It's a dog-eat-dog world in the tiger kingdom. And this Netflix series shows us that, in American (libertarian) culture, its much the same.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The Tiger King is a series so full of contradictions that it doesn't seem to know precisely what it wants to be.

It's a portrayal of the uniqueness, redeeming qualities, possibility, and value of American culture and its do-anything people that feels itself free to create bizarre, almost unimagineable, fictionalized realities. But, it is also a portrayal of the absurdity, artifice, contrivance, dishonesty, and delusion of those realities.

It is a portrayal of an American libertarianism that rebels against the conformity and constraint of government and society, of a radically individualized and liberated politics of the every-man. But, it is also a portrayal of the fecklessness, selfishness, betrayal and meekness of a culture unwilling to confront even the threat of a threat of actual retaliation against the daring provocation of its radical world-views.

And it is a portrayal of deep human insecurities and pathologies who's courageous and fantastical lives are inextricably bound-up with the suppression of the wild and dangerous animal spirits they seek to possess. But, it is also the story of how, together, man and animal combine to awaken possibilities for human and animal lives that might otherwise find no means of actualization.

The Tiger King wants us to look at the decades long struggles depicted between warring factions of private animal owners, with their conflicting rationales for ownership or preservation and see within them a libertarian message of the suppression of the human spirit at the hands of animal rights 'activists' and their left-wing fanatical networks of corrupt politics. But what it also shows us is a human species unable to escape its worldly constraints and whose own politics falls victim to the same pathologies and insecurities played-out on their captive animals.

In the end, The Tiger King is about the untameable irrational politics of animals and the kill or be killed world they inhabit. But the animals in the foreground, here, are not the tigers, but the humans themselves. And the way in which they hunted and cornered the purest of their kind in an act of simultaneous self-preservation and self-actualization, whether or not the boundless opportunism and performance of the co-creators of the series, or the cast of characters within, knows it or not.