It’s been 10 years since David Farrier, a New Zealand journalist and documentarian, first heard about his neighborhood car menace. In 2013, a co-worker tearfully reported that she accidentally parked her car in the lot for a store called Bashford Antiques, in the Auckland neighborhood of Ponsonby (which Farrier describes as “the Beverly Hills of Auckland”), only to return to a tow truck with a pugilistic operator and a steep ransom. After hours of negotiation, she paid $250 for her car.
At the time, there was no cap on the amount one could demand for a car parked on private property, and the people at Bashford Antiques were especially enthusiastic exploiters. Clamping – in which someone arrests the wheels of an easily misparked car for a ransom of hundreds of dollars – became a routine sport at the nondescript suburban store, enough to fill its Facebook page with furious one-star reviews from belittled, exasperated victims. It was the type of serious enough but also weird local story that fascinated Farrier, no stranger himself to odd obsessions; he directed the 2016 film Tickled, on the sport of competitive endurance tickling, which is one of the more bizarre documentaries I’ve ever seen. The same year, he also began blogging about the clamping at Bashford Antiques and the mysterious man he suspected was behind it, Michael Organ. The blogs and a subsequent documentary were supposed to be straightforward dissections of a small-fish predator.
If only. “I was in such a bleak headspace,” Farrier told the Guardian from Los Angeles, where he moved in part for work, in part to escape Organ’s harassment. “I just thought a different country would be some space from him being in my face.” His new film, Mister Organ, in US theaters this week, follows Farrier’s years-long efforts to explain a leech. Car clamping, it turns out, was only one tentacle of Organ’s soul-sucking predation. New Zealand is “such a small place”, said Farrier, that there was a whisper network about Organ – that he had once attempted to steal a yacht. That he had lived with a string of roommates scarred by his behavior. That he was posing as a lawyer for Bashford Antiques. That he had left a trail of confusion and destruction in his wake. The stories he heard stretched back at least 20 years, “a combination of funny, mysterious and kinda bleak”.
Farrier pitched the film as part investigation, part curiosity of a local character who seemed creepily latched on to Jillian Bashford, the elderly owner of the store. Once he began hearing other stories, “my focus shifted from the parking to how this man lived his life. And that’s what I wanted to explore with the documentary.”
The 95-minute film starts with the car clamping, admittedly a bit humorous if awful for the people involved – what a weird local quirk – and devolves into something much darker: the uncontrollable, inexplicable patterns of sadistic narcissism. Farrier attempts to engage with Organ, a bearded and burly man with a penchant for fancy dress and elaborate yarns about his fake royal heritage. He is stymied by Organ’s denials, his mercurial temper, his verbal aggression, his ability to talk for hours straight with no redress. Time and again, we hear from past roommates or unfortunate associates of Organ, who recall how he bullied, intimidated, harassed or assaulted them, how he wore them down. One man was driven to suicide; at his funeral, clips of which are included in the film, his friends explicitly blame Organ.
Farrier attempts to get confessions or even simple facts from Organ, to little avail. Engaging with him takes on the feel of a Sisyphean task. “As the film went on, I just realized that Michael was sort of a black hole of a character,” said Farrier. On camera, he regrets pitching the project, and contemplates quitting. Years into the project, he realizes, dealing with Organ has taken over his life.
At one point, he tries to articulate what is happening to him; he’s confused, demoralized, disturbed. A good portion of the film has an aimless, spiraling quality – Organ giving Farrier the run-around and talking his ear off, Farrier pressing again for something specific, Organ rebuffing him, repeat. Asked how he would describe Organ’s corrosive effect on his psyche now, Farrier still struggled to find the right words. “It’s really fucking hard to explain, and I haven’t had anyone do it to me before,” he said. “The only way I can describe it is that he just gets under your skin … I still struggle to explain how it felt and why it was such a problem. But if you spend hours and hours with him, he just fucks up your brain.
“I felt disoriented and weird and frustrated and no answers,” he added. “And when you repeat that over months and months, thinking about him for years and years, it just destabilizes you.”
The documentary was “never intended … to be about me and him”, he said. It was supposed to be more clinical, a bird’s eye view of a strange character. But as filming progressed, their fraught, at times symbiotic, usually toxic relationship “clearly just needed to come into it”.
For all its subjective descriptions of Organ’s effect on one’s mental health, however, the film is careful never to pathologize him. There’s no traumatic backstory supplied to explain his ways, no mention of a personality disorder or a diagnosis. Organ just is who he is, engage at your own peril. “I don’t have an interest in weighing in on the psychology of it,” said Farrier. “Whatever is going on in his brain, it doesn’t matter. The fact is, he’s allowed to operate like this in society, as a lot of people are, and there’s nothing to be done about it. You just need to be aware of it and catch their behaviors and maybe hopefully not let someone like that into your own life.”
Mister Organ avoids a neat conclusion, in part because there never was one – being manipulative and relentless isn’t criminal, and Organ continues apace. Since the film was released in New Zealand last year, he has mired Farrier in a heap of legal proceedings, naming him in irrelevant cases that demand he Zoom into court in Auckland to explain himself. “He made my life difficult in a variety of ways around that, and he made other people’s lives difficult,” said Farrier. “That’s what he does. It just continues on and on.”
Mister Organ may not reach a natural endpoint, but it ultimately provides Farrier some sense of clarity: that Organ is “a conman, but for him the joy isn’t in the con. It’s about what he’s doing to people’s minds, and how he works on people. Seeing that play and seeing how he did that – I don’t know if satisfying is the right word, but I felt some sense of closure.”
Mister Organ is out in US cinemas on 6 October with a UK date to be announced
