As Rio 2016 reaches week two, it’s fair to say that the sport of “competitive endurance tickling” is unlikely ever to line up alongside handball and synchronised swimming in the pantheon of weird Olympic events. And for good reason, if David Farrier and Dylan Reeve’s excellent, troubling documentary on the subject is anything to go by.
It might be considered a niche fetishism by many, but Tickled reveals an entire industry has been built around the endurance sport, where participants attempt to withstand lengthy bouts of tickling. It’s an industry that has its roots in the grand ambitions of one poisonous individual with deep pockets and a need for control that goes way past the point of kinkiness.
It all begins when Farrier, a Kiwi TV reporter, comes across videos of young, athletic men dressed in matching sportswear, being tied down and tickled. And there it might have ended, had the journalist’s polite email to US-based production company Jane O’Brien Media asking to learn more not been met with a torrent of abuse relating to Farrier’s bisexuality – strange, given the obviously gay nature of the films – followed by legal threats and even a visit to New Zealand by two sinister legal enforcers. Are these “competitions” a smokescreen for something more outre?
Intrigued, and shellshocked by the intensity of the attacks, the film-makers head to the United States to find out more. With a little digging, and interviews with several ticklees and a former co-worker, it becomes clear that Jane O’Brien Media uses similar bullying tactics – and vast financial resources – to control an army of young men recruited for its videos. If anyone tries to walk away, films of them involved in tickling can be released to employers, schools and others, often with venomous emails from “Jane O’Brien” herself, or a number of pseudonyms, shaming them for their involvement in “homosexual” videos.
Like other documentaries probing into the dark corners of the human psyche – Nick Broomfield’s The Grim Sleeper, about US serial killer Lonnie David Franklin Jr, and Andrew Jarecki’s Oscar-nominated Capturing The Friedmans, about the family of a convicted paedophile, spring to mind – the very act of watching Tickled feels a little grubby, as if we are somehow fetishising our own fascination for peeking into the internet’s heart of darkness.
Farrier and Reeve open up a genuinely freaky Pandora’s Box, the extent of which goes beyond anything they, or we, might have imagined in terms of scope and ridiculousness. Suffice to say, the film-makers follow the rabbit hole to its final destination, and by the end it’s hard to know whether to laugh or be very, very afraid.
