Images from Crip Camp (left) and Tiger King. (Images from Netflix)
A secluded site out in the American countryside where extraordinary characters who defy mainstream norms pursue their own special interests in their own special ways…
The lockdown imagination has been seized by Tiger King, the Netflix documentary series about Joe Exotic and other private zookeepers who breed, exhibit and work with rare and endangered big cats. (Perhaps it’s good timing for a show about the ethics of confinement?)
But there’s another new documentary (also on Netflix) that presents a different – and more inspirational – version of the set-up described above.
Crip Camp takes as its subject Camp Jened, an experimental summer camp for young disabled people that operated in upstate New York from the 1950s to the 1970s, and the generation of activists who hung out and grew politicised there.
Considered side by side, Tiger King and Crip Camp offer contrasting case studies in outsiders who strike out to make worlds apart on their own terms. In short, the former cases make for lurid cautionary tales while the latter shows a model for progressive change.
Like Joe Exotic (and the other big-cat entrepreneurs of Tiger King), the people who worked and stayed at Camp Jened found the everyday world was not set up to accommodate their wants and needs. They sought a space of their own, where they got to set the rules and the terms of engagement. As we all cast around for models of how our post-pandemic worlds might look and feel, the two docs feel like glimpses into would-be heavens and hells.
The big-cat world – or at least the version of it we see in Tiger King – is pretty dystopian. Notwithstanding certain individuals’ best efforts, consideration of the cats’ welfare appears to be pretty comprehensively subsumed by more or less toxic structures of exploitation, neglect, abuse and violence. For the cats, this can look like constrictive and unhealthy living conditions. For the people around them, weapons-grade narcissism and alarmingly cult-like set-ups. For both, it can escalate to the level of unwarranted deaths.
Camp Jened, on the other hand, comes across as pretty utopian. Here was a space where people typically marked out as anomalies – and inconvenient, inferior or disposable ones at that – constituted a majority. Given their own space, they chose not to reproduce hierarchies of othering but to value equally a range of distinctive subjectivities; to seek just and accountable ways of balancing autonomy and interdependence; and to take the radical step of taking their own pleasure (including sexual pleasure) seriously.
Camp Jened offered a glimpse of the promised land – not as an imagined fantasy but a lived reality, a functional small-scale set-up with the potential to expand. “What we saw at that camp was that our lives could be better,” as one camper put it. “We need to look at ways of doing things together not just at camp but after camp,” another said. For Judy Heumann, the outstanding political organiser among the group, it was about “empowering each other that the status quo was not what it needed to be”.
While vitally self-determined, it was a site with an outward-looking and porous sensibility – keen to cultivate empathetic and critically engaged exposure to different experiences and opinions, and to foment progressive change in the wider world. They developed communes, staged protests and changed laws. Individual self-respect, group solidarity and global transformation aligned.
The big names of the big cat world, on the other hand, seem largely to be driven by desires rooted in hungry ego and jealous control, where validation and power are zero-sum propositions and one person’s gain must be another’s loss. Intense hierarchies rest on vainglorious self-delusion and the desubjectification of others within secluded bubbles that can’t withstand much contact with one another, let alone the wider world, before the cracks show.
This is particularly evident when it comes to brushes with the law. Both Tiger King and Crip Camp are about people whose values and actions put them in positions of tension with legal and judicial authority. But where the cat people pretty much throw one another under the bus, the Crip Camp alums stick together and oblige the powers that be to bend to (some of) their demands.
If the times ahead find us all having to decide what kind of world we’d like to live in, these shows make a powerful case for choosing to be more like Judy and less like Joe.
