Netflix Fyre Festival film reminds us: Optimism is killing America
I recently tried to watch Netflix’s documentary about the infamously-aborted Fyre Festival, but couldn’t get to the end of it because I feared that the cringing might do permanent damage to my internal organs. My takeaway: America really needs to rethink the way we’re practicing optimism.
In “Fyre: The Greatest Party that Never Happened,” filmmaker Chris Smith gives viewers a backstage view of the spectacularly unsuccessful effort to mount a game-changing ultra-luxe music festival in the Bahamas.
Festival creator Billy McFarland was a would-be tech mogul who made considerable loot as a kind of pied piper for millennials with too much money on their hands. McFarland brilliantly tapped into millennials’ obsessive need to be seen in cool spaces with beautiful people and constructed a promotional campaign for the event that was like chum for the Kardashian generation. Launching with a video featuring scantily-clad supermodels lounging seductively on perfect beaches, the promotional campaign promised festival-goers proximity to prosperity, in-demand entertainment and beautiful people.
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McFarland was a master pitchman, convincing investors to dump millions into an event that was a guaranteed game changer and selling the dream to festivalgoers at up to $20,000 a pop.
There was only one problem: McFarland didn’t have a clue how to deliver what he promised. Instead of luxury accommodations, festivalgoers who landed in the Bahamas discovered rain-drenched FEMA hurricane tents. Instead of hand-crafted sushi from gourmet chefs, they got cheese sandwiches. Instead of chartered planes, they were left stranded on the island with no transportation home at all.
And instead of securing his place in the pantheon of American entertainment visionaries, McFarland was sentenced to six years in federal prison for fraud convictions.
How did it all go so wrong?
There were early signs that the vision McFarland sold was completely unrealistic. But in a telling scene in Smith's documentary, a festival consultant describes how his urgent warnings to McFarland about the looming disaster were flatly dismissed.
“We’re not a problems-focused group, we’re a solutions-oriented group," the consultant recalls McFarland responding. "We’d like to have a constructive angle about this.”
In an essay for the current issue of Rolling Stone, writer Nicole James posits that the Fyre Festival disaster is a perfect example of how overweening optimism is sinking the tech industry. She argues that tech moguls’ thirst for innovation is so overwhelming that the industry has devolved into a place where there is no room for healthy skepticism.
But I think there's a bigger problem afoot: Somewhere along the line, American optimism has morphed into something obscene, spawning a dangerous epidemic of chutzpah and outrageous risk-tasking.
From self-help bookshelves to televangelist broadcast and new age lectures, we are bombarded with the message that good health, prosperity and success are within one’s reach if only one believes enough in one’s self. This uncritical optimism-at-all-costs view of the world discounts real external obstacles such as structural barriers to class mobility, unequal education options and generational poverty.
It used to be that when critical thinkers suggested that responsible public policy choices and collective resources are also necessary to solve many of our nation’s problems, they were dismissed as Marxists. Now we call them something more insulting: pessimists.
We used to be a country that understood both the importance of bold visions and the hard work andcollective sacrifice necessary to make them real.
In the 1960s, President Kennedy famously promoted the race to the moon as a project America took on not because it was easy, but because it was hard. And it was hard: It required tremendous investments of time and money, our best brains and hard work. When was the last time the American public really got on board with making long-term investments to solve a national problem? No, we’d rather put the focus on individuals, encourage them to think positive thoughts, and hope for the best.
No wonder few policy makers are interested in solving seemingly intractable challenges such as generational poverty and educational inequity. To paraphrase McFarland, ours is no longer a problem-focused country.
Reliving the collapse of McFarland’s fantasy made me feel prouder than ever to be a “glass half-empty” kind of person. It’s getting harder and harder to be a realist in a world full of happy-talking faux optimists. The truth is that people who are satisfied with half a glass are probably not motivated to ask for more. As for me, I’m on team “Assess the Situation Then Figure out How to Fill the Glass to the Rim.”
KIM TRENT was elected to an eight-year term on the Wayne State University Board of Governors in 2012. She previously served as the director of Governor Jennifer M. Granholm's southeast Michigan office.