The promotional video of Fyre Festival opens with an overhead shot of a small island surrounded by the blueish swirls of the Caribbean. A voiceover drones, “The actual experience exceeds all expectations.”
Come this way, honored Odysseus, great glory of the Achaians, and stay your ship, so that you can listen here to our singing; for no one else has ever sailed past this place in his black ship until he has listened to the honey-sweet voice that issues from our lips; then goes on, well-pleased, knowing more than ever he did; for we know everything that the Argives and Trojans did and suffered in wide Troy through the gods’ despite. Over all the generous earth we know everything that happens.
Before you have time to wonder about what this could possibly mean, we are bombarded with pictures of models, private planes, yachts, models, musicians, dancing, bonfires, models dancing, models swimming, models laughing at some unheard joke, models riding jet skis, and models feeding pigs (?) on some beach in paradise. Superimposed over the images, we read…
Two transformative weekends…an immersive music festival on a remote and private island in the Exumas…the best in food, art, music, and adventure…once owned by Pablo Escobar…on the boundaries of the impossible…Fyre is an experience and a festival…a quest…to push beyond those boundaries.
It’s not exactly Homer, but it’s hard not to hear the Sirens’ song in those words especially knowing what would eventually happen to those weary travelers lured to “push beyond those boundaries” and attend Fyre Festival. Homer’s Sirens promised knowledge. The promoters of Fyre Festival promised what has become the postmodern substitute for knowledge. They offered an experience filled with music, sex, adventure, and glamor. Whereas it failed to deliver on those promises, you could argue that those who found themselves losing money and stranded on the Caribbean island did receive a bit of knowledge for their trouble.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, let me bring you up to speed. Fyre Festival was the 2017 brainchild of entrepreneur/con-man Billy McFarland in partnership with rapper and self-proclaimed mogul, Ja Rule. The idea was simple in its conception. Fyre Festival was to be a luxury music festival on a remote private island in the Bahamas. It was exclusive, and it was glamorous. It was also a colossal failure. Ideas simple in their conception are not so easily executed, and the Fyre Festival resulted in stranded patrons, abandoned vendors, the loss of millions of dollars, lawsuits and criminal charges, and not one but two different documentary films. Yes, proving the truth of the cliché about trains and their wrecks both Netflix and Hulu released films chronicling the disaster. My comments in this article will be limited to the Netflix film Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened.
Like many documentaries, Fyre mixes video footage with interviews of those involved. The interviews focus on three groups: people involved in the planning of the festival, patrons who attended, and Bahamian laborers. While some skepticism is warranted about the complete innocence of some of the parties, the principle scammers, Ja Rule and McFarland are never interviewed. However, they are given more than enough time in front of the camera for you to be convinced of their pathological arrogance. The longer you watch the documentary, the more you find yourself shaking your head and asking the question along with those interviewed, “How in the world did this happen?”
But curiosity alone doesn’t explain the appeal of the movie. It’s also the schadenfreude. It’s a movie that indulges our desire to feel superior. It indulges that part of us that longs to see people that we might not like or agree with get what’s coming to them.
I’m willing to admit there is something satisfying in witnessing a bunch of privileged, affluent millennials get a dose of hell on their island paradise. The filmmakers seem aware of this. Exclusive, private jets turn into cramped commercial flights. Luxurious accommodations turn into shabby tents and soggy mattresses. Fine dining turns into sad cheese sandwiches. A weekend of partying, drinking, and dancing turns into panicked calls back home from a hot, tiny Caribbean airport. But the film is not completely without empathy for those who really were hurt and abused by this fiasco. People were swindled, manipulated, and lied to. Reputations were ruined. Bahamian laborers were left unpaid and in debt by wealthy Americans who abandoned them and went home. Watching a film like this, it’s important to remember that eagerly taking joy in the pain of others – regardless of our feelings about those others – doesn’t make the viewer much better than the person who caused the pain in the first place.
Speaking of which…There is also something satisfying about watching Billy McFarland transform into Ozymandias before our eyes. McFarland is basically Bernie Madoff with a suntan and younger friends. He is the next, but definitely not the last, in a long line of grifters and scam-artists with the unique talent of “separating people from their money.” As the film unfolds, it’s not always easy to judge whether McFarland is actually evil or just hopelessly deluded. By the end of the film, you’re no longer wondering. As McFarland asks a video crew to record him committing fraud while out on bail, you realize this man is actually deeply disturbed. He is so deluded that reality seems to have little effect on him.
But that is finally one of the overall themes of the film. The film is about what happens when artifice runs headlong into reality. One person said that “Fyre was Instagram come to life.” Fyre was created almost entirely within the new “Influencer economy.” In the influencer economy, brands use the access and intimacy unique to social media to create and cultivate images of the good life. The cool kids of social media weaponize FOMO to sell product. McFarland chose a different word to describe his “product.” “We’re selling a pipe dream to your average loser. Your average guy in Middle America.” From the beginning, Fyre was little more than an image or a feeling that stubbornly refused to come to life. The festival is a reminder that so much of what passes for reality on social media is ultimately a carefully constructed illusion. Still there was hope among the organizers. At one point in the film, when faced with reality, one of the marketers declares memorably, “Let’s just do it and be legends, man.” Apparently, they all forgot that Narcissus was also a legend. Like hashtags, bold declarations alone do not change reality.
The lasting value of Fyre is its function as a cautionary tale or a parable of modern life. If we will have ears to hear. Blaise Pascal said:
“All men seek happiness. There are no exceptions. However different the means they may employ, they all strive towards this goal. The reason why some go to war and some do not is the same desire in both, but interpreted in two different ways. The will never takes the least step except to that end. This is the motive of every act of every man, including those who go and hang themselves.”
Or, I might add, including those who created, marketed, or attended Fyre Festival. The film confronts us with the unsettling reality of Pascal’s famous “God-shaped vacuum” which exists in the heart of every person. We are not that different from those caught up in this scam. The desperate desire to achieve the “good life” as defined by our culture is our Sirens’ song. We laugh at the naïve college student trapped in the Bahamas without reflecting on how our insatiable desire for the next product or experience has also trapped us. We want to be happy to such an extent that we become accomplices in our own manipulation. We are haunted by the thought that our desires might let us down and leave us unfulfilled, but we stubbornly choose to follow them anyway. “Let’s just do it and be legends.” And here’s the critical thing. Pascal would have been proven right even if the festival lived up to all its promise because finally achieving a dream is one of the very best ways to discover that the God-shaped vacuum can only rightly be filled by God.
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