Billed as a luxury music festival and advertised with a FOMO-inducing video showing bikini-clad social media influencers like Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid frolicking on a Bahamian beach, Fyre Festival was supposed to be better than Coachella. Instead, on what was both its opening and closing weekend in late April 2017, it became the collective schadenfreude we all needed. The brainchild of millennial huckster, Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule, it was an event born of and killed by social media hype. So, it’s fitting, then, that we now have two documentaries about it.
The first, Fyre Fraud, hit Hulu last Tuesday, previously unadvertised and almost at the same moment that reviews for its well publicized rival, Neflix’s Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, went live. While the move initially seemed like an act of petty marketing oneupmanship, there’s a reason for it too. Fraud directors Jennifer Willoughby Nason and Jenner Furst end their film by directly questioning Fyre’s legitimacy: they point out that Jerry Media, the social media marketing agency partly responsible for publicizing the festival in the first place, were involved in that film’s production. Fyre director, Chris Smith, in return, questioned Nason and Furst’s integrity for paying McFarland for an exclusive interview. And while both films are morally compromised, only Netflix’s suffers from the comparison.
Where Nason and Furst’s film focuses on the role social media played in Fyre Fest’s infamy, Smith is more concerned with giving a behind-the-scenes history of how it came to be. Both documentaries use some of the same footage, acquired from a mix of attendees’ social media accounts and video taken by Fyre’s employees, but Smith has the added advantage of access to Jerry Media’s footage. It’s frustrating, then, that his presentation of the facts feels so restrained.
Because Fraud is about the way hype and social media allowed it to happen, Nason and Furst are more willing to use the imagery of the internet. When an interviewee jokes that the nonexistent luxury villas sold couldn’t just be purchased online, Nason and Furst jokingly show an Amazon search for villas that yields no results. Smith’s approach is more straightforward, with talking heads and footage used to tell the story.
While it’s easy to argue that Smith is letting the story’s craziness speak for itself, it can leave the film feeling a little lifeless. Calvin Wells — who created the @FyreFraud account on Twitter that tried to warn people before April 2017 — is charismatic in Nason and Furst’s footage. He smiles as he relays how he figured out that the festival would be a disaster and his interview helps organize the chain of events. By contrast, he is so serious in Smith’s footage that his testimony is largely forgettable and worse, his early work to expose the festival’s lies feels glossed over.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljkaq_he-BU
Instead, Smith lets the Jerry Media employees Wells accuses of deliberately deleting negative comments from Fyre’s social media posts tell the story of that pre-festival backlash. To hear Jerry Media CEO, Mick Purzycki, tell it, he and his employees were just doing what Fyre marketing head, Grant Margolin (who appears in neither documentary) told them.
According to him, their obligation ended once they forwarded screenshots of legitimate questions to the people at Fyre. And maybe that’s true in the legal sense, but it’s a pretty lame, seemingly naive excuse. As it turns out, Purzycki and Jerry Media aren’t the only interview subjects who try to shift blame to the few members of the Fyre team who don’t speak for themselves in the doc.
Where Nason and Furst frame Fyre Fest as a product of a culture driven by image taking the place of truth, Smith and just about everyone in his film seem to place blame almost solely on McFarland. From Jerry Media employees to some of the native Bahamians who worked with him, everyone acts like an innocent taken in by a charismatic liar and the promise of being involved. As music festival consultant Marc Weinstein puts it near the end of the film, “that desire [to be part of something special] overcame my inner wisdom which was like, ‘this is a mess.’”
That moment of self-awareness aside, much of the film feels like a cleverly-constructed image rehab for some of the people who enabled McFarland’s grift and they and Smith seem largely unwilling to examine that guilt. Even producer Andy King may have experienced a level of PTSD post-festival, but he also didn’t dig more into how McFarland was paying for all this or set realistic expectations for everyone involved despite knowing that kind of festival takes at least a year to produce.
Still, if Frye has one advantage over Fraud it’s that it ultimately has more sympathy for those involved. The marketing experts and workers from both America and Great Exuma may have enabled McFarland’s grift, but they were also hurt by it too. Former Fyre employee, Shiyuan Deng, laments not only the betrayal of trust, but the months of wasted work on the Fyre app. The most upsetting story, though, is Maryann Rolle’s.
As the owner of Point Exuma, the bar where some festival attendees were first dropped off, Rolle provided a thousand meals a day for the workers trying to throw the festival together before the date, but never received payment. Holding back tears, she explains that she spent $50,000 of her own savings and while she’s since started a GoFundMe to make up some of her lost wages, she’s been left behind by the lawsuits brought by wealthy attendees. It’s a sharp reminder that while for most people, Fyre Fest was just a social media train wreck, some people suffered more than just a night on a damp mattress.
On some level, the reason Hulu and Fyre Fraud were able to get the drop on Netflix and Fyre is because they seem to have a better understanding of how and why the Fyre Festival could happen. It’s the product of an empire in decline, where perception is reality. But perception can only hold so long. McFarland, Ja Rule and the core Fyre team may have been very clever hucksters, but they couldn’t have sustained their collective fantasy without the workers who enabled their con or bought it without digging into the details. Fyre makes the exact same mistake. It takes the stories people tell and prints them as truth, unexamined. It works very hard to paint the whole disaster as the result of a few conmen and in turn, it cons not just the audience, but itself. Everyone gets to tell their stories, but only so they can move the blame to someone else.
Rating: 6.5/10
