Mister Organ

Journalist David Farrier finds himself in a game of cat and mouse with a mysterious and aggressive stranger. Exploring further, he discovers a series of court cases, ruined lives, and even potential ties to royalty.

This is the story of a local narcissistic asshole just… going around and causing problems for people. It’s the story of a sentient nuisance with nothing else to do but be a disruptive element, an instrument of harm, seemingly incapable of any other type of interaction, a person who insinuates themselves into the lives of people they see as weaker than them, a person who seeks out confrontation, refusing to relent like a dog with a bone, who forces themselves in, becoming the maelstrom at the center of the lives of everyone unlucky enough to cross their path, and like a sudden kitchen fire, unless beaten out early, permanantly, they endeavor to do nothing less than burn down the entire house.

This is the story of how journalist David Farrier accidentally encountered a man by the name of Michael Organ, a man who sometimes claims to be a Prince in exile, and sometimes a Duke, an enigmatic figure who has fully inserted himself into the life of a woman 20 to 30 years his senior named Jillian Bashford-Evers, of Bashford Antiques, in the suburb of Ponsonby, in Auckland, New Zealand, running the locally infamous car clamping extortion business that haunts the store’s parking lot after-hours, which is how he first came to David Farrier’s attention.

This is the story of what happened when David Farrier decided to try to learn a little bit more about the life of Michael Organ.

A decision he soon regretted.

It’s a fascinating premise for a documentary, about a fascinating subject, but it’s ultimately an unsatisfying story. Mainly, because it’s an on-going and unresolved story, and Organ is a slippery subject, an inveterate liar, litigious and dodgey, so there’s really no real chance of a satisfying ending, especially since Organ doesn’t seem to be doing anything truly illegal either… he’s just an asshole. Because of this, the film basically ends with Farrier just throwing up his hands, stopping filming, and walking away, because what else can you really do with an asshole?

Still, as a portrait of a local piece of shit, one with a long, long history of being generally terrible to people, and the sheer number of fractured and disrupted lives he has left in his wake… It real is fascinating.

This is the story of a nobody from an average place, just one more regular, every day, terrible, and tedious person, out there… being a shithead.

Choosing interesting subject matters that preclude him from ever turning them into a complete story is something I’ve encountered from Farrier before in his documentary Tickled, which is about "competitive endurance tickling" and the niche videos industry that features the “bouts” held between restrained athletic young men, and the shady world that supports it. The film investigated potential legal and ethical issues involving the people behind the videos, who immediately responded to Farrier’s initial inquiry with an weirdly combative, insulting, and litigious response, leading to a whole weird hullabaloo… that eventually just kind of fizzled out. Weird, interesting, but ultimately unsatisfying.

I haven’t seen Farrier’s documentary TV series, Dark Tourist, because I don’t support that kind of privileged bullshit, so I can’t say if it also featured ultimately unsatisfying stories, but 2 out of the 3 of his stuff have so far, so… maybe it’s just something to be aware of before bothering with whatever Farrier’s next project is.

Besides being generally unsatisfying, I’m also not sure what this film is trying to say. I mean “Wow… what an asshole,” I get it, but is that it? That the film doesn’t have a real resolution perhaps exacerbates this problem, but I don’t really see any point to any of it beyond, “Get a load of this fucking guy.”

Both this film, as well as the movie Tickled, really puts me in mind of something I remember from the documentary King of Kong. In one of the film’s special features, the documentarians talk about some of the other video game people that they were following around during filming, saying something like “this was one of the potential stories we were developing before the Donkey Kong rivalry became our main focus.” This is something I never considered—probably because I don’t make documentaries—the idea that the process is that you’re basically fishing for your story. In the case of King of Kong, the filmmakers entered into this weird little niche community fully intending to find a story to tell, so they cast out several different lines, like fishing with multiple poles, hoping to catch a “fish” on at least one of them, and when they did, they abandoned the other fishing poles.

Farrier’s films feel to me like they’re from one of the fishing poles that maybe got a bite or two, but in the end, the fish got away.

And yet, he released the movies anyway.