Of all the contradictions that make up Mike Tyson‘s public persona, none causes me to scratch my head as much as this: Tyson‘s entire ethos could be boiled down to not caring what “people” — the mainstream in general, but the media in particular — think of him, but no figure of his stature has put in the conspicuous and shameless effort to make sure that anybody whose residency is not beneath a rock has heard Tyson’s version of who he is.
He has been the focal point of an Animal Planet documentary about himself and his love of pigeons (Taking on Tyson) and the centerpiece of an Adult Swim animated series about himself and, well, his love of pigeons (Mike Tyson Mysteries). He had a long-running one-man show about his life (I assume pigeons were involved, but I don’t remember). Even when Hulu made a limited series about his life — 2022’s Mike, which couldn’t have made less of a cultural footprint — and Tyson threw a tantrum comparing Hulu to a slave master, that unauthorized version of Tyson’s story was completely interchangeable with the authorized version he has told so many times.
Tyson
The Bottom Line
Familiar and visually uninspired, yet still sporadically captivating.
Airdate: Tuesday, October 13 (Netflix)
Director: Russ Floyd
I suspect this simultaneous desire to be represented and professed antipathy at being represented isn’t an unreasonable facet of the celebrity condition, and that if somebody were to ask him why he can’t stop telling his own story, one viable answer would be “money” — which is probably reasonable as well.
I assume Tyson wasn’t paid for his central role in Floyd Russ’ Netflix docuseries Tyson, and he isn’t even an executive producer on the four-parter. But it’s only ever the version of Mike Tyson’s story that he wants it to be — candid and emotionally raw one moment, stubbornly and annoyingly evasive the next.
Russ never directly asks Tyson what he hopes to get out of appearing in the project, which makes it clear that for all the objectionable and illegal behavior that have been part of Tyson’s life, he has never been “cancelled,” so to speak. He was out of the public eye for a couple of years when he was serving prison time for rape, and the tone of the conversation may have briefly darkened in the few months after he repeatedly bit Evander Holyfield in the ring, but Tyson has retained his position in mainstream culture better than nearly any figure with a comparable rap sheet.
That, ultimately, is what Russ’ docuseries is about. If you were already fascinated by Mike Tyson, Tyson is four hours of storytelling so aesthetically formulaic that it borders on parody, and I don’t think it will provide much new information or even fresh perspective, since Tyson has already given his perspective endlessly. Yet Tyson’s vulnerable volatility is hard to look away from, and Tyson is as well — especially since most people who are grossed out by the excessive platforming of this severely damaged pugilist probably won’t watch anyway.
A plot summary for curious viewers thinking, “Finally, this will be my opportunity to learn something about that guy from The Hangover“: Russ traces the established facts of Tyson’s life from his rough-and-tumble youth in Brooklyn to his juvenile run-ins with the law to the youth facility where he discovered boxing and which, in turn, connected him to legendary trainer Cus D’Amato.
I’m a big enough boxing fan that I have to admit I’ve watched videos of most of Tyson’s fights, some many times (you could watch his knockout of Michael Spinks nearly 40 times per hour if you chose to); I know it’s hard to look away from the run of vicious stoppages that led to his becoming the youngest heavyweight champion ever.
Russ follows the rise and fall and rise and fall of Tyson’s boxing career to a certain point, interspersing the rape trial, the misadventures of Tyson’s Holyfield fights, the tragic death of his daughter, his drug addiction and recovery and relapses and more. Nothing is exactly off-limits, but most things are governed by when Tyson wants to be forthcoming and when he threateningly looks at the director and urges him to find another line of questioning, which he does a number of times. He’ll talk about his ill-fated marriage to Robin Givens, acknowledging some levels of abuse while avoiding confirmation of others, but when it comes to the Indianapolis rape accusation, one-sentence denials are all you’ll get. Since Givens and Desiree Washington either declined to appear or didn’t respond to requests to appear, what Tyson says goes.
Tyson is at once scary, funny, personable, distasteful, introspective, superficial, articulate and incoherent. He cackles at things a decent person absolutely shouldn’t be cackling at and he’s reduced to conveying wordless sorrow multiple times per episode. I suppose if you’ve never watched any of Tyson’s exercises in self-portraiture, you might find his open-wound quality to be revelatory. Yes, Tyson seems to be comfortable talking to Russ, but I’m not sure that Tyson wouldn’t have been equally unfettered in conversation with a bowl of potato salad. Russ leaves in all those scenes of Tyson telling him to change the subject just to show where his limits are.
The documentary isn’t exclusively a conversation with Tyson. Russ has a solid roster of people from different stretches of Tyson’s life, from childhood friends to gym partners to follow boxers to family members to several of the women who didn’t divorce him or accuse him of rape.
There are insightful conversations with the likes of Lennox Lewis and James “Buster” Douglas, whose attempts to explain what it meant for him to beat Tyson just weeks after losing his mother yielded my only emotional response to the docuseries. There are painful and real interviews with Tyson’s children, who highlight the positives and negatives of having Mike Tyson for a father. While many of the more contentious and controversial aspects of his life are presented in one-sided fashion, friend and former manager Rory Holloway’s still-raw sense of betrayal at Tyson firing his entire team is evoked with vivid irritation.
Russ keeps the storytelling very straightforward and very much in keeping with the style that ESPN and HBO sports documentaries have codified over the years. That means that it’s strictly chronological, except for a few times he “hits rewind” and goes back a few days or even hours, usually to no particular advantage. The editing is rudimentary throughout, whether it’s the myriad scenes intercut with footage of fluttering pigeons or the predictable rhythms of stock footage and inserts. There’s a real opportunity in the fourth episode to do something fun, or at least interesting, when Tyson convinces Russ to join him in smoking hallucinatory toad venom, but no flair or flourishes emerge.
Every once in a while an outside observer, almost always journalist and commentator Van Lathan, will say something that could open the door for Tyson to situate its subject as a product of a specific historical moment or in terms of race in America. Tyson, a student of boxing history, surely would have appreciated a deeper discussion of the role of the Black heavyweight champion in culture. But Tyson doesn’t aspire to be OJ: Made in America and it definitely is not.
That is to say that Tyson is not a docuseries that I would recommend purely on its merits to people who think they have no interest in, or desire to listen to, Mike Tyson for four hours. But if you do, I’ll just say that Donald Trump is a more useful talking head here than in Netflix’s Hulk Hogan documentary, with plenty of (predictable) opinions on sexual assault accusations against Tyson and whatnot. Take all of that as you will.
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