Netflix's "Fyre" Is a High Class Documentary
5 ways Fyre is higher quality than Hulu's Fyre Festival documentary.
Netflix
Hulu may have released its Fyre Festival documentary first, but Netflix's Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened is of a higher class.
Despite the questionable ethics of both production teams, director Chris Smith does justice to the Netflix legacy of well-structured documentaries with a human interest payoff. In contrast, Hulu's co-directors Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason aim to make lofty connections between Fyre Festival and millennial ethos that are sound on paper but a messy visual argument.
Both documentaries acknowledge the media storm of schadenfreude that resulted from one attendee's now-iconic Twitter post of the festival's "gourmet" dinner: "Literally slices of bread, cheese, and salad with no dressing." Of course, on the surface, the spectacle of rich, entitled millennials paying exorbitant ticket prices for a luxury music festival in the Bahamas and ending up sleeping in FEMA tents amused the public. However, both Hulu and Netflix examine the serious repercussions of the scandal and what it signified about our culture.
Here are the five key points that Fyre hits home better than Hulu's documentary.
1. Netflix Shows What Hulu Only Tells
At first, Hulu scoring an exclusive interview with Billy McFarland (conducted before he was sentenced to six years in jail for fraud) seemed to give it an advantage. However, Fyre Fraud's cobbled-together footage from over eight hours of interviewing a "compulsive liar" gives the narcissistic conman exactly what he seeks: attention with no substance. On the other hand, the clear upside of co-producing Fyre with Jerry Media is Netflix's extensive behind-the-scenes footage, which spans from the festival's early planning stages to McFarland's release on bail in a fraudulently acquired penthouse.
2. Ja Rule Knew
Among both documentaries' many scenes of McFarland and Ja Rule partying on the beach, Ja Rule's oft-repeated toast captures the naivety and blind-sightedness of the inexperienced festival planners: "Here's to living like movie stars, partying like rock stars, and fucking like porn stars!" However, while Fyre Fraud leaves little room to speculate whether or not Ja Rule was kept in the dark about the disastrous planning, the interviews and recorded phone calls featured in Fyre show his frank denial of the facts he was exposed to.
In fact, the release of Netflix's documentary drove Ja Rule to post a slew of tweets that claimed he "had an amazing vision to create a festival like no other" but he was a victim, too. He posted, "I too was hustled, scammed, bamboozled, hoodwinked, lead astray!!!"
3. Everyone Denies Who Really Planned the Festival
Aside from Ja Rule's back and forth about his level of involvement, the festival's marketing company, Jerry Media (a.k.a FuckJerry on Instagram), has been accused of co-conspiring in the fraud. This is the first point of direct contention between the Hulu and Netflix productions, as Furst and Nason feature a former employee of Jerry Media who recounts how the company propagated a known lie–including deleting all Instagram comments that alluded to the truth.
In stark contrast, Netflix co-produced Fyre with the remaining members of Jerry Media. They claim they were also victimized and misled by Billy McFarland, with their interviews dotted with passive language like, "It was decided by someone...I don't know who."
4. The Disaster Up Close
For a real dose of schadenfreude, Netflix is the way to go. The combination of behind-the-scenes interviews and attendees' first-person footage paints the full, collapsing picture of the luxury villas and personal yachts the guests expected. However, Fyre's extended coverage of the fallout also highlights the more serious reality that hundreds of young adults were stranded on an island with no food, water, or transportation home. Footage of the campsite after nightfall with no light sources shows how rightfully the event was later described as "post-apocalyptic."
5. Bahamians Were the Real Victims
To give Fyre Fraud its due, Hulu's documentarians use Fyre Festival as a dowsing rod to uncover the source of status and social media obsessions. In Furst and Nason's words, "McFarland's staggering ambition metastasized in a petri dish of late-stage capitalism, corporate greed, and predatory branding, all weaponized by our fear of missing out." One interviewee makes a pointed comment aligning Trumpian politics with the festival's deception: "It's a good time to be a conman in America."
However, Chris Smith's team tackles the human interest angle of how much the Bahamian economy and local workforce were damaged and exploited. Fyre underlines the dozens of laborers who worked nearly day and night for empty promises of pay. Interviews even detail how some of the festival planners felt the need to disguise themselves in order to escape the area, because in the immediate fallout, "mobs" of workers were demanding overdue pay (they never received any).
One of the most memorable interviewees is Maryann Rolle, the owner of Exuma Point restaurant who unexpectedly received Fyre Festival's first wave of guests with less than half an hour's notice. This was due to the fact that the intended campsite was drenched, unprepared, and inhospitable on the first morning that guests arrived. Rolle seems genuinely pained during her interview, saying, "I had ten people working with me directly. They were just preparing food all day and all night, 24 hours. I had to pay all those people. I went through about $50,000 of my savings that I could have had. They just wiped it out, and never looked back."
In fact, Gabrielle Bluestone, one of the producers of Fyre, took to Twitter the day after the documentary was released to share Rolle's (legitimate) Go Fund Me page to pay back the expenses incurred by Fyre Festival. As of Monday, donations totaled over $137,000.
Meg Hanson is a Brooklyn-based writer, teacher and jaywalker. Find Meg at her website and on Twitter @megsoyung.
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POPULAR NEWS
Liam Neeson Admits to Wanting to Kill a "Black Bastard" in an Act of Revenge
The interview went in an unexpected direction.
Liam Neeson
Thoughts and prayers to Liam Neeson's publicist who is undoubtedly dealing with the consequences of Neeson's wildly problematic Independentinterview. The purpose of the interview was to discuss Neeson's upcoming movie Cold Pursuit, an action thriller (obviously) about a snow plow driver who goes after the drug dealers he believes killed his son. When the interview turned to the subject of revenge, a clear theme in the movie, Neeson said, "There's something primal – God forbid you've ever had a member of your family hurt under criminal conditions," he continues. "I'll tell you a story. This is true."
He then went on to relate a tale from many years ago, when he learned that a woman close to him had been raped. All she knew about her attacker was that he was a black man, leading Neeson to roam the streets for weeks afterwards, carrying a "cosh" (a stick-like weapon) hoping to meet a man who fit the description, get into a fight with him and, ultimately, kill him.
"She handled the situation of the rape in the most extraordinary way." He said, "But my immediate reaction was...I asked, did she know who it was? No. What colour were they? She said it was a black person."
He continued, "I went up and down areas with a cosh, hoping I'd be approached by somebody – I'm ashamed to say that – and I did it for maybe a week, hoping some [Neeson gestures air quotes with his fingers] 'black bastard' would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So that I could kill him." At this juncture, we recommend picturing the faces of the journalist who was expecting a tepid movie promotion interview, and Liam Neeson's costar, Tom Bateman, who was also present but likely recognized that nothing he could say for the remainder of the interview would have any consequence whatsoever.
Neeson went on, "It took me a week, maybe a week and a half, to go through that. She would say, 'Where are you going?' and I would say, 'I'm just going out for a walk.' You know? 'What's wrong?' 'No no, nothing's wrong.' It was horrible, horrible, when I think back, that I did that," he says. "And I've never admitted that, and I'm saying it to a journalist. God forbid."
Echoing the primary sentiment of the world at this moment, Bateman said, "Holy shit."
But Neeson wasn't done yet, "It's awful. But I did learn a lesson from it, when I eventually thought, 'What the fuck are you doing,' you know?"
"I come from a society – I grew up in Northern Ireland in the Troubles – and, you know, I knew a couple of guys that died on hunger strike, and I had acquaintances who were very caught up in the Troubles, and I understand that need for revenge, but it just leads to more revenge, to more killing and more killing, and Northern Ireland's proof of that. All this stuff that's happening in the world, the violence, is proof of that, you know. But that primal need, I understand."
What was said in the remainder of the interview feels pretty irrelevant, given that Neeson had just admitted to once wanting to kill a "black blast are." While it's undoubtedly productive for white people to engage with and acknowledge their own implicit biases and past racist behavior in an effort to change for the better, this was not a harmless admission of past non-PC statements. This was an admission of plans to commit a hate crime, treated as though it was a harmless anecdote.
Yes, Neeson's intention in telling the story was clearly to acknowledge the poisonous nature of revenge, but the ease with which he shared it suggests a man who considered himself already forgiven by the public for his appalling confession. He told it as though it were relatable and understandable, using racially-charged language ("what color were they") but not necessarily acknowledging the obvious racist implications of the story. Even when he expressed regret for his intentions, he didn't specifically recognize the racism in his anger being aimed at any and all black men because they happened to share a skin tone with the man who assaulted his loved one. Instead, he ultimately related the story to the troubles of Ireland, a seemingly unrelated comparison. If Neeson's problematic interview shows us anything, it's that there is still a long way to go in terms of finding ways to have productive racial discourse. Acknowledged racism is not excused racism.
Brooke Ivey Johnson is a Brooklyn based writer, playwright, and human woman. To read more of her work visit her blog or follow her twitter @BrookeIJohnson.
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