In the third episode of HBO docuseries Chimp Crazy, director Eric Goode has a crisis of conscience. He knows that his primary subject, Tonia Haddix, kidnapped a chimp named Tonka and lied about it, secretly hiding the animal in her basement for a year while pretending the ape died, a claim she reiterates through jagged sobs during a court hearing. Now Goode has learned that Haddix is so stressed about the situation, she plans to euthanize Tonka. He wonders if he needs to intervene.
“Do we turn her in?” Goode, who previously directed the pandemic phenomenon Tiger King, asks Peter Laufer, a reporter and documentarian who has also covered exotic animal cases. “Or do we continue following the story?”
“As journalists, we don’t want to do something that’s morally, ethically wrong,” Laufer responds. “You have to hope that the end result is more positive than negative. Is there a greater good?”
Goode ultimately reports Haddix to PETA, sharing a voicemail in which she describes her plan to euthanize Tonka. (She later says she never intended to kill the animal.) As revealed in the Chimp Crazy finale, Tonka is rescued by authorities and relocated to the PETA-operated Florida sanctuary where he lives today among his fellow chimps. Haddix faces the possibility of criminal charges as well as the expectation that she will repay PETA $225,000 in legal fees.
The outcome suggests Chimp Crazy did achieve a greater good: It put Tonka in a more suitable living environment, held Haddix accountable for her actions, and illustrated the dangers of attempting to domesticate animals not meant to exist as roommates for human beings. But it’s only able to do those things by resorting to means that, to borrow Laufer’s words, are morally, ethically wrong. In order to gain access to Haddix in the first place, Goode and his team completely misrepresent themselves to her. Goode, a notorious figure in the exotic animal world due to the success of Tiger King, knows Haddix and other key sources won’t talk to him if made aware of his identity, so he hires a proxy director: Dwayne Cunningham, a former circus clown convicted of illegally smuggling exotic lizards into the United States. Cunningham tells Haddix he’s the filmmaker in charge, never explains Goode’s involvement, and builds trust with the Missouri nurse by positioning himself as an ally to her cause.
Not only is this a clear breach of journalistic ethics, it’s a deception that reeks of hypocrisy. Chimp Crazy, while mostly matter-of-fact in its approach, spends much of its time highlighting Haddix’s many lies and the way her love for Tonka clouds her ability to understand that keeping him in a basement is not what’s best for him. By contrast, Goode initially presents his decision to hire a shadow director as a semi-routine documentary procedure and the only option he has given his reputation. The series never adequately interrogates how Goode’s determination to get what he wants on film parallels the lengths to which Haddix will go to keep Tonka in her possession. Chimp Crazy is, really, a portrait of individuals — Haddix and the other chimp owners in the series, as well as the filmmaker capturing their stories — who are in denial about the degree to which they prioritize their own desires above doing the right thing.
As noted in Lane Brown’s recent profile of Goode, before he got into filmmaking, the former New Yorker made a career out of developing eye-catching nightclubs and restaurants in Manhattan. Then and now, he’s displayed an instinct for the dramatic that can serve his projects for both better and worse. In Tiger King and, to a more restrained extent, Chimp Crazy, Goode can’t resist the opportunity to photograph his subjects in ways designed to make them look extra freakish. At one point, cameras follow Haddix as she gets a spa treatment, frequently zeroing in on her injected lips so they look even more plumped. After Tonka is taken away from Haddix, she’s asked if anything can take the chimp’s place in her life. Goode immediately cuts to a scene of her eating donuts and drinking cans of Coke. The finale devotes an unnecessary amount of time to footage of Haddix weeping in her car while listening to a Jelly Roll song, practically daring the audience to laugh at her pain.
Back in 2022, in the midst of Chimp Crazy production, reporter Cheyenne Roundtree published a Rolling Stone article in which she revealed to Haddix that Goode is really directing the docuseries. Haddix responds that she never would have agreed to be filmed if she knew who was behind the camera. In the Chimp Crazy finale, Cunningham confesses to Haddix that the documentary team ratted her out to PETA and apologizes to her. He seems to feel remorse, but only to a point. “Tonia always knew we were filming a documentary and I always told her, ‘Don’t say anything you don’t want the whole world to know,’” he says in the doc.
After the article comes out, Cunningham tells Haddix that Goode is waiting nearby and would like to speak to her on camera. It feels like Haddix has been blindsided with information that should have been shared with her earlier.
“I’m the bad guy in this,” Goode confesses to camera while waiting to hear whether she will talk to him, something that feels necessary to the project now that he’s been outed. “But we like to look at ourselves differently, don’t we?”
“Why do you think we do that?” asks a voice from behind the camera.
“We like to believe our own truth,” he says. Before he can reflect more deeply on what he means by that, Chimp Crazy cuts to the next scene, where Goode sits down with Haddix and, among other things, tells her how much he empathizes with her connection to Tonka. But that comment — “We like to believe our own truth” — hangs in the air, begging for elaboration.
When Goode says he’s the bad guy, he’s referring to his role in secretly blowing the whistle on Haddix. During his conversation with her, he doesn’t mention the lie that put her in his docuseries in the first place, nor does he apologize for it. He does ask his source why she’s talking to him now. She says she hopes the documentary will convince PETA to let her visit Tonka. Haddix is still under the impression that Goode is on her side.
Throughout the doc, there’s a sense that there are things going on behind the scenes between Cunningham, Goode, and other high-level members of production that they’re withholding from viewers as well as Haddix. In that Rolling Stone article, for example, an unnamed source says members of the crew were “disturbed” by Tonka’s care, but also “‘uncomfortable’ with the ethics of Haddix being in the dark about who was behind the documentary.” The documentary never suitably addresses any of this, nor Goode’s trickery.
In the final episode, before he talks to Haddix, Goode interviews Roundtree about her article. She talks about how much she, like Goode, empathizes with Haddix’s love for Tonka. Then Roundtree describes seeing photos of Haddix standing in the small basement enclosure where Tonka was kept by himself for so many months. “To me, I question: does she not see what other people see?” Roundtree asks.
It’s Goode’s job as the filmmaker to show viewers the full picture of Haddix, and the ways in which her relationship with Tonka primarily functions as selfishness dressed up in selfless clothing. His imagery is effective; perhaps the saddest scene in Chimp Crazy is of Tonka, his eyes conveying profound loneliness as he lies in his cage staring at cell phone photos of other chimps as Haddix describes how happy he is. While Goode’s treatment of Haddix is not as blatantly harmful as her treatment of Tonka, he doesn’t seem to consider that he’s rationalized his behaviors in ways that aren’t all that different. He does not seem to see what other people see, either. As a documentarian, his job is to convince viewers that his truth is the truth and the only one they should embrace. It’s hard to do that when you start out by telling your audience you’re a liar.