American Freak Show

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: HBO, Netflix

HBO’s Chimp Crazy, which serves as the doc maker Eric Goode’s follow-up to Tiger King, spends sizable chunks of its four episodes considering the strangeness of Tonia Haddix, the exotic-animal broker who abducted her chimpanzee Tonka in a bid to outrun PETA. Haddix, its primary subject and talking head, provides a lot to take in: burnt bronzed skin, Barbie-doll hair, heavily doctored face, loud pink shirts. To be sure, this is by her own design. “I’m the Dolly Parton of chimps,” she declares early in the series. (“Or I’m the crazy monkey lady, whatever,” she adds.)

But there is a certain way Chimp Crazy fixates on her strangeness that straddles the line between establishing a character and gawking at their oddities. In one scene, the camera lingers on Haddix as she receives lip fillers. The technician performs the injection and talks through the process of manually sculpting her lip to produce the desired engorged effect. Cosmetic surgery is uncanny to witness; video of a lip-filling procedure will always resemble body horror. The sequence produces a repellent effect with Chimp Crazy’s message clear: Haddix is a freak.

This is a visual framing of Haddix the docuseries revisits over and over again, reinforcing her alienness even as Goode tries to couch the broader project within a kind of empathy. “I can relate to what you’re going through,” he tells Haddix the first time they meet in person. “I also keep animals” — Goode is an animal conservationist who operates a turtle conservancy near his Californian estate — “I know that there are certain animals that if someone took them away from me, I’d be very upset.” Yet there’s a massive distance between Goode and Haddix and, for that matter, between Goode and the insular community of exotic-animal breeders about which he’s now made two different hit docuseries.

Though he counts himself as a member of this community, Goode is on the periphery at best. Exotic-animal breeding is a trade to his subjects but just a passion project for Goode, who’s made his money elsewhere: first in high-flying New York City hospitality circles — with ventures like the canonical ’80s art gallery–meets–nightclub Area, the Bowery Hotel, and the Waverly Inn — and now with his production business Goode Films, which has three docs in the pipeline, including another with HBO. His reputation among the Joe Exotics, benign four years ago, is now infamous due to Tiger King’s success, so much so that he had to utilize the ethically dubious tactic of deploying a “proxy” director for Chimp Crazy, essentially an admission of his inability to infiltrate this under-the-table world populated by variations on the Florida Man meme. Yes, Goode’s subjects run big businesses and own real estate, but they exist in an extreme new-money tier of society whose extralegal conditions are ripe for big wins and even bigger losses. Their maximalist existence in the margins makes for fascinating stories but also tragic ones. With two projects now, it’s clear Goode is interested in this very specific American archetype but perhaps less aware of the role he’s playing in exploiting its image for the screen, particularly when it comes to the social trauma and mental-health issues bound up in these “characters.”

This dilemma was fully present in Tiger King, which traces the conflict between two exotic-animal entrepreneurs, Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin. Like Chimp Crazy, Tiger King emerged from Goode’s modus operandi of embedding his film crew with eccentric figures and keeping the camera rolling when he fortuitously stumbles into a rollicking “so insane how could it be real” situation. In Tiger King’s case, it’s the revelation of Joe Exotic attempting a murder-for-hire plot to kill his rival Baskin, herself already notable for potentially engineering her husband’s death. Though criticized at the time — Slate described it as “a sprawling, ethically shaky mess” — Tiger King was nevertheless a streaming sensation on Netflix and a pop-culture phenomenon inextricable from the confinement of early COVID and the latter stages of the (first?) Trump presidency. Which is to say American viewers were primed to gawk at the lurid drama of Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin because they were stuck at home, living under the chaos of a Florida Man’s presidency. But the sugar high was short-lived. Though Tiger King ultimately resulted in legislation outlawing private ownership of big cats, it was hard to shake the impression that you were watching two not particularly stable people destroy each other. Joe Exotic, for instance, may be an abuser, but by his own account, he was also a victim of sexual abuse as a child. However you view their sins as individuals, Tiger King’s treatment of them as crazy “characters” leaves a deeply sour taste long after the fact.

Chimp Crazy comparatively plays like a character portrait that gestures toward unpacking the psychology of its subject, Haddix: What makes a person feel so strongly about a chimp that they would kidnap it? But this gesture is rarely more than a feint, as the series never probes Haddix’s interiority. At one point, we see her discuss how she married young to a much older man who didn’t believe in women working, which she uses as a transition to talk about how she eventually channeled her energy into fostering over 70 children. There is a narrative inconsistency here, as Haddix was a former registered nurse before the events of Chimp Crazy, but the series doesn’t capitalize on this. Instead, it presents the fostering detail as a psychological bridge that may help contextualize why she was so eager to throw herself into a love for chimps and exotic-animal brokerage despite no prior experience or interest. It evokes an impression of Haddix as a tragic figure but doesn’t display much curiosity about the substance of her tragedy.

When Haddix expounds on her love for Tonka and the other chimps, we see flashes of deep emotional wounds the pseudo-maternal possession of these animals seems to fill. She speaks of feeling abandoned by her kids, and there’s a strong undercurrent of control in how she describes the animals. “They’re eager to please,” she says. “They don’t grow up and get a mind of their own.” In the same sequence, her son, Justin Range, talks about his mother’s love for the chimps constantly overshadowing her love for her human children. But Chimp Crazy leaves this conflict hanging, content to use Haddix’s narrative-spinning to illustrate her self-mythologizing instead of unpacking the mythology itself. Despite spending so much time on Haddix, Chimp Crazy is painfully half-hearted in its pursuit of any insight into the person. It’s just not interested in Haddix beyond seeing her as a vile cartoon. The final reveal that she herself becomes a victim of a vicious chimp attack — a somewhat common outcome of unnatural chimp confinement foreshadowed throughout the series — has the effect of a punch line, one that makes apparent how Haddix, a person with serious issues, was always its biggest joke.

It’s productive to contrast Chimp Crazy with Lance Oppenheim’s Ren Faire, another HBO docuseries from earlier this year, which situates itself within the domain of another group of eccentrics. The show follows the succession drama that breaks out at the Texas Renaissance Festival after its patriarch figure, “King” George Coulam — a wildly wealthy octogenarian who’s still hunting for dates online and intends to die by assisted suicide should he live to the age of 95 — announces he’s stepping down from the business. Coulam’s faculties have clearly declined, and just as one may infer all sorts of red-state implications from Joe Exotic’s mullet, one may do the same from Coulam’s sprawling estate complete with manor house. Yet Ren Faire’s unorthodox and semi-collaborative approach, which sees Oppenheim rely on visual flairs and even dramatic re-creations to simulate a subject’s interior experience, results in an evocative work, as if Oppenheim is trying to see the world from the perspective of the people he’s following, no matter how strange and questionable those viewpoints might be. The classic dynamic between the documentarian, who has the power, and the subjects, who do not, still exists, but Ren Faire lets the people it documents reveal themselves on their terms. The series takes their words and self-perceptions seriously, even as it remains eminently clear about the overarching moral story: a tale of institutional decline that doubles as a microcosm of the decline of the world around us.

“It’s important for me not to overreach into the story, but just document it and let the viewers at the end of the story come to their conclusion,” Goode says in Chimp Crazy’s third episode to the journalist Peter Laufer, who serves as an expert talking head on the series. Here, Goode is referring to the ethical conundrum of whether to intervene after determining that Tonka might either be in danger or become a danger to others. His team has acquired a recording that would help PETA take legal action against Haddix. “What would you do in a situation like that?” he asks Laufer, who begins his reply with “As journalists …”, thus equating the function of the two men. This is grandstanding. This presupposes that what Goode is doing can actually be called a journalistic documentary as opposed to nonfiction entertainment whose events are at least partly catalyzed by him. But Goode and his team have always been clear about how they approach their productions. “We cast a wide net and then home in on the characters that rise to the top,” he told my colleague Lane Brown in a profile for New York. Which is to say what he really does is wander the world of eccentrics in the margins, pull out compelling enough subjects, build a circus around them, and invite polite society to gawk at the resulting freak show.