Just what we needed: more evidence that the internet is a dark labyrinth filled with the evil and strange. Despite the carefree, positive connotations of its name, that’s exactly what Tickled serves as.
The documentary, which created a lot of buzz on the festival circuit and officially hits area theaters July 1, doesn’t exactly mislead with its title. This is a film about tickling and laughter. But this tickling and laughter is done by young, well-built men who are being paid to do so and are captured on camera. The documentary begins when David Farrier, a New Zealand-based journalist, stumbled upon one of these videos (as all great internet discoveries happen) and emailed the site behind the clips in search of a possible story.
Jane O’Brien Media, the company that created these “Competitive Endurance Tickling” videos, responded to Farrier’s inquests with immediate vitriol. Repeatedly highlighting the fact that Farrier is gay, the company engaged in a heated conversation with the journalist and soon threatened absurd legal action. Farrier, ever a journalist, is inspired to dig deeper.
The digging that’s done in Tickled will do nothing to, if I may borrow a phrase from another corner of the internet, restore your faith in humanity. As I said, the web is a dark and dangerous place and the world of endurance tickling is no different. As Tickled progresses, Farrier’s research sends him deep into a tangled web of money, deception and blackmail — and that’s not even hyperbole.
There’s no doubt this is a good documentary. It’s an entertaining, investigative thriller that’s probably unlike anything you’ve really seen before. At times, it will make you deeply uncomfortable and it’ll be hard to explain why. But what’s really interesting about Tickled is the chaos its release has already created.
Very rarely do we see the contents of a documentary spill out into real life to the point where it affects the movie itself. Recently, at the Los Angeles premiere of the film, Farrier’s co-filmmaker Dylan Reeve was accosted by two of the film’s subjects during the Q&A portion of the night. A video of the exchange is posted on the movie’s Facebook page and it’s fascinating. Reeve and Farrier hold their ground against accusations that they recorded material without proper consent and the exchange clearly has real anger in it.
I don’t want to get into the real nature of these men and their connection to the movie because it unfolds nicely by itself, but I can’t emphasize enough how strange this is. It would be like if Tilikum the whale showed up at a screening of Blackfish and said “say it to my whale face.”
There is no doubt that Tickled has benefited from this aftermath. If anything, both men are now more publicly shamed because the headlines have doubled. How they didn’t see this happening before deciding to crash the premiere is puzzling.
But despite this side story, it’s clear that the work itself certainly would have earned attention on its own. With Tickled, Farrier and Reeve have created a documentary that is both timely and timeless. There have always been bad guys lurking beneath seemingly innocuous things. But in 2016, most of those guys are fueled by the power of the internet, fueled by the feeling that with infinite possibilities at their fingertips they can never be stopped.
CORRECTION: Due to a reporting error, a previous version of this story stated that both David Farrier and Dylan Reeve were in attendance at the LA premiere. Just Reeve was present at the screening. The story has been updated to reflect this correction.
