According to Tickled, David Farrier is a fluff piece journalist in New Zealand, specializing in local lifestyle stories and occasional interviews of celebrities. He’s the type of reporter who goes around to county farms for testimonials on the sheep competition, or find the story behind that guy who saved a bunch of ducks in the storm drain and made it a YouTube sensation. He spends a lot of time to tell us that he doesn’t do hard investigative journalism and shouldn’t be a threat to anybody. Thus, when he approaches Jane O’Brien Media to do a silly fluff piece on heterosexual male-on-male tickling, he never expected to get an unprofessional hostile response that took issue with his sexuality. As the saying goes, hostility begets hostility, and only the sleazy can uncover the sleazy.
Jane O’Brien Media hires heterosexual fit college-aged men, most fitting the All-American Boy look, to tickle each other in a variety of manners, or be force tickled by young women. There is no nudity or sex in the videos, but they do occasionally feature bondage or domination positions. Sometimes the tickle victims are strapped down to a mattress or pinned down by their ticklers, creating a non-pornographic homoerotic fetish video.
When Farrier gets push back from Jane O’Brien Media, he launches an all-out assault to get to the bottom of the company, and discover who or what owns and operates Jane O’Brien. He ambushes people, records conversations, stakes out numerous locations, and finds himself creating a story of connected dots that begin to add up to something more sinister. For a good portion of Tickled‘s running time, he’s chasing ghosts and going down a bunch of side roads that just barely add up to a story of unfettered wealth and the havoc people can create with it.
More than once the ghost of Michael Moore’s Roger and Me rears its head by Farrier’s copying the unscrupulous techniques that Moore has now become famous for. Farrier stakes out a studio because he knows a porn is going to be shooting there. He sandbags the media representatives that come visit New Zealand to intimidate Farrier into dropping the story. He places surprise calls to long-separated relatives, and uses that in the movie. Farrier even goes to Michigan to investigate some sort of pop-up recruiting hub in a town without money. Where Roger and Me created a story of the new American economy illustrated by the disaster that GM left behind when it pulled out of Flint, Farrier is merely creating a story of malicious and purposeless wealth.
By the end, both Farrier (and co-director Dylan Reeve) have created a story of corruption with a decades long list of twists and turns that creates a disgust with so many aspects of American life. Equally, Farrier’s techniques should be judged more like they came out of a Dashiell Hammett detective noir than a piece of actual journalism. Currently, the two representatives of Jane O’Brien Media who showed up to New Zealand have launched an anti-Tickled campaign, including posting a counter-interview with the recruiting guy from Muskegon, MI. They showed up to the film’s official non-festival premiere to heckle the filmmakers, and talk about their pending lawsuits against the filmmakers.
Whatever the merits of their complaints, Jane O’Brien Media is certainly an unethical company with a story that falls down a deep dark well. Farrier constructs a case as solid as the counter-case in Making a Murderer, with great use of filmmaking techniques to at least make a compelling story. Tickled is bizarre, banal, is fronted by a charismatic Kiwi, and asks occasionally dark questions about our society. Is it an ethical documentary whose story is 100%? Well…