MOVIES
July 8-14
BY R I C K L E V I N
THE ONES
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541-357-0375
TICKLED CO-DIRECTOR DAVID
FARRIER (LEFT) OBSERVES THE
WEIRDNESS OF ‘COMPETITIVE
ENDURANCE TICKLING’
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TICKLED
FRI
12:30 2:45 5:30 7:45
SAT
2:45 5:30 7:45
SUN - TUE 12:30 2:45 5:30 7:45
WED
12:30 2:45
THU
12:30 2:45 5:30 7:45
THE ONES BELOW
9:30 PM
MAGGIE'S PLAN
12:30 2:50 5:10 7:30
THE LOBSTER
1:40 4:20 7:00 9:40
HELLO, MY NAME IS DORIS
12:40 5:00
THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY
3:00 7:05
SUNSET SONG (R)
1:00, 6:00
SING STREET (PG-13)
Friday 3:30, 8:00
Saturday 3:45, 8:45
Sunday - Thursday 3:30, 8:00
DARK HORSE (PG)
1:30
LOVE & FRIENDSHIP (PG)
Friday 6:00, 8:45
Saturday 3:15, 5:20
Sunday - Thursday 6:00, 8:45
LES COWBOYS (R)
Friday 3:45
Saturday 10:00 pm
Sunday - Monday 3:45
IT’S NOT FUNNY ANYMORE
In Tickled, journalist David Farrier exposes the wealth,
power and abuse behind a bizarre Internet fetish
CITY SLICKERS CAN’T STAY WITH ME:
THE COACH BOB LARSEN STORY
Saturday 7:30 pm
TICKET PRICES: MATINEE before 6pm $5
ADULT $8 | STUDENT $7 | SENIOR 62+ $5
CHILD age 12 & under $5
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“I
started this journey curious about a bizarre sport called competitive endurance
tickling,” says New Zealand journalist David Farrier near the conclusion of his
strange and upsetting documentary Tickled. “But I now think this was never
even about tickling. This is about power, control and harassment. It’s about one
person’s twistedness and how far that can go.”
Co-directed by Farrier and videographer Dylan Reeve, Tickled is funny for about five
minutes before it veers off into an unnerving odyssey that leads the filmmakers down the
hermetic, perverted corridors of money and corruption. At first, when Farrier happens upon
his first tickling website — in which hunky young straight guys are bound, piled upon and
tickled by other hunky guys — he is bemused and, yes, curious.
He decides to pursue the story. It doesn’t take long, however, before he hits the wall:
Farrier is contacted by the site’s representative and told that, because he’s homosexual,
they’d rather he didn’t bring bad publicity upon their harmless entertainment. The harder
he pushes, the more vicious becomes the pushback, until he’s called a “faggot” and threat-
ened with legal action.
Tickled is one of the most bizarre and creepy documentaries I’ve seen in a long time,
and the less I say about the details of the story, the better; it seems that every five minutes
or so, a new revelation is cracked open, sending Farrier on increasingly alarming and dis-
tressing tangents — the results are like getting trapped in some sadistic, crypto-fascist hall
of mirrors where money, lawyers and blackmailers operate with absolute impunity, dealing
destruction willy-nilly for the sole satisfaction of one person’s oddball fetish.
It’s an old story — camels and needle-eyes and all that — and yet, for all its timeless
familiarity, the vile egotism and omniscient control of the filthy rich never stops being
compelling, confusing and frustrating when brought to the light of day. What’s fascinating
about Tickled is not the fetish at its core, a seemingly harmless yen to make another person
squirm and squeak in orgasmic ambivalence, but the lengths to which someone will go to
satisfy that urge.
As Farrier pursues an increasingly elusive and recalcitrant truth, receiving dire threats
all along the way, we witness the ways power and money function when confronted by
the people harmed: Deny, lie, deflect and threaten. By the time he peels back the curtained
layers of deceit covering an international operation of tickling voyeurism, Farrier seems
almost disappointed to find that the person pulling the levers is such an insipid and sad
homunculus — like some closeted, self-loathing Wizard of Oz hiding behind myriad false
identities and an endless assault of bigoted, abusive mumbo-jumbo.
“It’s all family money,” Farrier says at one point of the perpetrator’s wealth. Indeed.
Money is as money does, and I suspect that, behind closed doors, the rich have always
indulged in whatever the fuck excesses they want to without a care in the world for who
or what they damage. In this way, Tickled is simply a modern, real-life updating of movies
ranging from Citizen Kane to Pasolini’s Salò to the more recent Foxcatcher. Yet, lurking
beneath the surface of Tickled is a subtle cautionary message about this scary new age
we’re caught in, wherein the worldwide web has become the new gothic dungeon, and
victimization can go global with a spontaneity that is impossible to halt. The hallways of
power are now digital, and no one is safe — especially, as usual, the poor and dispossessed
young, willing to be kootchi-kooed for a few bucks. (Broadway Metro)
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“We are all citizens of this world.” -Bahaulla
eugeneweekly.com • July 7, 2016
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