FYRE: O Festival que Nunca Aconteceu

Two documentaries about the Fyre Festival debacle came out days apart, Netflix's Fyre and Hulu's Fyre Fraud, and each shines in different ways.

The Netflix documentary approach is a methodical chronology. It describes what happened as it happened and how people saw it at the time. It really puts you into the day-by-day experience.

Fyre Fraud takes a different approach. It actually sketches out the basics of the entire thing in the first 15 minutes, then builds upon the various components to create a whole.

The titles actually hint at the different approaches. Fyre describes the Fyre Festival as a slow-mo disaster, only at the end fully revealing the shadiness of Fyre's charismatic creator, Billy McFarland.

Fyre Fraud, on the other hand, immediately establishes Billy as a sleazy con man, and portrays Fyre as a series of shady transactions. Netflix portrays the festival as a disaster, Fyre Fraud as a crime.

Fyre Fraud spends a lot of time framing the Fyre Fraud hysteria within the current culture. It's the sort of pundit "hot take" that is easy to poke holes in, but it's sometimes persuasive. Fraud also has an interview with Billy, although the guy is to slippery to offer much satisfaction.

If you only wanted to watch one Fyre documentary, go for the Netflix one. But after you've seen it if you want more details and a different angle, Fyre Fraud is well worth your time.

It is some fairly deep irony when a "documentary" on a subject of exploitative people, using vapid, shallow influencers, to dupe rich kid victims who themselves may have deserved what they got, turns out to be itself exploitative, vapid and meaningless as well. Essentially the makers of "Fyre Fraud" engage in the same cheap marketing and lack of substance as the subject they are covering. We don't even learn why Ja Rule was not jailed

If you want to learn about this festival, the stages of fraud, and just how nasty everyone involved was, read one of the news articles, and skip this documentary which is so shallow and laughably emotional it could have been made by the fraudsters itself.

"In the millennial era, scamming is the air we breathe." - Jia Tolentino, writer for the New Yorker

'Fyre Fraud' tells the story of a con man pretty well, and also puts it into the larger context of the current generation and social media. Between the cons, enablers, internet influencers, and the entitled, all of them reeking of incredible selfishness, it made me want to weep for humanity.

One thing I found endlessly frustrating is that there is a sit-down interview with the Zuckerberg wannabe/Con Artist who gets to trot out his highly fabricated version of what happened but he is repeatedly asked direct questions which he never appears to answer - but it's hard to know because it's a quick cut edit and on to something else. If he doesn't answer 'You lost a box of keys to $2 Million worth of houses? Why didn't you tell that to the guests?' - I want to see him sit there and squirm for as long as he did in the interview. But overall, it's a fascinating spectacle to watch, as was the other Fyre documentary. I don't despise the type of people that are featured in this film: cell-phone zombies that begin every sentence with 'Literally..' and describe everything as 'Amazing'... but I do enjoy watching them actively make themselves a victim of their own narcissism.

I cannot handle documentaries like this that use so much B roll and unrelated clips. Well, related only in the sense of a key word. It's that "stylized montage" from Reality Bites that I can never get out if my head. The one with the pizza spinning around like a record player. That's my definition of irony. The actual documentary looks like the awful, fake documentary in a fictional movie. Ugh