meat, juicy and otherwise (some is expired meat from supermarkets). But the deeper story, underlying the meat, is Joe Exotic's unquenchable thirst for fame, relentlessly pursued through social media. And in the irony of ironies, he eventually obtained that fame, along with a prison sentence of 22 years for attempted homicide of an animal activist and mistreatment of animals.

My late editor at Tor Books, David Hartwell, once told me never to kill a pet cat or dog in my science fiction novels. "Some readers will never forgive you," he said. I didn't heed his advice in one of my novels, and its sales indeed were markedly off. I have no idea what Joe Exotic actually did and didn't do to his animals. I wasn't there. But I was impressed, near the end of the docu-series, to hear someone remark that mistreatment of animals, including killing tigers, was likely to be far more effective in turning the jury against him, then his planned murder of animal-rights activist Carole Baskin in Florida. One of his ultimately not-so-loyal staff, Kelci "Saff" Saffery, told Joel McHale in the postscript interview that the thing that got him the most angry at Joe was taking in an old horse from a grieving owner, and chopping it up for meat to feed the tigers after assuring the owner that he'd take good care of the horse.

The things he did to the animals apparently really happened, though we mostly only know this through the words of his staff. In contrast, the threats against Carole Baskin were not only later reported by his workers and associates, but conveyed to the world via videos that Joe relished making and posting, in which he shot and otherwise assaulted dummies of Baskin. Since his feud with Baskin fueled his pursuit of fame, he at very least had to have had some misgivings about getting her permanently out of the picture. He fancied himself a country singer and posted music videos, with someone else's voice overdubbed. He ran for President in 2016 and governor of Oklahoma in 2018 and, obviously, lost both times. If you think about wrestler Jesse Ventura's successful run for governor of Minnesota in 1999, Joe's run in Oklahoma wasn't so crazy. The only thing Ventura really had over Joe was more fame to begin with (in addition to Ventura being mayor of a medium-sized city in Minnesota, but without the pro-wrestling fame, that mayor position would likely not have been enough to propel Ventura into the governorship; here, by the way, is an interview Ventura did with me after he left the state house).

Joe Exotic, now in prison, has a lot more fame than Ventura had in 1999. Can someone in prison run for Governor? I don't know, that's up to state law. Let's say he's released? That depends, again, on the state law in Oklahoma. But there's nothing in the U. S. Constitution that would prevent him from running -- again -- for President.

Given what we've had in the White House the past four years, stay tuned. Fame is a fungible commodity that can easily be transferred from anything to politics. Nothing would surprise me.