I came to the Netflix Fyre Festival documentary – like most people, let’s be honest – ready to laugh at a bunch of over-privileged hipsters ‘roughing it’ in the Bahamas surrounded by stroppy supermodels. There is admittedly an element of that to what makes it so gripping but there’s more to the story than the schadenfreude.
It’s set up as a series of talking head interviews with festival-goers and the poor b******s who were employed to work on the project – some wry and resigned, others still shell-shocked. These calm testimonies, interspersed with footage from inside the Fyre camp in the lead-up to the event, plot the narrative arc of Billy McFarland, the CEO, as the perception of him moves from wunderkind entrepreneur to delusional sociopath.
At the beginning it’s all beach parties, beers and Bella Hadid. McFarland is in the flush of a bromance with business partner on the project, Ja Rule. Once the beer runs out Ja Rule seems to disappear completely and is nowhere to be seen when the festival gets underway. He only resurfaces to assess the damage after the event on what looks like the worst conference call in history and which would have been ripe for a good old-fashioned Downfall parody if half the world’s social media movers and shakers hadn’t still been stranded in the Caribbean.
But to go back a few months, to before the catastrophe had unfurled, it was 250 of these social media influencers and 10 of the world’s most famous supermodels who were employed so effectively to promote the event. It was they who were responsible for it selling out in 48 hours – rare for a first-time festival – and generating the sort of clamour for a ticket not seen since Willy Wonka hung up his apron.
By the time the festival date rolled around the whole set-up was so dangerously shambolic that there was serious doubt whether it could even go ahead but by then the private planes had left Miami and the cool kids were on the way. As the inevitable bedlam ensued, it was a distant cry from the Instagram-idyllic promotional shots that were clogging timelines only weeks earlier. From the crucible of this chaos – by then a hideous hybrid of Hi-De-Hi and Lord of The Flies – came a tweet.
Despite the meticulously-planned, eye-wateringly expensive and achingly-hip promotional campaign it was this picture that tipped the festival into the public consciousness, making it news around the world. To paraphrase one of the marketing gurus – powerful supermodels built the festival and it was taken down by a picture of some cheese on toast. It captured the shambolic dark comedy of the whole escapade as it was unraveling and contributed to an ultimate reckoning-up which ended with McFarland facing a six-year jail sentence for fraud.
Another of the contributors quips that there were two festivals; one on Instagram and one on the island. I think most of the festival-goers would argue that there was only actually one, but it wasn’t the one they paid for. The Fyre Festival was born, played out and killed on social media – without ever delivering in real life.
We often talk about the power of social media but there’s no better example than this for showing that it’s a power that’s available to us all, not just the big cheeses.
Richard Ellis Communications 