ME: I’m burnt out. There are simply not enough hours in the day.
ALSO ME: I watched two documentaries about the exact same thing to see if they were a little different about each other.
In case you’re totally out of the loop on the world of pop culture, I’m referring to the recent Fyre Fest documentaries that were released by Hulu and Netflix. I could say that I’m not the type of person who will watch two nearly identical films on the same topic, but then I’d be a liar. Truth be told, I’d watch 50 more documentaries on the Fyre Fest because it’s one of the most insane, bizarre, and wildly interesting situations I’ve come across. If you use social media (and let’s be real, even my Grandma has a Twitter and a Facebook because so I know you do), then you probably remember the catastrophic music festival where “luxury” cheese sandwiches and FEMA tents were documented via Tweets and Instagram posts by the poor unfortunate souls in attendance.
Believe it or not, both the Hulu and Netflix versions are worth a watch. Both films dive into the making of the 21st century’s biggest music festival flop at the hands of Billy McFarland and Ja Rule, and they’re equally fascinating. How exactly did these bozos (for a lack of a better word) con hundreds and hundreds of people into spending thousands of dollars to attend a music festival that they had no chance of actually creating? The key to their con was capitalizing on the power of influencers, and the fact that they were so successful at tricking people using nothing more than a single promotional video speaks volumes to how much influence these influencers have over our lives. If you’re not alarmed by that, you should be. As People notes, the crux of Fyre’s marketing campaign centered around having models and social media influencers create buzz about the festival, beginning with all of the celebrities and influencers posting a plain orange tile at the same time. Then the models and influencers shared the promotional video they made in the Bahamas on their feeds, along with behind-the-scenes shots and clips.
Much has been written about the impact of social media on our happiness, and what has left so many people transfixed by this topic and these films is that they both are pointedly aimed at making us understand: Something like this could have happened to any of us. As this Vox article points out, that point ultimately helps sort out why McFarland and the whole Fyre debacle is a subject of such unending fascination, enough to light the internet on fire for a while and to sustain two documentaries about what happened coming out the same week.
