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Porn Revolution hosts Chris Parker and Eli Matthewson with director Kate Prior (Photo: Jin Fellet)
Porn Revolution hosts Chris Parker and Eli Matthewson with director Kate Prior (Photo: Jin Fellet)

Pop CultureNovember 7, 2022

Why we made a documentary about porn

Porn Revolution hosts Chris Parker and Eli Matthewson with director Kate Prior (Photo: Jin Fellet)
Porn Revolution hosts Chris Parker and Eli Matthewson with director Kate Prior (Photo: Jin Fellet)

For the director of The Spinoff’s new series Porn Revolution, it was important to approach the topic with a critical lens – but also one that’s shame-free and sex-positive.

All this week on The Spinoff we’re talking about porn. Click here for more Porn Week stories

Until this year, I had the kind of relationship with pornography that I suspect a sizeable portion of women my age have. The word “pornography” only meant one thing and it existed out there on the internet: a whole sea of free stuff with dubious titles constructed by and for the male gaze. An incognito tab might be opened occasionally, but I was relatively apathetic. It was simply something that existed that wasn’t made for me.

Then in May, Hex Work Productions commissioner Sophie Dowson asked if I wanted to direct a documentary series about it. Six months later, I really, really care about porn.

Pornography is everywhere yet most of us publicly ignore it. It sits at the intersection of a raft of questions about gender, ethics, and social values; it’s always been at the vanguard of advances in technology and monetisation. And of course it connects with deeply personal questions about sexual desire, sexual expression and masturbation (a word we often ignore in connection to porn).

In Aotearoa, there’s just so much we haven’t talked about.

When a subject lacks robust discussion, our reference points become narrow. The same media narratives are repeated, and even if we’re not really listening they still drum a beat in our subconscious. Don’t become a porn addict. Porn affects brain chemicals. Porn fuels crime. Once you start looking under the bonnet, each one of these black-and-white headlines represent extremely contested areas of research. But with repetition and not much interrogation, these ideas become the only ways we have to talk about porn.

I’m not a porn expert, but I make stories, and I’m fascinated by how the narratives we tell ourselves affect our lives for better or worse. Chris Parker and Eli Matthewson aren’t experts either, but they make comedy, and good comedians have an especially well-honed radar for things we don’t talk about but probably should. The idiosyncrasies of our unspoken human responses are a comedian’s home territory, and a big one when it comes to porn is shame and secrecy. When the overarching public narrative is consistently about harm, you can understand why.

So we wanted to introduce some different narratives. Our lens is critical, yet scare-free and sex-positive. We wanted to hear from consumers, we wanted to find out what’s behind and beyond free mainstream online porn, what independent or ethical porn looks like, and most importantly, we wanted to speak with those whom we rarely hear from in Aotearoa: the people making porn here now.

But on top of that, Chris and Eli love a task, so they set themselves an outlandish one: to take their learning and launch a campaign to get New Zealand to talk more about porn in ways that don’t reinscribe the repeated responses of shame and punishment. They have just one problem. At the beginning of their journey, the friends don’t have a clue what their sharp, pithy call-to-action – the mainstay of any campaign – should be. So throughout the series, the more they learn, the more they try to hone their slogan. With a subject as crunchy and nuanced as this, it sometimes feels like an impossible task.

Chris Parker, Kate Prior and Eli Matthewson take a break from filming (Photo: Jin Fellet)

For the past five years, Chris and Eli have hosted a podcast called The Male Gayz. What I love about the nature of audio is how intimate it can be. On The Male Gayz, no subject is off-limits. The two friends always ask questions of each other, stay curious, fumble and laugh their way through conversations.

For this series, I wanted to find a simple visual mode that would platform this intimacy and offer a way in which some level of complexity (and comedy) could be navigated in a short 15-minute timeframe. In our hot-take world where conviction and righteousness are weapons, an everyday space where Chris and Eli were allowed to “not know” and just be our friends working it out felt important. There’s something unique about car conversations – the being-together-but-looking-ahead coupled with the constant movement means your own thoughts can travel. So Chris’ car became the key environment of the show.

It felt like the right choice when we interviewed Kate Whitaker, who works in education and outreach at Te Mana Whakaatu – the Classifications Office. A piece of advice she often gives to parents starting conversations with their kids about sex, healthy relationships, or porn is to try chatting in the car. Not least because there’s always a guaranteed end to the conversation.



Outside of Chris and Eli’s immense ability to make us laugh, you might be wondering why a documentary about a genre of content that’s starkly underpinned by gender power dynamics is being fronted by two men. Well, men watch porn. Women watch it way more than is commonly acknowledged, but porn’s consumers are overwhelmingly men. Heterosexual men seem to have the choice of only two narratives: casual locker-room joking, or the fear of being a porn “addict”. There’s very little in between. So some pretty deep concerns remain unspoken, which is never a good place for them to be. For me, some of the most compelling conversations in the series are when Chris and Eli open up the discussion with men.

Additionally, Chris and Eli are two queer men and we’re a queer and bisexual creative team. Because free online mainstream porn is overwhelmingly created by heterosexual men, conversations around porn often get unhelpfully locked into a familiar cisgender, heterosexual discursive framework. While Chris and Eli have lots to learn throughout the series, approaching the subject through their lens allows us to acknowledge that porn can be many things to many people, and our relationships to it can be deeply complex and sometimes contradictory. Eli’s layered disclosure in the car in the first minute of the series underscores this.

Porn Revolution hosts Chris Parker and Eli Matthewson with director Kate Prior (Photo: Jin Fellet)

One of the first things Chris told me at the start of making this series was that he’d always felt a kind of connection to porn, it being one of the first ways he was able to discover and explore his sexual identity. In my cerebral, conscious brain, this felt like a completely new idea. Watching free online mainstream porn as a woman is so often an exercise in disconnection; even lesbian porn is made for men. Yet when I had the chance to be honest with myself, I realised that subconsciously it wasn’t a new idea at all. Of course I’d tried to explore my own sexual identity through porn, but it was simply something I’d ignored because the mode of delivery was considered “wrong”.

There’s something special about the friends who help you understand a different story about yourself because they’re so unapologetically themselves; like all of us, full of both assertion and confusion, learning, being critical, and working it out, but still standing in the experience that’s true to them. That’s the spirit of this series.

We absolutely should be talking more about porn. We should also chat about how we’re talking about it. I reckon it takes some bold, curious minds to step in and acknowledge what they don’t know in order to get the conversation started, allow us to go on the journey with them, and maybe introduce some new narratives.

Luckily for all of us watching, Chris and Eli are our friends. And they’re the funniest friends at the party, so we know whatever they discover, they’ll make us laugh.

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Mister Organ
David Farrier spent three years chasing the shadowy figure, Michael Organ. (Photo: Supplied / Treatment: Tina Tiller)

Pop CultureNovember 5, 2022

David Farrier on making a movie that never ends: ‘It sucked … it fucked me’

Mister Organ
David Farrier spent three years chasing the shadowy figure, Michael Organ. (Photo: Supplied / Treatment: Tina Tiller)

He fled New Zealand to get away from the subject of his new film. Ahead of Mister Organ’s release, David Farrier’s worried it’s about to kick off all over again.

David Farrier, the journalist, podcaster, film-maker, TV adventurer, online provocateur and bird fanatic, would like to make it very clear that he did not enjoy making his new movie. “I absolutely wouldn’t do it again,” he admits just moments into a Zoom call from his current residence, a clammy, claustrophobic Los Angeles apartment. “It was just a fucking mission … I desperately wanted to drop it. It was miserable. It just went on and on. It was so fucked up.”

With a cap stuffed over his shaggy hair paired with stubble that’s well past the five-day mark, Farrier gives the impression of a man in desperate need of a warm bath and a long nap. After what he’s been through, it sounds like he deserves one. “It just ended up being this long, awful fucking time,” he sighs, hunching further over his laptop screen. “It sucked … It fucked me. If I had my time again with this, I guarantee you I would not do it.”

Farrier’s known for being a dogged journalist, unflappable in the face of tense subject matter and litigious interview subjects. He showed off those skills in his first film Tickled, when he chased an elusive underworld figure desperately trying to cover his tracks, and in Dark Tourist, the Netflix series that saw Farrier horsing around with Pablo Escobar’s former hired guns and swimming in a radioactive lake. With his Substack newsletter WebWorm, he’s spent much of this year taking on the might of Arise church.

But it sounds like Farrier met his match in Mister Organ. Released in theatres next week, Farrier’s second movie tracks a shadowy figure – one who claims, among many other things, to be a prince around Aotearoa for three years. He also talks to many of his alleged victims in an attempt to understand what makes him tick. Over that time, Farrier loses control of his subject and the tables get turned: his front door key is stolen and copied, some of his possessions go missing, and he’s forced to decamp regularly to Whanganui to chase his subject and front for a tense court case.

As tenacious as he is, even Farrier found himself up against it. In one of Mister Organ’s most wrenching scenes, Farrier can be seen crying, hunched over his bed on the phone to a friend, breaking down while regretting every decision that led to him making this movie. That scene, Farrier confirms, was not faked. “Fuck, no, no,” he says. “I was lost in it, lost in what this was, and it was such a shitty, depressing place to be. There are a lot of those moments that happened over probably the last year of shooting where I just … didn’t see a way through it.”

Mister Organ
David Farrier meets Michael Organ outside the Whanganui District Court. (Photo: Supplied)

Filming only finished when Farrier decided he’d had enough. He blocked his subject from his phone, left New Zealand and fled to Los Angeles in a bid to escape his clutches. Why keep going for so long? “I get really obsessed with stories. I don’t want to let things go. And if I’m curious, I want to see what happens next,” he says. “I find it very motivating when people are cagey, and this started with a lot of cagey-ness.”

Farrier likes to find ghosts. He is, he admits, addicted to the thrill of the chase. “If you poke something and people say, ‘There’s no story’ or just don’t talk to you or hang up the phone, that’s when you know there’s definitely something happening. So, that’s like crack. Like, how can you stay away?”

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Mister Organ’s princely protagonist is Michael Organ, a character Farrier first encountered while covering him right here on The Spinoff. Regular readers will remember Farrier’s five widely read dispatches on the Bashford Antiques saga, when hungry Ponsonby diners who parked their cars briefly in front of a local antique store while dashing in to pick up their takeaway food would return to find their car clamped. A bearded, black-clad figure would approach demanding hundreds of dollars in cash before they could leave.

It was during this time, while researching his third Bashford Antiques piece, that Farrier decided there was more to Organ than perhaps met the eye. Once he started digging, interviewing those that had come into his orbit, he couldn’t stop. “It was less about a wacky person [and] more about someone who had a really unique fetish for controlling people,” he says. Where most journalists would have run a mile, Farrier decided he’d found the subject for his next film. He began to pull on threads and chase leads. There were many.

He soon found himself immersed in a world where reality began to blur. The relationship between him and Organ is consistently antagonistic. Angry words are exchanged. Legal letters are filed. Threats and counter-threats build up. “You’d think, ‘I’ll never speak to this person again.’ Next minute, out of curiosity, you ask, ‘Do you want to sit down for a coffee?’ and suddenly it’s happening and you’re back in it,” says Farrier, who gets called a “c***” during their first formal interview together. “You’d never quite know what was what was going to happen day to day.”

Mister Organ
Michael Organ and David Farrier enjoy a coffee and a confrontation on the streets of Whanganui. (Photo: Supplied)

Farrier believes his film, set mostly in the confines of an old bank and the surrounding streets of downtown Whanganui, captures a small part of something much bigger going on in the world. While making Mister Organ, the OG of blurred reality, Donald Trump, was never far from Farrier’s mind. “We’re living in a time when … a really good technique to get ahead in life is just to lie and to keep lying and sort of live within your own reality,” says Farrier. “It works really well. You can become president of the United States if you just lie and stick with it.”



Farrier didn’t realise just how far his own wormhole went until he was in too deep. To explain more would give away too much about his twisted film that needs to be seen to be believed. But the film-maker expects most viewers to connect to Mister Organ because they’ve probably had encounters with someone just like his subject. “There are Mister Organs everywhere,” says Farrier. So far, the reaction he’s had to his film seems to confirm this. “That makes me feel slightly better about it. We all brush up against [these kinds of] people. And then we hopefully get the fuck away.”

But Farrier can’t escape. As he returns to Aotearoa to continue promoting his film and front a series of in-person Q&As, he’s worried his subject may want revenge. Has Organ seen his film yet? Farrier doesn’t think so. He hasn’t shown it to him. “He can buy a ticket if he wants to come,” he says.

Is he worried something could spark him off again, or another court threat might be issued, forcing Farrier to return to the world of Michael Organ that he’s only just escaped from? “He’s certainly made his presence known,” says Farrier. “He’s always a bit ahead of where we think he’s going to be. So I’m curious what he’s going to do.” By this, Farrier might be referencing his recent clash with The Platform’s Sean Plunket, who appeared to be taking Organ’s side with a flurry of Twitter posts.

One thing’s for sure: Farrier’s never doing this again. “I’ve got no intent to go and spend time with with another unpleasant person anytime soon,” he says. In fact, he might even be done with documentaries for good. “The whole process was fucked and I hated it. I’m very happy not thinking about making a documentary about anyone at this point.”

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