TV Review: "Chimp Crazy": "Gone Ape" and "Head Shot" (Season 1, Episodes 2 and 3)

The HBO documentary series asks some surprisingly touch questions about the ethics of documentary and great ape ownership.

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We’re now three episodes into HBO’s Chimp Crazy, the newest salacious and troubling documentary from the creator of the notorious Tiger King. In the second and third episodes we toggle between two different story strands. On the one hand there’s the story set in the present, in which Tonia Haddix continues to try to keep custody of chimp Tonka, going to increasingly bizarre lengths to do so (including faking his death and hiding him out in a private animal sanctuary). On the other hand there are a number of scenes set in the past, in which we learn about two particularly horrifying chimp attacks, one involving the chimpanzee named Travis and the other involving Buck. 

As with the first episode, Tonia continues to be a larger-than-life character, someone who appears and acts even more outlandishly than Joe Exotic. In some bizarre way, she seems to almost be an amalgam of  Joe and Carole Baskin, with the former’s outsized (and, dare I say it, trashy) aesthetic and the latter’s misguided do-gooder energy. She clearly loves Tonka, and as self-interested as her actions might seem, Chimp Crazy does at least make it clear that she wants to do what’s best for him. On the other hand, she also is more than happy to sell monkeys and engage in some shady dealings, and as it becomes clearer that PETA and the law is going to catch up with her, she starts to show signs of Joe’s self-serving attitude, even going so far as to consider euthanizing Tonka (supposedly at the suggestion of the vet).

Even so, there is, I think, something tragic about Tonia. This is a woman who has given up her family–including her son, who makes a number of aggrieved appearances during these two episodes–in order to care for the chimps. At several points during these episodes we see her rapidly changing hairstyles, each one more outlandish (and, dare I say it, buffoonish) than the last, and there’s even a moment when we see her get injected with lip filler. All of this adds up to a rather travestied image of femininity, one that wouldn’t be all that out of place on an episode of Drag Race. Much like Joe Exotic, Tonia is always/already larger-than-life, and the series never lets us forget it, for better and for worse.

While Chimp Crazy is certainly exploitative and sensationalistic in both its subject and its approach, it does manage to ask us as viewers to engage in some remarkable introspection. In this respect it’s a better and more focused production than Tiger King, which tended to get lost in its own salaciousness (and, if we’re being honest, lionized Joe Exotic even as it was supposedly holding him up for moral judgment). Chimp Crazy even goes so far as to draw our attention to the ethics of documentary filmmaking itself. 

Take, for example, the fact that much of the documentary is filmed under false pretenses, with Tonia spilling most of her secrets to someone who is essentially a proxy for Eric Goode. Once it becomes clear that Tonia has in fact been keeping Tonka and defying a court order in doing so, the ethical questions become ever more acute, and there’s even a striking conversation between Goode and a journalist as to what the ethical thing to do is in such a situation. Should he turn Tonia in to PETA and the law–and thereby save Tonka’s life–or should he let this situation play out? From the point of view of the audience it’s not a particularly tough question, since we’ve already seen what poor Tonka has had to endure, but it’s clearly a more vexing one (supposedly) for Goode. It’s also one with which all documentarians who take on such subjects have to contend.

Obviously, though, the more pressing ethical question is what should be done with poor Tonka. I won't lie. There are numerous moments in Chimp Crazy where I want to yell at the screen and tell Tonia to stop being an idiot, that she is in no way that she can ever hope to provide this poor ape the care that he so desperately needs, for all that she continues to insist that he would never survive in a sanctuary. This is an ape, after all, that has been kept in a basement for who knows how long, denied fresh air or time outdoors–that would risk Tonia’s ruse being discovered, you see–and who is fed things that are not healthy for a human, let alone a chimp (McDonald’s is often on the menu). Whatever Tonia’s intentions might be, and however fond of Tonka she might be, the truth is that she is actively harming him by keeping him in her basement. 

As the segments detailing other chimp attacks make even clearer, this isn’t just a question of whether Tonka is being treated cruelly (though he is, in my view). There’s also an acute danger to Tonia and everyone who comes into contact with him. Travis and Buck seemed like perfectly nice chimps, but in both cases their caretakers were foolish enough to think that they could ever be tamed, that they weren’t just ticking time bombs waiting to explode. No matter how much chimps might look and act like humans, and no matter how closely related they might be, the truth is that we can never fully know what’s going on behind those eyes, just as we can never know what will set them off and lead to a horrible rampage. The stakes of chimp ownership, then, go far beyond individual chimps–whether Tonka, Travis, or Buck–and right to the ethics of captivity itself and whether any person, no matter how well-meaning, can ever give these creatures the life they deserve. 

While Chimp Crazy never entirely shakes off its tabloid ethos–particularly evident in the outlandish ways in which it so frequently stages Tonia–there is nevertheless a great deal more to this documentary series than its outlandish premise and name might suggest. Let’s hope that the fourth and final episode manages to stick the landing.