The world is a sordid and ruthless place. A pathetic battlefield for our needy egos. A crowded coliseum where all of us wage a constant war of wills against our neighbor. Tickled is a documentary that explores precisely those human cravings and their miserable consequences. That's what Tickled is about—yes, but also about competitive tickling! Hee hee.
David Farrier, the director of the documentary that brings us here, is also a journalist. And one of those movie-like ones, with a steady job at a New Zealand newspaper and a column with his own specialty: strange stories. "Light entertainment," color pieces about how weird this world can sometimes be. That's why, when one day he came across a video of men tickling each other and calling it a competition, he fell for the story like a fat man on a cake. What was that about Tickling and Resistance Championships"? David had to find out the truth! His journalistic instinct told him it would be a good story... and he wasn't wrong.
Behind that video of ticklish men, and many other videos like it, lurked a company called Jane O'Brien Media, which produced them. David, like any good journalist, first sent a message to the company's Facebook page, seeking an interview. The response from Jane O'Brien Media's representative was explosive. Among other similar absurdities, it read: "I'll be brutally frank: the association with a homosexual journalist is not something we seek."
David, stunned by the outburst and unable to recover from the irony, kept exchanging messages with that person. But as the emails went back and forth, the insults escalated. How could a company that produced homoerotic videos of men tickling each other see David's homosexuality as an aberration? What was being protected? What lay behind it? Where did the fortune needed to organize all that and pay thousands of dollars to the ticklish athletes" come from?
And that's what Tickled is about, folks. That and human miseries. About deceit, extortion, and people sick with power, who impose their will on others simply because they have resources and the other has needs. It's also a journey back in time through the less conventional side of the Internet, of fetishes and porn of different sexualities. And... I wouldn't want to tell you more about what Tickled covers, because the nice thing about a thriller" is discovering how the mystery unravels, frame by frame. Because this is a real detective movie, I can assure you.
Tickled was produced by HBO and Magnolia Pictures and has been shown at various screenings around the world, having successfully dodged two lawsuits against it. You can download a copy of the movie on iTunes, or figure out some other way, if you don't have an iPhone.
