Pontificating on 'The Tiger King'.

'The Tiger King' is a documentary on Netflix about private zoo owner Joe Exotic. It has been an extremely popular, binge-worthy event. You watch for the shock-factor, the voyeurism, the horror, the intrigue. I finished with a bad taste in my mouth.

It is like watching an adaptation of a Graham Greene novel. Every time you think you've located a source of good, a source of morality, every human involved demonstrates the capacity for potential, or actual, evil. On all "sides" there is incessant greed for power, status and money. There is incessant violence, incitement of violence, physical abuse, emotional abuse, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, exploitation, betrayal, lying, entrapment, preying on the vulnerable. Deep, deep misogyny.

I felt so angry at the end. There are characters in this story who continue to behave in the most damaging, horrific way. They did not get their comeuppance.

But, of course, that's the point. I've projected my ideas of right and wrong onto this story and I expect them to be met with a sense of justice. I expect it all to come full circle.

As well as making parallels with a Graham Greene novel, I kept thinking that the structure of the documentary follows the same structure of a Shakespearean tragedy. A protagonist falls from some sort of elevated status due to an act of evil, and the whole story world collapses. I even felt, at some points, sorry for Joe Exotic as if he had some sort of tragic flaw. But I wanted the conspirators to fall too. I wanted 'The Tiger King' to be like 'Hamlet' where every character compliant in the moral wrong dies (gets their justice).

But Shakespeare knew, like Greene, that that is not how the world works. Our sense of morality is futile after a point.

Despite all this pontificating I am still holding out for a hero. The hero being any vague sense of karma, justice, satisfaction. I want Jeff Lowe, Doc Antle etc, etc. to have their worlds collapse too. That would be fair, wouldn't it?