Fyre: Dive Into the Schadenfreude

The Netflix documentary, Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, is the most delicious piece of schadenfreude you could hope to experience this year. Curl up on the couch and spend an hour and a half watching a documentary about how a rich, entitled, white dude defrauded thousands of gullible people and exposed how there will always be suckers with more money than sense.

The movie is about the ill-fated music festival that became a social media bonanza after its rich attendees and social media "influencers" were stranded in the Bahamas with none of the fancy food, flights, or accommodations they were promised. Even though you know this festival turned into a raging dumpster fire, there is still such novelty in watching how exactly it happened, with each day leading up to the event bringing fresh horrors and increasingly terrible decision-making. Fyre Festival was the brainchild of Billy McFarland, a random guy from New Jersey whose previous claim to fame was a bogus credit card company, Magnises, that catered to elite millennials who wanted a fancy-looking card with exclusive perks and a clubhouse in Manhattan. The man was all about the image, taking private jets and limos everywhere he went and because of this, he ginned up confidence in rich investors who had no trouble dumping millions into his fraudulent schemes.

The documentary consists of interviews with the people involved in the planning, coordination, and marketing of Fyre Festival. All of these people have the same dazed look on their face as they recount their tale, a look of “how on earth did I not realize what was going on?” People were asked to do insane things in service of McFarland’s stupid ambitions, and they all somehow went along with it, convinced that he was a visionary instead of a lunatic. Each interview is a bit like watching a brainwashed cult member finally see the light.

This is also a very millennial documentary - this entire enterprise was based on social media “influencers” doing what they were told and promoting an event that was not planned or ready in any shape or form. Apart from a snazzy video and a crisp website describing luxury packages with drawings of what the tents and villas would look like, there was no actual substance to this enterprise, and yet people bought into it hook, line, and sinker. In our Instagram-worshipping age, looks matter more than content, and the documentary is an eerie insight into how easy it is to be swayed by a charismatic dumb-dumb who looks like he lives the life you’re aspiring to, but secretly is just an extraordinarily good scam artist.

Unless you’re one of the people who paid to go to Fyre Festival, you will derive so much joy from watching Fyre. It is hilarious and insane, and there’s only one person you feel sorry for in the entire thing: the Bahamian woman who was hired to do the catering for the festival and ended up losing $50,000 of her savings to pay her local workers without ever getting repaid by the Fyre team. Thankfully, she has been amply rewarded via a GoFundMe page. So sit back and enjoy the misery of some rich "entrepreneurs." Watching people squirm has never been so fun.