Tiger King is Overrated-双语剧评
Popular Culture Happy Hour这个播客节目的三位主持人对Tiger King发表了相当有意思的评论，在这里给大家分享，并附上我自己（翻得很随意）的译文。此播客没有文本，英文部分是我用耳朵听+手打的，省去了少量信息。节目地址：Tiger King And What's Making Us Happy
前文说了一下Tiger King最近有多火，然后三位主持人：Glen, Steven, Linda，开始了各抒己见。
Glen: 你们尽管嘲笑我是个一本正经的老古董好了，但是！我完全不理解Tiger King里这些人，他们反复强调：“每个人都想撸小老虎...”，这根本是空穴来风，谁想撸小老虎啊？不存在的好吗。我也没觉得Joe Exotic有意思。闭嘴之前我最后说一句：这片子很用力在污名化Carole Baskin，待会儿咱们可以谈谈这个。
Steven: 我和Glen有相同的疑虑。这片子当作娱乐消遣的话，的确是引人入胜。但一般来说，我喜欢在影视作品中找到一个角色，去理解、支持、感受ta，然而这部片子里除了Saff，我找不到任何一个值得我支持的人，这是观影过程中我很失望的一点。我觉得最大的毛病应该是：剧中那些分明是惹人憎恶的行为，却以猎奇的方式呈现，简直越看越失望。但我也能理解这片子的叙事为啥会有点儿跑偏：因为剧中充满了怪人，所以非常容易就去聚焦这些人的离奇故事，而错过了更重要的议题，如虐待动物、动物园里的邪教氛围。
Linda：我觉得制作不好，结构也不行。这样的故事需要一个连贯一致的整体方向，与此同时，每一集也需要有自己的内部结构，这个层面上看，这片子说不上成功。在性别层面上，也有让人不舒服的地方，因为片中女性所呈现的形象是让人扫兴的、心肠歹毒的“黑寡妇”。很扯的是，片中断定Carole和她第一任丈夫的失踪有关系，这是完全没有丝毫证据支撑的，但还专门搞了出一集讲这个，此举给人感觉是想重新平衡整个故事。对很多人来说，Joe Exotic是一个相当怪异，但却魅力十足的角色，但我却丝毫不认同。我觉得这是Joe有意识想向我们呈现的形象。我还认为他很可憎，因为他虐待老虎，这一点他自己也承认了的，并且还有人指控他虐待G.W.动物园的员工。他被描绘成一个有趣的怪人，但我是不吃这套的。
Glen: Joe对Carole的憎恶缘由是没有证据支撑的，他一遍又一遍地说Carole的种种坏话，然而这些控诉却并不能让人信服。所以，我们就花很多时间看他火力全开地控诉Carole。他的那套理论有点儿误导观众的意思，这是不对的，我很失望。
Steven: 另外让人郁闷的一点是，这部纪录片搞了一点小手脚，想要影响人们的判断。受访者说完以后，摄像头总会停留一小会儿，来捕捉他们眼睛一眨不眨的那几秒钟。每次他们搞这出，都弄得好像这个受访者刚才说的东西很诡异，不对劲，不诚实一样...这是个小细节，但剧组这样的行为，给人的感觉就很不真诚。比如在采访Carole时，她说了点啥，镜头就定在那，捕捉她眨眼的表情，搞得好像她是为了制片者才故意这样做的。每次在Carole身上施展这一招，都像是在故意让观众觉得她是个怪胎。这种小动作让我非常失望。
Linda: 从影视制作的角度来说，这故事非常需要一个靠谱的叙事者。该剧很显然把Carole，Joe和其他角色都呈现为不靠谱的叙述者。通常在这样的故事当中，会有一个类似记者，调查员，律师的角色，来带领观众走进真相，这样的一条主线也能把故事碎片组装起来，不至于让观众仅仅在众多事件之间无目的地徘徊。该片还带有明显阶级指向性。对于Joe的嘲笑和指点，就有明显的阶级指向性，因为根据Joe的自述，他是个可怜人。然而剧组也有意把Carole呈现为一个类似“文化精英”，“势利眼”的形象。可是，如果你真的有去关注她的生平故事，你会发现其实和剧中所呈现的不一样。我觉得该片在努力制造两名主角间的阶级矛盾，这给人感觉就很不真诚。
Glen: 该剧很“享受地“在讲述Joe的酷儿身份，这是很诡异的。我感觉，该剧自以为发现了Joe的丈夫们所做的“交易”，也就是直男为了利益，故意装成同性恋。但该剧没资格沾沾自喜，因为很多酷儿概念该剧都没搞清楚，比如压根儿没提到Saff的性别误认，甚至连“性别流动”这个概念都没涉及。
Steven: 这片子有一种魔性的好看。我5小时就看完了。内容很好消化，但是结构上挺乱的，制片者的重心飘忽不定，导致观众也很晕乎。举个例，当看到Carole的故事，你可能就惊了：“啥？她丈夫失踪了？咋回事？”，然后该剧紧接着就说：“好的，我们下一集就来讲讲她丈夫的失踪。”就这样牵着观众鼻子走，而并非带着他们去探索，不知道我说清楚没。
原文：
Glen: I’m gonna be a stick-in-the-mudhere. I’m gonna bea humorless prig.Not for nothing, I don’t understand these people. Everybody on the show keeps making the same assertion over and over again, which is “everybody wants to pet a baby tiger” What? No! that’s not a thing! I never found Joe Exoticinteresting or compelling, and I will shut up now ,but I’ll just close by saying just for Carole Baskin, the show does her so dirty!Let’s talk about that.
Steven: I shared some of Glen’s misgivings. As a piece of entertainment, I found it engrossing. Where the showfalls down for me as a viewing experience is I tend to like to find somebodyto latch on, to somebodyto root for,somebodyto feel for. And other than Saff, I didn’t really find anybody particularly rootable as a human being. The biggest issue for me probably is in presenting repellent behavior as quirk.I found that very frustrating over time. But I also understand how this show slid off the rails a little bit as a piece of story telling. These people are weirdos. It’s very easy for a show like this to follow these wackadoodle storylines that keep popping up, and then you loose sight of this larger story about animal cruelty and cult-like atmosphere at these zoos.
Linda: I didn’t think it was made very well. I didn’t think it was structured very well. For stories like this you have to have a kind of coherent direction but then each episode also has to have an internal structure to it. I don’t think it succeeds at that level.It has a real genderedickinessto it in terms of like woman as buzzkilland woman as black widow. There is a weird kind of completely evidence-free assertion made that she had some involvement in the disappearance of her first husband. I don’t think there’s a shred of evidence that’s presented to support that, but they spend a whole episode on it and it feels like an effort to rebalance the story.For a lot of people, Joe Exotichas emerged as some kind of appealingly quirky character. I don’t find him that way at all. I think that’s how he wants to be perceived. I find him to be rather loathsome because of the animal cruelty things that he essentially admits to in terms of how he handled the tigers that he had. There are a lot of allegations that he was abusive to the staff that worked at thisG.W. Zoo. I just didn’t buy into this kind of image of him as a wackyentertaining figure.
Glen: His loathing of Carole is not built, it’s not shaped; it’s just asserted over and over again. It dosen’t go anywhere. So what we end up doing is watching him fire off theory after theory and he eats up all that airtime, so that his theories get added of this kind of emotional weight that they probably shouln't have. It’s frustrating.
Steven:The show does put its thumb on the scalein some really frustrating ways. The tendency to having interview where the person says what they’re there to say, and then the camera holds on there kind of unblinking face for like an extra bit or two. When they do that, it tends to be presented as like there’s somethingweird or off or stagedabout or dishonest about what this person has just said…this is a very subtle thing but it felt very dishonest everytime they did it. You're interviewing Carole, she says somethingand then you're almost frozen on her blink expression and it's like she’s doing that for the benefit ofthe filmmakers. It’s been turned on her to make her look like more of a werido. That kind of thing, I found really really frustrating.
Linda: One thing just from a filmmaking perspective that I think this desperately needed was someone who seemed like a realibale narrator. They certainly treat Carole as an unreliable narrator. Joe is presented very much as an unreliable narrator, just about everyone is. Very often in a story like this you’ll get a journalist, an investigator, an attorney, somebodywho gives you a sense of what’s the center of like this, what is the truthful center of this story.And that character can help keep you crowned within the story and it’s one of the things that helps assemble things with some kind of through linesso that you don’t feel like that you’re just wandering from incident to incident.It’s heavily classed in a way that I think is..you know..some of the pointing and giggling at Joefeels classed because he is somebodywho according to his own telling of his story, was very poor. But there’s also somethingvery classed in the way that they try to present Caroleas a culturally elite,like maybe she is more snobby. And if you read about her story, her story is not that, really. But I think they’re trying to set up a class conflict between these two people that dosen't feel like it’s genuine.
Glen：There’s also a weird delight that this show takes in his queerness that I don’t think it’s earned. It seems to me as if the show feels likeit’s discovered the concept of trade-straight guys doing gay stuff for goods and/or services. It gets a lot of the queer stuff wrong. Misgenders, Saff and it dosen't even raise the issue of gender fluidity at all.
Steven: There’s something compulsively watchable about this show. I blazedthrough 5 hours really quickly. It’s a digestableshow but I think that formlessness is part of the issue like I think that the attention of the filmmakers seemed to wander in the way that the attention of the audience member might wander-like, where you’re kind of just seeing this weirdo, and it’s like “what, her husband disappeared? What’s that?”, and then the story’s kind of like “OK, well, there’s an episode where her husband disappears.” It’s sort of following instead of leading if that makes sense.
第08集
