Summary
Netflix documentary Fyre presents accounts and versions of events from the absolute horror show that was the Fyre festival planned by Billy McFarland.
What was strange about the Fyre Festival back in 2017 is that no normal living person knew what it was until it became a social media trend showcasing a burning fiasco which generated plentiful memes. I remember having my feet up in my lower-class life, sipping my sweet brew thinking this is the kind of shit these people deserve. Twitter was full of meltdowns from rich teenagers and social media “influencers” moaning that their tent was absolute horseshit and the key menu item was bread and cheese. The festival represented the peak of rich people problems, and Netflix documentary Fyre allows us to relive it again.
In case you have no idea what happened at the Fyre Festival, Ja Rule, along with entrepreneur Billy McFarland, created an app where you can book A-list talent to gigs; to promote the business they decided to sell an island party/music festival in the Bahamas, with no thought to infrastructure and location, and seemingly embraced zero project management skills and no implementation plan.
The island party was purely for ultra-rich young adults to live an island party, listen to music and chill with highly attractive social media influencers. The whole festival was canceled when everyone arrived, leaving them stranded with limited food and water with no way of getting home. It was an absolute shit show.
Funnily enough, as part of their tickets, they sold luxury tents, beds, chefs and other utter nonsense with no idea of how to even deliver it. The documentary shows how the Fyre festival crumbled with each day leading up to launch, how the project team reacted to the demands with direct interviews, and how it slowly became clear how corrupt Billy McFarland is.
Netflix’s Fyre also shows the viewer just had absurd people can get when they have more cash than legitimate ideas and rational thoughts. Billy was so far removed from reality that money almost became secondary – his eagerness to be that entrepreneur that pulls off the best party the world has ever seen became tent city, with hundreds of rich folk eating standard cheese on bread on their soaked mattresses.
Fyre tries to go down the route of this is what happens if you do not plan events properly. Yet the message is abundantly clear; these people are fucking clowns, and I am surprised how many agreed to be interviewed; they all passed the blame and laid it solely on Billy, but the documentary makes it flagrantly clear they were all brainwashed way too quickly.
If you learn one lesson from Fyre it’s that money cannot buy you brains – remove the currency, and the food chain still exists, folks.
