L'impero del solletico

I arrived at the local art house cinema expecting to see Weiner only to find that it played at 4:30 and 9:30. Tickled, a film I hadn't heard of was just about to start at 7:00 so there I was.

I have seen tickle videos on YouTube and elsewhere and always wondered about the economics behind these strange, professional looking videos. They weren't advertisements for subscription pay sites so what gives...

Tickled sheds some light on the economics and motivation behind them. Without giving anything away, I'd suggest that it is as creepy and malevolent a story as Foxcatcher. The head games played by Mr. DuPont and 'Teri Tickle' are frighteningly similar even if the results were very different.

Talking about the film with strangers as I left the theater: I thought my 'creepy' was better than any of the other adjectives mentioned. But when I talked about tickle videos being everywhere on the Internet, they might of thought that was creepy.

Too often in documentaries, the person with the microphone can be overbearing to irritation. The low key approach in Tickled makes the journey more interesting. It only heightens what unfolds on the screen.

Interesting story marred by hyper-passive filmmaker, David Farrier. Always on his heels, not asking the tough questions when he finally had a chance to talk to the subject. Same for his colleague Dylan.

Whether it is drama, comedy or documentary, New Zealand filmmakers punch above their weight. The documentary Tickled (2016) is one of the most unusual films you will see for a long time and a guaranteed conversation starter in the right company. While the film's title suggests comedic titillation, what it reveals is something more sinister that has wrecked many lives. It is also a fine example of how dogged investigative journalism can stumble from something that appears innocuously weird into something bizarrely dangerous.

It is said that movies have plots while documentaries have premises. Pop-culture journalist David Farrier specialises in fringe phenomena and his premise is that if someone spends a fortune to stay anonymous they have something serious to hide. He comes across something described as "competitive professional tickling" that involves the filming of young athletic males being tied down and tickled by one or more other young athletic males, all fully clothed. His initial inquiries to understand more about this activity are so aggressively stonewalled that he turns his investigation into a documentary with most of the filming in the United States. Expecting to find a secretive cult of homoerotic activity, he finds participants who have been subjected to extraordinary legal threats, extortion, and public shaming. The scale of intimidation and the lengths to which perpetrators are prepared to go indicate there is big money involved. The documentary feels like a parallel universe where things go from strange to stranger as the inquiries lead to a prominent and wealthy American lawyer who was a teacher and school principal. Farrier and his team-mate Dylan Reeve use old fashioned stakeouts, doorstop confrontations, and forensic web-based research to turn the study of a fringe fetish into a gripping thriller.

This is a well-produced documentary, especially for a novice filmmaker. Minor criticisms aside, like Ferrier's occasional tendency to tell rather than show and a few scenes that need tighter editing (like the time spent in the car stake-out), the overall pace, direction and content make this a totally engaging film. The hand-held filming technique and the unexpected twists and turns in the investigation impart real-time-discovery effects. A quick Google search will show that both during production and since the film's release Farrier and Reeve have been and still are under serious legal and financial threat. Not only do the filmmakers deserve a bravery award, their work is riveting from the laughter-filled opening scenes to the chilling closing credits.

As with The Jinx, a simple take-away is this: you get someone who has a *lot* of personal identity issues and a *lot* of New York family money, and it makes for a ridiculously dangerous combination - emphasis on both ridiculous and dangerous.

This was riveting material as a mystery-unfolds story, though the filmmaking is fairly standard as an expose (you can't help but feel suspense for the directors as they have to do literal stake-outs outside of places like the 'Tickle' video building, where as if out of the Joker's hide-out you can hear the barbaric sounds of laughter wafting out of the windows, or when they wait for days to find the one car that belongs to the now-late David D'Amato). It gets stronger and more disturbing as it goes along as the directors discover more and more in places they weren't necessarily looking; at first they were simply looking into another tickling-fetish video company out of Orlando not related to the group that was trying to "sue" the filmmakers (in quotes as it turned out to be a bust). Then this leads from one person to another, and it turns out to be aliases and undercover identities, stolen social security numbers from dead people, and a figure who was once an assistant principal at a school.

I thought at first this was going to all be some sort of goof, even into the first minute or so of the interview with the first "tickled" subject who agreed to talk on camera (face and all, not in the shadows or only just a voice or so on). What this so-called 'company' did is mortifying, and all for what is on one hand a seemingly innocent and on the other hand is disquieting; think about the times that you have, as a child, been tickled by your parents or tickle siblings or friends, and all in a having-fun sort of way. The manner in which some of these tickling videos were presented, one expects the Gimp from Pulp Fiction might appear to either tickle or be tickled.

And yet people going into this doc should know it's not an exploration of ticklers like, say, Hot Girls Wanted where it's about the subjects in the videos. It touches somewhat on the fetish, but this, aside from some curious homosexual aspects (and I mean that not in any gross way, simply that it's interesting that it's all men and that David D'Amato is one of those highly ashamed gay men of wealth and prestige and projects that on to others), is more about the depths of WTF that go into this "Tiffany Tickle" or whatever her name was and how she is really this one man D'Amato.

It's about power and control, and how it corrupts and makes humans into monsters, which slightly, thematically, connects back to how tickling in these videos is about submission and domination and being emasculated under intense pressure (again they're *all* young, well-built men in the videos, never women, never men older than, say, 24). In that way, Tickled can't help but hold out attention - not to mention a final, devastating phone conversation with D'Amato's step-mother.

Tickled certainly deviates from its trailer, but the film itself is a shocking piece of art. Tied together with tasteful cinematography (with necessary hidden cameras here and there), Tickled captures the enigma of David D'Amato's empire of male-tickling videos which results in scare tactics, harassment, and financial bullying of the unsuspecting participants--something that is very relevant to modern issues. I felt sad walking out of the film, which is evidence that this film does its job of riding the line between comedy and tragedy. I do feel that the trailer sets up an expectation of a horror/thriller aspect, but there is not much of this atmosphere in the film. I do, however, think that the film by itself is a brave piece of journalism that endangered the Tickled team financially and psychologically. The fact that the team was able to muster up the courage to finish the film is remarkable, and I hope David and his team are brought to justice.