Tru Crime (allathetime)

McMillions, 2020, d. James Lee Hernandez, Brian Lazarte - HBO (6 episodes)
Tiger King, 2020, d. Eric Goode, Rebecca Chaiklin - Netflix (6 episodes)

I'm not an avid true crime consumer, but I certainly dabble and have been doing so since the heyday of Unsolved Mysteries in the early 90's.  There's something fascinating, eerie, curious (sometimes morbidly so) and upsetting about murder, arson, kidnapping, robbery and all the other criminally atypical behaviours in society.

For me it's not so much the "what happened" but the "why did it happen" that intrigue me, and what I think make for a captivating true crime story.  There's a part of me that loves to play amateur psychologist, to try and understand the motivations of someone who acts so aberrantly.  A well told crime story may not spell this out explicity but at least give you a thorough enough profile to hazard a guess.

HBO's McMillions doesn't necessarily fit the profile of your conventional true crime story.  It tells of how the McDonalds Monopoly game was subject to years of fraud where every winner of a major prize was a hand-picked recipient...but the primary question was, hand-picked by whom?  And once it reveals "whom" it's still not that interested in the whys of the action.  Perhaps because it's a non-violent crime (all things considered, there's threats lobbed about, and an insinuation that a fatal car accident may not have actually been an accident).

The 6-part series begins with the discovery of the crime, one in which a the Sacramento branch of the FBI receives a tip off that something is hinky with the contest.  As it's told it's almost happenstance that the thread left dangling is even pulled at all.  A post-it note memo of the tip is discovered by a junior agent hungry for something meatier than the usual insurance fraud case their branch normally tackles.

From there, the show starts tugging at the thread, slowly unraveling the complex weave of characters, criminals and dupes involved in the scam.  We see the connections, and the show helps with the usual "family tree" mapping board to display the connections.  But who sits at the top?  A name, "Uncle Jerry" is all that they have for a while.  The Feds also have to determine if they should be working with McDonalds on this, or possibly risk tipping off an insider who's in on the scam.

A complex but cinema-ready ruse is put in place as the Feds act as a marketing company hired by McDonalds to create commercials starring past winners of the Monopoly game, which gives them an excuse to question them.  Through phone taps and rigorous investigation they start working their way to the top, which at first seems to be connected to the Columbo crime family through one Jerry Columbo.  Included in the talking heads is Jerry's brother and sister-in-law, both who seem eager to lay out what they know of the story, but also very aware of what can and cannot be said about their family's extra-legal dealings.

By the start of the fifth episode, we know who Uncle Jerry is, but the mystery has become less "whodunit", or even "whydoneit", but more "howdoneit"?  This dangling carrot of how it was done is kind of the least exciting aspect of the show, and the directors remind you of that hovering veggie a little too often, to the point that it seems almost like a magical feat.

The greatest success of McMillions is the impartial lens in which it looks at the people who were wrangled into helping Uncle Jerry accomplish his crimes, some far more complicit than others.  The shows producers, like the prosecuting attorney, aren't letting anyone off the hook, saying that greed got the better of them, but at the same time, the context provided give you a sense of how these people became involved, often through duplicitous means, and even more unfortunately, to no real material gain.

The show isn't beyond compassion, even for the guilty.

Which is much more than can be said for Netflix's highly exploitative Tiger King.

The biggest cultural phenomenon of today is, well, COVID-19.  But a close second is the Tiger King documentary.  There's a reason for that...it's absolutely insane.  It's upsetting and entertaining in equal measure, profiling, mainly, one Joe Exotic, a "big cat" private zookeeper in Oklahoma.

To get into the story of Tiger King would take hours to frame right, but in broad swaths, it's framed around Joe's hatred for big cat rescue advocate Carole Baskin.  Lest we think Carol is the hero of the piece, the show takes time, practically a whole episode, midway through the run to explore Joe's theory that Carole killed her second husband.

It would seem there's no agenda to Tiger King other than to tell the most sensationalistic story it possibly can.  The editing of the series makes for a confusing timeline, and Joe Exotic's constantly shifting narrative (and existence) makes it even harder to track exactly what happened and when.  It really only matters if the show were interested in truth telling more than storytelling.  But it's as interested in hot gossip, insinuation and heresay as it is about facts or any sort of message about the nature of keeping big cats.

In many ways this docuseries should act as a scathing expose of the big cat "industry" that's seeing thousands of big cats subjected to abusive conditions in the United States.  The show doesn't take any measure to psychologically explore why the people who are into big cats are into big cats, but it's easy enough to extrapolate... it's all about power.

Though never actually said in the documentary, Joe, it turns out, is very afraid of these big cats, but he likes the power and notoriety it affords him.  It does seem that for a time Joe does actually care about the well-being of these animals, but as it starts to afford him more fame, his ego revs up and takes over.  Joe is like a Batman villain, a two-faced conundrum of a man, capable of brutal crimes and venomous vitriol, but also overly brimming with love and charity.  He's a living cartoon, always wearing a costume with his dyed mullet mismatched with his dark beard, his cowboy hat and ever-present thigh holster.  He's proudly out and gay in a state not known for its tolerances.  He doesn't seem very smart, and yet in his own way he's fumbled his way into being a criminal mastermind.

Joe is kind.  He holds an annual thanksgiving dinner at his zoo where the impoverished can come for a big meal.  He takes in ex-convicts who may have nowhere else to go and puts them to work and gives them a home.  He showers his husbands (yes, plural) with affection and gifts a plenty, doting on them sweetly.  Joe wants people to experience the joys and wonders of big cats, doing outreach events at local shopping malls and up close experiences at the zoos.


But beneath all this warmth and charity is something very sinister.  Those ex-cons are effectively slave labor, working 80 hours a week for barely a pittance, and their living conditions are vermin-infested squalor (and the food they eat is the same discarded meat they get from the Wal-Mart that they feed the cats).  Joe's husbands are all straight men effectively kept in Joe's sway by the gifts he gives them, oh, and the steady supply of meth (we aren't even told about Joe's first husband in this series).  The big cat outreach is more about the glory of Joe than the glory of the cats, and the money he makes off them.  There's a potent scene where Joe, late in the series and in effectively desperate times, violent steals a literal newborn tiger cub from its mother and absconds with it for sale for a measly couple thousand dollars.

We meet in the second episode Doc Antle, another big cat breeder/zookeeper/showman who is effectively Joe's mentor.  He taught Joe about animal handling but Joe was even more interested in Doc's many beautiful wives who work at the zoo for basically nothing.  Doc is running a cult, no bones about it, and he dupes young women into both his employ and his familial life by means of attacking their confidence while bolstering their importance to the animals, and therefore him.  Doc taught Joe the way of manipulating, but with Doc you can see the control and restraint he has in his upsetting and unseemly ways.  Joe on the other hand unable to control his warring id and ego, which is why Joe is now in jail and Doc, save for the bruising this documentary might give his reputation, is still pretty much untouched.

The central narrative, as mentioned, is the rivalry with Carole Baskin (though there's so much other craziness in Joe's life, like his "music career" and his ill-fated run for President).  Herself once a big cat breeder, she's flipped to the other side running a big cat conservation, where she houses rescued big cats, and has her own cult-like army of volunteers who work their way through her t-shirt colour rankings like graduating through karate belts.  Carole is a public advocate for laws on big cat breeding and keeping, which puts her on the radar of every big cat wrangler in the documentary (and beyond...but they all seem to hate her).  She's put a target on Joe's zoo and Joe responds in kind x1000.  His egocentric homebrewed internet broadcast network seems (at least from the perspective of this documentary) heavily invested as a Carole Baskin smear campaign and/or hate show.  Numerous times Joe shoots or explodes effigies of Carole on camera.

So when it come out that Joe was involved in a murder-for-hire crime with Carole as the target it's hardly a surprise, it's just yet another twist in Joe's crazy out of control life.

I've written ten paragraphs on this series already and I've hardly scratched the surface of all the seriously crazy bullshit from Joe's life (and surrounding personalities orbiting it's sphere).  It's not a finely crafted documentary, but it is very entertaining, and that -- next to the insane amount of animal abuse -- is the disturbing part.  This reality show doesn't see it's people as humans, so much as characters in a story, and as such there's a sense that the participants are unwittingly self-incriminating in their participation (less concerning for the guilty) but also unknowingly opening themselves up to mockery, ridicule, and abuse (again, less concerning for the guilty).

Ultimately, there are no heroes in this story, there's hardly even a truly good person to latch onto.  Rick Kirkham maybe, but he was still trying to capitalize upon Joe's insanity for his own gain.  Or Joshua Dial, Joe's campaign manager he recruited from the Wal-Mart guns and ammo department who witnesses Joe's third husband's accidental suicide (and, horrifyingly we witness him witness it, the deed happening off camera).  But even Josh, who has our utmost sympathies for the trauma he endured being in Joe's sphere, still seems to defend Joe far too much.  Or Saff, the ex-marine trans man (misgendered by the show) who has his arm ripped off by a tiger, still seems to uphold Joe's good deeds, ignoring his bad...acknowledging at the end that the animals seemed to have been forgotten amidst all the madness.  And that's pretty much the damning commentary for the mini-serise, that the animals got lost amidst all the meaty messiness.

So yeah, it's highly entertaining, but just as upsetting, and even more problematic.  In its edit, the Tiger King is transfixed by Joe, and gives him perhaps more time, more attention and more of the benefit of the doubt then he deserves, almost painting him as a sympathetic victim.  Again, clearly less interested in facts, and more interested in opinions, there's a reflection of modern America at the heart of all this.  It's one of ugliness, division, exploitation, crass consumerism, and cults of personality barring any sense of logic, fact, or reason.  It doesn't paint that correlation but it really should.

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Some things it left out (from Robert Moor's twitter, a podcaster who extensively covered the Joe Exotic story prior to this docuseries)