Fyre

One of the embarrassing truths our time is that wealthy and predominantly white people pay good money in order to experience conditions that poorer and predominately brown people have no choice but to undergo. When a college-educated millennial buys an overpriced ticket to a music festival, it’s a rite of passage. When a Bangladeshi village is washed into a tent encampment without running water, it’s a humanitarian catastrophe. Of course, choice is a factor. But once you’re hovering over a brimming chemical toilet and it hasn’t stopped raining for two days, the conditions are the same — a temporary reversion to Neolithic conditions, but with the population density of a modern city.

Any attempt to satirize millennial culture is doomed to fail. It’s already too absurd and too self-aware. A caricature would verge on the surreal. The best (perhaps only) way to squeeze some fun out of it is through deadpan objectivity, which is the secret to the success of FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened. The sad and hilarious new Netflix documentary tells the story of an ill-fated music festival that was supposed to take place in the Bahamas. Its organizer, Billy McFarland – imagine Walter Mitty meets Bernie Madoff – used the influencer economy to bootstrap into existence the kind of party billionaire rappers fantasize about, with supermodels in barely there bikinis lounging on yachts levitating over a crystalline sea.