The ‘Struggle for the Narrative’: Cooperation and Conflict in Tiger King’s Intermedial Universe

This article examines the disputed status of narratives in the Netflix documentary Tiger King (2020—2021), and the ways in which the series’ actors use media to bolster their particular version of a narrative. While classic studies of intermediality have productively analyzed the relations between the multiple semiotic resources employed in narrative forms, I offer an approach to intermediality in documentary art that enriches the structuralist paradigm insofar as it calls additional attention to the various human actors that put the worldmaking power of media to use.

Assuming that in filmmaking the creation of a storyworld is a fundamentally cooperative, while also potentially conflictive, endeavor, I examine the Netflix hit show as a documentary in which narrative co-construction is particularly significant. The series introduces its audience to the strange world of ‘big cat owners’ in the United States — a world which is populated by dubious storytellers and full of conflicts of interests. Tiger King’s ‘hyperreal’ world is saturated with media and images that are employed by its actors for storytelling purposes on a contested narrative territory. I argue that the actors’ ‘struggle for the narrative’ resonates with the show’s Darwinian themes and its interests in documenting a world in which the true predators are not the tigers but the human ‘storytelling animals.’ By examining how the various actors boost their own narratives while discrediting those of other players, I aim to illuminate the fine line between narrative co-construction and conflict in the show’s intermedial storyworld.