DANCE INTO THE FYRE

Jaw- dropping moments come thick and fast in Netf lix’s documentary

IF F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby perfectly captured the hedonistic lifestyle of the monied classes in the Roaring Twenties, then Netflix’s Fyre documentary might just be its modern descendant, peeling back the narcissism and vapidity of that subsection of millennials who have more money than sense.

The Netflix documentary, subtitled The Greatest Party That Never

Happened, dropped this week and promptly had the same effect on the jaws of millions who watched it in horrified fascination. In 2017, a New York-based twentysomething huckster called Billy McFarland (weirdly, a doppelganger in looks and almost in name to South park creator Seth MacFarlane) decided to stage a music and lifestyle festival on a remote island in the Bahamas that once belonged to drug baron Pablo Escobar.

To sell tickets and ‘experiences’ that in some cases cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, he enlisted an ad agency to film a promotional video with supermodels (I believe a ‘bevy’ is the collective noun), which featured a lot of yachts, a lot of alcohol, a lot of swimming pigs, and very little bikini. It was Instagram come to life, a vision of a fantasy world in which anyone with the cash could, for a weekend, live the lifestyle they see every day on the social media site, chugging tequila straight from the bottle, showing off perfect teeth and abs and, very likely, getting up to mischief under moonlight on a beachfront day-bed in front of a dreamy cabana.

Billy’s plan soon unravelled. The owner of the island withdrew permission after the explicit instruction to play down the Escobar connection was ignored, so eventually he settled on a site on Great Exuma island, which is 60km long, already touristy, and not exactly the remote paradise depicted in the video.

From that point, everything descended into farce. Instead of the luxury accommodation promised, former hurricane-shelter tents were erected, and then soaked and almost destroyed by a storm the night before Fyre was due to begin. The promised catering – the usual mix of vegan, sushi and kale smoothies – never materialised, and instead, Styrofoam boxes with bread and cheese, little more than survival rations, were offered.

Customs officials refused to release four tanker loads of Evian water until import duties of $170,000 were paid and, in a scene burned into the memories of all who watched – spoiler alert – Billy’s sometime collaborator, an older gay man called Andy King was asked ‘to take one for the team’ and perform a sexual act on the chief of customs to smooth things over. Astonishingly, King agreed, went to his hotel, gargled with mouthwash and prepared for the task at hand, as it were, only to find the customs officer expected no such favour. I can’t really recall an anecdote that left me so paralysed with disbelief.

Within hours of arrival, the sophisticated millennials had gone feral, stabbing holes in tents and urinating on mattresses just to keep others away, and the whole chaotic fiasco was cancelled, leaving dozens of local workers unpaid. McFarland was charged with fraud, but while on bail started a new scam selling unavailable tickets to major events. Eventually convicted, he’s now serving six years in prison and Fyre has gone out for good.

The documentary is pure gold, a savage indictment of a society built on impossible expectations. Almost everyone in it, with a few honourable exceptions, is irredeemably ghastly. Maybe The Fall Of The

Roman Empire is a more appropriate comparison than Gatsby.

Gender identity is another very modern issue, and one the older among us tiptoe around for fear of using the wrong pronoun. RTÉ addressed calls for the age at which people can self-identify as male, female or non-binary (yes, the terminology alone is a minefield) to be reduced, in a Prime Time special that tried so hard to be balanced it ended up skewed. Graham Linehan, who co-wrote Father Ted, is well known for his trenchant opposition to transgender rights, though since he is not a medical doctor, a psychiatrist or a psychologist, it is hard to know why he was part of the filmed report at all. In a much trailed clip, he said: ‘You don’t tell a child he or she is born in the wrong body any more than you tell an anorexic they’re fat.’

The problem is that he has it backwards. No one is telling these children they were born in the wrong body – they’re the one desperately trying to tell others, be that parents, other adults or friends, and that’s why the most powerful contributions came from the only people who really matter in the debate, transgender people themselves.

I still haven’t quite made up my mind if the BBC’s decision to enlist Danny Dyer to tell the story of his royal antecedents is another sign of dumbing down or a stroke of genius. Right Royal Family proved a lot of fun nonetheless, as he looked back on the life of his Viking forebear Rollo, who became the first Duke of Normandy.

In a scene already legendary, Dyer on horseback, bearing a lance, skewered a watermelon standing in for the enemy. ‘I, Danny Dyer, 30 times great-grandson of William the Conqueror has got the ’ump with an Anglo-Saxon watermelon and it’s going to get it,’ he announced, before cleaving it in pieces.

And that, I imagine, is how the Fyre festival might have finished up had it not been cancelled.