I just found out
that Joe Exotic’s life is being made into a scripted TV show starring Nicholas Cage
as Exotic, and this is not even the first scripted series on him announced within
the last year (https://variety.com/2020/tv/news/joe-exotic-nicolas-cage-series-tiger-king-1234574979/). It is fascinating that three serialized
projects are being made about the same person in a year, which makes me wonder
1-What else they are hoping to add to an already spectacularly excessive
entertainment content that is the Tiger King 2-What does this
glorification of a documentary that has so many ethically questionable practices
in it tell us about the contemporary landscape of TV production?
As you mentioned, the serialized projects based on the popularity of the television documentary, Tiger King looks like a fascinating starting point to think about the relationship between documentary ethics and epistephilia, a desire and pleasure in seeing and knowing. I think the viewer's curiosity toward this extremely idiosyncratic character, Joe Exotic is one of the significant factors of this viral popularity. However, conditioned by the broadly shared ontological understanding of documentary's indexicality to the lived world, it is inevitable to think about the ethical question of representing social actors and of in what capacity documentary engages in public dialogue. Although there have been a lot of scholarship on this issue in the field of documentary studies, I think little work has been done put documentary scholarship in a productive conversation with television media ecology. I also hope to consider the problem in detail!
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