TV Review: "Chimp Crazy: Monkey Love" (Season 1, Episode 1)
The new documentary series from the creator of "Tiger King" succeeds on its own terms, for good and for ill.
Hello, dear reader! Do you like what you read here at Omnivorous? Do you like reading fun but insightful takes on all things pop culture? Do you like supporting indie writers? If so, then please consider becoming a subscriber and get the newsletter delivered straight to your inbox. There are a number of paid options, but you can also sign up for free! Every little bit helps. Thanks for reading and now, on with the show!
Like many other people, I was morbidly transfixed by Tiger King, back in the darkest early days of the pandemic when the world around us was falling apart. There was something both nauseating and yet irresistibly compelling about the Netflix drama, which was like something out of our collective id. It was tragic and trashy and exploitative, and it was impossible to ignore or to stop watching once you’d started. Such was its power that it spawned a fictionalized series based on the Joe Exotic/Carole Baskin feud (Joe vs. Carole) and a second season of Tiger King. Suffice it to say that neither of these quite caught on in the way that many had hoped, and it’s probably not going too far to say that they’ve been collectively memory-holed (though for my part I think Joe vs. Carole is actually better than Tiger King itself).
However, Chimp Crazy, the new docuseries from HBO, shows signs of trying to capture some of that lightning in a bottle that its predecessor did. It’s directed by Eric Goode (who directed and produced Tiger King), it’s about rather looney people who become far too invested in wild animals (in this case chimps rather than tigers), it has a larger-than-life personality at its center (Tania Haddix, about whom more anon), and it demonstrates the extent to which wild animal ownership in the U.S. really is a problem that needs to be addressed by the legal system.
As the title suggests, this is a series all about the ways that certain people have developed deep, and troubling, bonds with chimps, humanity’s closest relative and a source of ongoing terror and fascination. As I was watching this first episode, I constantly found myself thinking of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the first film in the reboot trilogy from the 2010s. Like Caesar, the apes of the Missouri Primate Foundation–once one of the main sources of chimps used in the entertainment industry and the center of a legal battle with PETA–are reduced to little more than creatures clinging to bare life. As the series makes abundantly clear in its first episode, these poor creatures are not living their best lives, for all that it’s clear that their caretakers, including Tania and the Foundation’s owner, Connie Braun Casey, do truly seem to love their charges, for all that the latter at least has also been willing to exploit them.
And speaking of Haddix… If this series clearly wants to tap into the same lurid tabloid pleasures offered up by Tiger King, then it has certainly found its Joe Exotic. With her overdone hair, her caked-on makeup, and her almost childlike simplicity (in several scenes she’s shown sitting between two beds with teddy bears strewn about), there’s something almost saccharine about her naivete and her utter devotion and attachment to the chimps in her care. Like so many of the other people chronicled in this documentary–including a woman who actually went so far as to nurse a premature chimp baby on her own breast– it never seems to occur to her that love simply isn’t enough when it comes to providing creatures like chimpanzees with the kind of care they need to really ever flourish in captivity (if they could ever do so, that is). She may not be as nakedly self-serving and pathologically narcissistic as Joe, so far anyway, but she is just as culpable when it comes to the suffering her charges endure at the Foundation.
Lurking in the background of this whole thing is an awareness of the violence of which chimps are remarkably capable. At several points a large ape will slam into the bars of its cage and, while Haddix may not be disturbed by these shows of aggression, they are reminders of how powerful these apes are and how quickly such power can be turned against a careless human. Contrary to what Haddix and others like her seem to think, they are not to be taken lightly. Given the trailers for the subsequent episodes, I have no doubt that this is going to be made very clear to us going forward.
This first episode ends on a cliffhanger, with the viewer uncertain whether or not Haddix, confronted with a confiscation order by the courts, has absconded with noted chimp Tonka or not (though it seems more than likely that she did). After all, by this point we’ve already seen just how emotionally (over)invested she is in her simian charges, and Tonka in particular, so it would make perfect sense, narratively, if she were to have done so. To put it bluntly (and to quote the immortal Sophia Petrillo of The Golden Girls, her heart’s in the right place, but I don’t know where the hell her brain is).
Among other things, Tiger King posed the question: how close is too close when it comes to individual people’s relationship to wild animals? For women like Tania, there seems to be no boundary that she’s not willing to cross when it comes to her bond with them, and it takes an intervention from both PETA and the State of Missouri to get her to relinquish the chimps to a sanctuary where they can have a life that is at least somewhat close to the one that they would be able to lead in the wild (and where they’ll presumably get a better diet than the McDonald’s that we see them being fed at the Missouri Primate Foundation.
Also like Tiger King, Chimp Crazy sometimes struggles to engage with its own moral equivocations, particularly when it comes to the ethics of documentary filmmaking and how much honesty with the subject the filmmakers should espouse. After all, the only reason Haddix agrees to an interview in the first place is because Goode had someone else pose as the director. This raises some very thorny and vexing ethical questions and, though he offers his justifications for this, it nevertheless manages to cast a shadow over the production.
I’ll be honest, though. Despite my qualms and despite (or perhaps because of) my horror at what’s unfolding on the screen, I know I’ll be plopped in front of my TV next week at 10 PM, ready for another salacious episode.