The Tiger King is a popular documentary series on Netflix about a group of people entangled in the lifestyle of wild animal ownership and the incredible complications it has on all their lives.
I’ll admit I’m a bit behind the times in getting some thoughts on this wild ride of a show, despite having binging it when it premiered. The impeccable timing of weird, wild people doing weird, wild things with tigers, lions, and, er crocodiles, among a worldwide pandemic forcing all of us to stay inside and reconsider just what exactly qualifies for “entertainment” is almost enough to have one question the very existence of magic … dark or otherwise.
The show, as the internet seem to agree, is endlessly fascinating and addictive, the outlandish deeply-committed insanity of what it happening on screen enough to make us all feel a lot better about the foibles in our own lives we hope no person ever finds out. I’m right now wondering if ‘Air Fryer King’ would draw an audience.
Anyway, I was as hooked to the fun good times Tiger King delivers as anyone, taken in by the majesty of these caged tigers and lions and rightful controversy that orbits them, finding myself taking sides far on the other side of the fence with just about every person in the show. These are some truly curious people, the likes I think most us never truly thought (or hoped) existed. The sheer lunacy of it all is like getting happiness injected straight in the feel goods of my brain stem. Give me more.
And then there is Travis.
You’ll recall the harrowing tale of this misguided unfortunate soul, who wandered in the toxic battlegrounds of the show’s titular Joe Exotic, a fresh faced youngster with little direction in life, already hooked on drugs and and in need of an anchor. I’ll bypass the details of his relationship with Joe as there’s plenty to feed a number of posts on all that, but rather instead – as our website’s namesake steers me – into the documentary’s most challenging moment, the one where everything before and after most certainly hinges, even if it gets slightly dissipated as the madness further unfurls.
Travis is a big, good looking fellow with a carefree attitude and a powerful addiction. Joe feeds into that immediately, like a botfly burrowing into the boy’s vulnerable wherewithal, and gives Travis a home, rocky as it may be in a world that is quite literally populated with brawny creatures that powerfully symbolize the kid’s very existence – tigers caged and unnaturally tamed, hooked on handouts from a father figure with serious and questionable intentions and motivations. It’s a tragedy in the making and you sense early on that sure, something bad can only come from such a setup. It does.
The moment is captured from a mounted camera in the office of Joe Exotic’s main office, where a guy named Joshua Dial works daily, he being another unfortunate twisting in Joes’ web, a good-natured young man who becomes Exotic’s campaign manager … for um, president all things. Travis is a man falling apart, ensnared into a sexual relationship and marriage to Joe (along with his other husband), working at the animal reserve and trying to keep chemically high. He’s clearly not entirely stable, leaving it genuinely disconnecting to see him try to fit into a universe that has no safe corners, figuratively and literally. When he comes to the office, fractured and frazzled, and sits under the camera across from Joshua (keeping him unseen by us), he talks about his troubles, like we expect.
Then the worst occurs.
In a moment that is shocking and perverse and dynamically shifting of all things already tenuously keeping unhealthy balance on a microscopic line of containment, it all shudders in the single muffled echo of a gunshot when Travis takes his own life. We don’t see it and nor do we need to. What we do witness is the reaction, live, as it happens, of Dial, who, a split second earlier was dealing with what he – and we – have come to accept as “normal” in the Joe Excotic compound. Every day is chaos. What’s more, amusing chaos.
No more.
The stunning and violent actions of Travis on himself had a permanent impact on me as I tried to get through the remainder of the series. The harrowing frames of Dial staring in disbelief as he narrates his own feelings in reflection afterward, forever wounded the experience for me, leaving the “fun” and, to twist the German word about, schadenfreude-ism of it all to the giles of the hungry winds. Tiger King no longer was fantastical folley. It instead became real.
While there is much about Tiger King that is battered like butter with delicious moral questions, the suicide of Travis at the heart of the show is crucial in delivering its ultimate message. We can laugh, talk, debate, and speculate endlessly about the genuine craziness that is everything about what directors Rebecca Chaiklin and Eric Goode deliver, but we cannot let go the deeply traumatizing reality that it all represents. Travis Maldonado is the absolute takeaway from Joe Exotic and his band of fools.