1 Captive audiences
DOI: 10.4324/9781003157205-2
Quarantining with Tiger King
Hannah Boast and Nicole Seymour
Shortly after a deadly virus leapt (possibly) from bats or pangolins to humans in late 2019,1 much of the quarantined Western world found itself enraptured by the spectacle of another boundary breach: humans handling wild cats in Netflix’s series Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness. As the program’s full title suggests, directors Rebecca Chaiklin and Eric Goode offered a melodramatic melange of reality TV and true crime, with elements of wildlife programming sprinkled in – thus pushing generic boundaries as well. Within ten days of the program’s release on March 20, 2020, 34.3 million households had followed the machinations of flamboyant private zoo owner Joseph Maldonado-Passage or “Joe Exotic,” his rivalry with animal sanctuary director Carole Baskin, and a motley crew of supporting characters. Within a month, that number had reached 64 million.2
Perhaps it is only appropriate that a program about problematic zoos flourished while a zoonotic disease plagued the world. And indeed, beyond their temporal synchronicity and the human/nonhuman boundary issues they both encapsulate – and even beyond the more obvious link of their common “virality” – the connections between Tiger King and the COVID-19 pandemic are surprisingly extensive. For one thing, the experience of lockdown is mirrored in the program’s thematization of confinement and incarceration. Netflix observed of their success with Tiger King and other programs, “We expect viewing to decline and membership growth to decelerate as home confinement ends.”3 Meanwhile, much of Tiger King features live tigers confined in cages, and many of the featured workers at Joe Exotic’s zoo are formerly incarcerated people. And near the program’s end, an incarcerated and disgraced Joe, perhaps missing the ironic resonance with his earlier activities, compares himself to a wild animal trapped in a cage. There is something disingenuous about a white man decrying his dehumanization by imprisonment, given the racialized nature of mass incarceration and his own anti-Black racism – something that, as we discuss later, the program actively erased. But Joe is not completely wrong to say that there is something animalizing about being stuck indoors. One commonly used phrase under COVID is “cooped up inside,” with “coop” a small enclosure for housing chickens.4 Even the term “quarantine” is applied to animals as well as humans – as when, for example, celebrities seek to cross international borders with their pets.5 In sum, while “cooped up” like chickens and “quarantined” like dogs, Tiger King viewers faced questions about the ethics of caging animals and, perhaps, humans.
Questions of sexuality, reproduction, and family also surround both Tiger King and COVID-19. The ethics of exotic animal breeding is a major topic in the program – and, of course, animal incarceration more broadly is often a matter of regulating reproductive processes, from egg laying and milk producing to births that produce new sources of meat. And we could argue that both Tiger King and COVID-19 have prompted critical reflection on the normative human family. That is, the camp queerness of Joe Exotic – whose three-way marriage to two younger men, among other peccadillos, is highlighted in the program – spoke to many viewers whose loss of childcare and sudden family togetherness highlighted the failures of the heterosexual nuclear unit. Mareile Pfannebecker and James A. Smith agree: “During lockdown, the nuclear family – with all its loneliness, repression, and hidden violences – is back with a vengeance. Viewed from within it, the queer interspecies counter-family of Joe Exotic’s zoo takes on a surprising utopian bent.”6 Some readers may recall the salacious factoid that (presumably heterosexual) divorces across China spiked after lockdown was lifted, prompting officials to institute a mandatory “cooling-off period.”7 Countless articles and op-eds, too, have revealed how COVID-19 has exacerbated the unequal division of heterosexual household labor, with childcare, cleaning, and, now, homeschooling falling disproportionately to women.8 Tiger King offers a respite from the normative family not only in terms of its queer familial and species dynamics but also in not being “family-friendly” viewing. While animals and, specifically, wildlife programming are often associated with children, the program earned an “MA” or “mature adult” rating for “violence, language, sexual content, drug use, and more.” “Is Tiger King OK for Kids? No!” concludes “mommy blog” Lola Lambchops.9
Teasing out these connections, we approach Tiger King as two environmental humanists with expertise in film and media studies, animal studies, and queer theory. We propose liveness and queerness as two keywords to understand the program’s popularity and significance. Liveness unites the contemporary phenomena of documentary broadcasting, streaming services, and social media with the enduring appeal of the older institution of the zoo. Queerness is found in the camp elements of the program and the many drag homages thereto, and in the ways that Tiger King disturbs species categories and the institution of the family. Through its engagement with liveness and queerness, the program offers new ways to think about time under COVID-19. Liveness is also present in our own “live” writing of this piece during the first wave of the pandemic in our respective locations of the United Kingdom and Germany in summer 2020. At the time of revising this piece in spring 2021, the pandemic has receded in those countries but intensified in others. Liveness complicates the process of writing in ways that remain visible in the text, notably in our use of the present tense. A future reader encountering this piece after the pandemic has ended may be lucky enough to find our verb tenses out-of-time. But from the 2021 present, when we are just beginning to see how COVID-19 has reshaped our world, and with the threat of new zoonotic diseases in the future, it seems premature to speak of pandemics in the past tense.
Watching on COVID time
As liveness is a function of time (as in the notion of “real-time”), we begin with the strangeness of time under COVID-19. We propose, first, that the virus has forced many people into a rather queer relationship with time: chronos rather than kairos.10 As literary critic Frank Kermode famously clarified, “chronos is ‘passing time’ or ‘waiting time’ and ‘kairos is the . . . point in time filled with significance, charged with a meaning derived from its relation to the end.’ ”11 We don’t know how or when the pandemic will end, and thus, we don’t know how to make sense of anything. This sense of warped, and specifically slowed, lockdown time was captured in Twitter jokes, such as, “Experts say we may be as little as two days away from finally leaving the March Age. The next epoch is provisionally being called ‘April’, and is also expected to last 5–10 million years.”12 Less humorously, many of those infected experience unexpected relapses or extended duration of symptoms known as “long COVID” – thus invoking Alison Kafer’s notion of “crip time,” or the ways that disability compels a “reorientation to time.”13 For Kafer, “crip time” is the correlative of “queer time;” both involve “departures from ‘straight’ time” that disrupt the expected ordering of our life courses and the organization of past, present, and future.14 In this sense, we might say that COVID time is “queer” by virtue of the state of suspension into which it has unexpectedly cast many of our lives.15
But binge watching a television series, as so many know, is a perfect way to pass time, if not to make sense of things. Here, we might note that Tiger King “began as a feature documentary.”16 We would argue that its ultimate serial nature – along with extra episodes, follow-up specials, planned spinoffs, and homage or parody videos, memes, and other paratexts (some discussed below) – has allowed for an even greater passing of quantifiable time and a sense of unfolding that at least gives shape to our days. Of course, Tiger King entered not just any entertainment landscape, but one heretofore defined by content saturation and audience fragmentation; viewing platforms have rapidly proliferated, asynchronous streaming has become the norm, and the era of communal “appointment television” has faded. Lucas Mann has described this scenario in terms of “piece[s] of culture . .. moving past and around us at all times, everything simultaneously here and gone. The act of viewership becomes reaching out for something sturdy . .. grabbing on tight.” In such a disorienting and isolating time as a pandemic, such “grabbing on” becomes more important than ever. But perhaps more to the point, Mann explains, “[w]hen new content is endless, access constant, any act of laying claim to what to watch, or read or listen to, becomes a snatch at a moment of slowness . .. which is another way of saying relief.”17 Whether perceived as slowing (a relief from the typically relentless pace of life and media) or quickening (a way of passing time that seems to have slowed or expanded unbearably under COVID), watching Tiger King was a chance to unify or actively manage time that had begun to feel out of control, and uniquely so starting in spring 2020.
What does this have to do with liveness? Tiger King created a sense of simultaneity, of a widely shared reality, that is crucial to a sense of liveness – especially when we recall that subjective feelings of community, immediacy, intimacy, and intense engagement typically define (“real”) live experiences.18 That is, given the compact and concentrated window of its popularity, this streaming program...
