It is no doubt intended as visual testament to their magnificence. Instead,it is like watching a 12-car pile-up in very slow motion. You know how it's going to end,of course. The festival was consumed,very publicly,in an inferno of bad planning,financial mismanagement and staggeringly bad preparation.
But watching it unfold over 100-odd minutes is like an excruciating,unstoppable ballet in which you know most of the ballerinas will have broken their legs before the curtain comes down. That it comes via Netflix,which is to television what Fyre intended to be for music festivals,is an unexpected icing of irony.
From the opening frame of the story,everything about Fyre is a too-good-to-be-true metaphor for social media itself. The first video shoot,starring models Bella Hadid and Emily Ratajkowski,was"influencer"-fuelled nonsense intended to craft a fiction off which ticket packages could be sold.
As the key player in the piece,McFarland was writ large from the directory of self-styled tech boy wunderkinds. He rose to prominence flogging a VIP credit card brand named Magnises and had planned,in Fyre,an app which would offer Uber-style one-stop-shopping for people looking to book musical talent for corporate gigs.
From that a music festival was born,initially as a platform for the promotion of the app,but later transforming dramatically into an entity itself,promising ticket holders a slice of the VIP life – at least as the Instagram"influencers"had framed it – partying in the Bahamas with pop icons,models and superstars.
At one point in the documentary it is inelegantly but honestly explained thus:"Living like movie stars,partying like rock stars and f---ing like porn stars. We're selling a pipe dream to your average loser."