Netflix’s Fyre Is a Story You Have to See to Believe
To most of us, the Fyre Festival, a high-profile debacle in the Bahamas in the spring of 2017, crystallized something about Internet culture. Here was the toxicity of social media for all to see: a sunbaked scene of disaster tents, soaked mattresses, and millennials with roller bags looking wide-eyed and dehydrated. LOL, right? So what if these people had been defrauded, lured with the promise of a luxury music festival that never came to be? If you’re seduced by models, Instagram influencers, and FOMO hysteria, this is what you deserve.
Actually, what transpired on the island of Great Exuma that spring was much darker, more criminal, and more devastating to the lives of many than most of us realized. Such is the feeling inspired by Netflix’s gripping, supremely entertaining, and troubling documentary Fyre, which debuts on the streaming service this Friday. We already know that Billy McFarland, the young huckster behind the festival, a charlatan with a vacant smile, is a convicted felon. (He didn’t participate in Netflix’s doc; Hulu’s competing, and less effective documentary, Fyre Fraud, paid for an interview with McFarland). And we’ve seen much of the footage the filmmaker Chris Smith has assembled to tell his story: the bikinis-and-boats sizzle reel with the likes of Emily Ratajkowski, Hailey Baldwin, and Bella Hadid that Fyre created to hype their festival; the smartphone footage shot by appalled attendees. Smith does a terrific job of stringing it all into a taut narrative—but the real revelation of Fyre is in the insider interviews. Here are software engineers who worked for McFarland’s app, event organizers he hired to pull off the festival, and the social media marketers who aided and abetted his illusion. They all speak candidly about how they were caught up and carried along. It’s startling to see so many urbane, sophisticated, young creatives—the kind of cool kids our media economy reveres—ensnared in old-fashioned criminality.
The documentary plays like a thriller. McFarland and his cofounder, the rapper Ja Rule, are ruthless villains—as greedy as they are narcissistic—and yet they manage to convince an incredible number of investors and employees and ticket-buyers that they have entrepreneurial vision. There’s a moment, as the days tick closer to the festival and the Fyre team begins to panic, that one organizer commits himself to an appalling act of personal humiliation to keep disaster at bay.
It’s easy to laugh at much of this—and you do—but your laughter fades as the documentary goes on. The cost of Fyre wasn’t to investors and credulous hipsters who wanted to party with Major Lazer and Blink-182 on a white-sand beach. It was to ordinary Bahamians whose island was trashed in the service of such pointlessness, who couldn’t afford to work for free—but were made to do so by McFarland’s team. Schadenfreude on Twitter is fun and all, but the spectacle of white moneyed elites defrauding a Caribbean workforce makes our delight at what happened at Fyre seem small.
And in the age of Trump, there’s every reason to believe that we haven’t learned from any of this, and that a character like McFarland will rise again. The final section of the documentary shows how he succeeds, even as a convicted criminal out on bail, at launching another fraudulent insider’s club. The truth is we love to be sold stuff—fantasies of popularity, the promise of cachet and status, lies upon lies upon lies.
