Tiger King

Tiger King (2020) 

The Tiger King series is not the unrivalled revelation it is considered to be, it’s just a prime example of how a documentary should be made. Picking a rich subject, gaining the trust of everyone involved, and being able to become part of their space until they ultimately forget the ubiquity of the documentary crew. With any luck, the dramaturgy will then take care of itself. Which is what happened here. Far from being pure observation, however, there are classic narrative shortcuts, cross-cuts, and quite obviously blatant antipathy towards the protagonist's nemesis Carole Baskin, even though the creator of the documentary, Eric Goode, as a lifelong animal advocate, is fundamentally on her side. Scenes where the camera slowly follows her cold eyes as someone's voice over lists off the evidence for her having murdered her millionaire husband years ago, or slow-motion shots of her cuddling with her husband's shrimp after Joe Exotic was given what essentially amounts to a life sentence builds an indiscriminate monument of a universal enemy of taste and humanity in general. The circus around Joe Exotic itself then contributes wonderfully to the mythology of "the freest country in the world," the upturned face of the American Dream, and to the catalogue of haunted mystery ranches and their associated characters, where it can stand somewhere alongside Waco, Neverland, or Spahn Ranch, retroactively proving how accurately the underbelly of rural America was portrayed in the first season of True Detective. PS: Anyway, the eighth episode with the world's most embarrassing man as the host is a blast. PPS: As a hint for the beginning, the only more or less positive characters in the series are identified by the fact that they are missing more than half of their teeth or at least one limb (this doesn't include John Finlay, who doesn't have the mental capacity to become either a positive or negative character) PPPS: Here we meet clearly the worst assassin since our Citrón. (04.07.2020)