Wild Fyre

The window was open for a very short time, but there was a week or two there where it seemed like every corner of the internet I turned to, I was hearing about the Fyre Festival. Specifically, I was hearing about two dueling documentaries from Netflix and Hulu. Both seemed to vanish from the zeitgeist as quickly as they arrived, but I did check out one of the films. (The Netflix one, both because I've never actually broken down and subscribed to Hulu, and because I'd heard it was the better of the two.)

One of the first things I learned in watching Fyre is that the festival was an online sensation that had come and gone years earlier without me taking any notice whatsoever. Driven by internet influencers, the Fyre Festival was to have been a massive music festival in a posh tropical location, attracting people with money to burn to a once in a lifetime experience. Instead, it was somewhere between a massive scam and an enterprise doomed to failure -- one the documentary covers in great detail.

What I don't quite get is why this scam, among so many perpetrated in the world, garnered such attention. The documentary doesn't hazard an opinion. I would wager, though, that it's because the broad perception in this case is that it was rich people getting scammed. A little turnabout, a little justice. And it all went down early in 2017, freshly after an election that literally left a voting majority in the U.S. feeling like their voice had not been heard -- like they'd been "scammed." The fascination with the Fyre Festival and its implosion might be pure schadenfreude.

But one of the strongest aspects of the Fyre documentary is how it shows that all kinds of people were affected here. People might debate whether festival attendees looking to be "on trend" or whatever actually deserved any of what happened to them, but it's indisputable that locals on the island of Great Exuma did not. Throughout the documentary (and particularly in its final 15 minutes), we're presented with tales of people whose very livelihood was threatened by the huge sums of money they put up and were never paid back. Tales of people drawn into the orbit of smooth-talking fraud Billy McFarland, who lost their live savings and their dignity along the way.

While these small stories are compelling, I felt that the documentary overall was far less so. The real mystery of the Fyre Festival is how anything this transparently disorganized went so far to begin with. No doubt, some of the answer is that only hindsight allows us to see the problems now. But the only other real answer that anyone seems to have is that "Bill McFarland is charismatic." And this is something that the documentary does not do a particularly good job of depicting.

There's an undercurrent here of high school. Of a certain type of personality being willing to do whatever it takes to be popular and get close to the people who are. But you really have to draw your own conclusions in this -- the documentary doesn't seem to have a theory of the case or point of view.

So after watching Fyre, I was now left knowing what everyone was buzzing about, while feeling like I had little more sense of it than I came in with. I'd grade the documentary of C. Like the Fyre Festival itself, it's a flash in the pan, something likely to be forgotten years from now, remembered only by the people who actually lived it.