By coincidence, two of the more provocative documentaries I’ve seen this year arrive in Chicago on Friday. Pervert Park, screening for one week at Facets Cinematheque, takes viewers inside Florida Justice Transitions, a Saint Petersburg trailer park that provides temporary housing for some 120 registered sex offenders. Tickled, which opens at Music Box, chronicles the efforts of two New Zealand journalists to uncover the truth behind “competitive endurance tickling,” a new sport based in Los Angeles, despite a series of legal threats from the sponsor. Both movies explore atypical sexual proclivities, whether they’re harmless (as in Tickled) or profoundly destructive (as in Pervert Park). But on a deeper level, these are really stories about power, shame, and the law.
Watching all this, you may feel torn, because Hutchinson’s actions were so despicable. But just as the residents can move forward only by owning up to their crimes, Pervert Park forces viewers to acknowledge even the worst offenders as people in need of care. Instead they’re demonized, ostracized, blackballed by employers, and endlessly harassed. One resident finds a bag of dead rats in his clothes dryer. Another resident, Bill Fuery, remembers how a father once drove into the park and pointed a gun at him; Fuery refused to flinch, and after talking it through, the two men became friends. He exhorts his fellow residents to consider themselves ambassadors to the outside world: “You’ve gotta go out and let them see that you’re a human being.”
He can afford it—according to documents obtained by Farrier, D’Amato has nearly $6 million in his checking account alone—so this story is likely to continue for some time. But it may have begun years and years ago. In the final scene Farrier contacts D’Amato’s stepmother, who paints a revealing picture of him: he was an only child, unusually close to his mother, and had no girlfriends as far as the stepmother knew. His father wanted grandchildren. The stepmother, never identified by name, remembers D’Amato as a bullied kid: the other boys taunted him, and he once got stuffed into a locker at school. That sort of humiliation never goes away, and like sexual abuse, it can sometimes generate a cycle of cruelty. D’Amato has every right to protect his privacy, but is his privacy doing him any good? You’ve gotta go out and let them see that you’re a human being. v
Directed by Frida and Lasse Barkfors
Tickled ★★ Directed by David Farrier and Dylan Reeve
