Pants on Fyre: parasitic masculinity and the Fyre festival documentaries

ABSTRACT

The documentaries Fyre Fraud and FYRE: The Greatest Party that Never Happened recount the fraudulent and imprudent decision-making process that led up to the ill-fated Fyre Fest. These documentaries represent the music festival’s failure through depictions of white masculinity that seek parasitic attachment and proximity to the hegemonic ideal of masculine authority in the neoliberal marketplace. We argue that these movies map the operations of an imitative form of white masculine subjectivity that thrives in precarity, even as they recuperate the status of late-stage neoliberalism by symbolically removing parasitic masculinity from the neoliberal social order that it feeds on.

KEYWORDS:

• Abjection
• neoliberalism
• masculinity
• entrepreneurialism
• Fyre festival

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Editor Robin Boylorn and the anonymous reviewers for comments and suggestions for improving the initial submission of this manuscript. They also extend thanks to Editorial Assistant LaTonya Taylor for her detailed copyedits to the final draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Emma Nolan, “Billy McFarland, Fyre Festival Organizer, Reveals Biggest Lie He Told,” Newsweek, March 4, 2021, https://www.newsweek.com/billy-mcfarland-fyre-festival-biggest-lie-prison-interview-1573821.

2 FYRE: The Greatest Party that Never Happened. Directed by Chris Smith. New York: Vice Studios, 2019; and Fyre Fraud, Directed by Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason. Cinemart: New York, 2019.

3 Adam Davidson, “Is Fraud Part of the Trump Organization’s Business Model?,” The New Yorker, October 17, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/news/swamp-chronicles/is-fraud-part-of-the-trump-organizations-business-model.

4 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015); and Henry A. Giroux, “Beyond the Biopolitics of Disposability: Rethinking Neoliberalism in the New Gilded Age,” Social Identities 14, no. 5 (September 1, 2008): 587–620.

5 Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 13.

6 Robert Asen, “Neoliberalism, the Public Sphere, and a Public Good,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 103, no. 4 (2017): 329–49, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2017.1360507; Bradley Jones and Roopali Mukherjee, “From California to Michigan: Race, Rationality, and Neoliberal Governmentality,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7, no. 4 (2010): 401–22, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2010.523431; and Adam Kotsko, “Neoliberalism’s Demons,” Theory & Event 20, no. 2 (2017): 493–509.

7 See Casey R. Kelly, Apocalypse Man: The Death Drive and the Rhetoric of White Masculine Victimhood (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020).

8 Henry A. Giroux, “Beyond the Biopolitics of Disposability: Rethinking Neoliberalism in the New Gilded Age.” Social Identities 14, no. 5 (2008): 587–620.

9 R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity, 2005).

10 Claire Sisco King, Washed in Blood: Male Sacrifice, Trauma, and the Cinema (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2011); and Casey Ryan Kelly, “The Wounded Man: Foxcatcher and the Incoherence of White Masculine Victimhood,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 2 (2018): 161–78.

11 Hamilton Carroll, Affirmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

12 Paul Elliott Johnson, “Walter White(Ness) Lashes out: Breaking Bad and Male Victimage,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 34, no. 1 (2017): 14–28, https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2016.1238101.

13 Kelly, “Wounded Man.”

14 Paul Elliott Johnson, “Fear of a Black City: Gender and Postracial Sovereignty in Death Wish (2018),” Women’s Studies in Communication 45, no. 2 (2021): 1–22, https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2021.1941465.

15 Luana Jéssica Oliveira Carmo et al., “Entrepreneurship as a Neoliberal Ideology,” Cadernos EBAPE.BR 19 (2021): 18–31, https://doi.org/10.1590/1679-395120200043; see also William Davies, “The Chronic Social: Relations of Control Within and Without Neoliberalism,” New Formations 84, no. 84 (2015): 40–57.

16 Helene Ahl and Susan Marlow, “Exploring the Dynamics of Gender, Feminism and Entrepreneurship: Advancing Debate to Escape a Dead End?” Organization 19, no. 5 (2012): 543–62, https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508412448695.

17 Carmo et al., “Entrepreneurship,” 25.

18 Connell, Masculinities.

19 Tasha R. Rennels, “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo: A Cautionary Tale Starring White Working-Class People,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12, no. 3 (2015): 274, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2015.1053957.

20 Wendy Brown, “Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” Theory & Event 7, no. 1 (2003), https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2003.0020; and David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

21 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957).

22 Kotsko, “Neoliberalism’s Demons.”

23 Henry A. Giroux, “Trump and the Legacy of a Menacing Past,” Cultural Studies 33, no. 4 (2019): 711–39, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2018.1557725.

24 Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: Harper Perennial, 2000).

25 Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (London: Oxford University Press, 2012).

26 Paul du Gay, “Organizing Identity: Entrepreneurial Governance and Public Management,” in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1996), 151–69.

27 Brown, Ruins.

28 Douglas Kellner, Guys and Guns Amok (New York: Routledge, 2008).

29 William Davies, The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition (Thousand Oakes: Sage, 2016).

30 Jack Bratich and Sarah Banet-Weiser, “From Pick-Up Artists to Incels: Con(Fidence) Games, Networked Misogyny, and the Failure of Neoliberalism,” International Journal of Communication 13 (2019): 5003–27.

31 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, Reprint edition (New York: Picador, 2010), 223.

32 Brian Dolber et al., The Gig Economy: Workers and Media in the Age of Convergence (New York: Routledge, 2021).

33 Andrea Cornwall, “Introduction: Masculinities Under Neoliberalism,” in Masculinities under Neoliberalism, ed. Andrea Cornwall (New York: Zed Books, 2016), 1–28.

34 Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

35 Kristeva, The Powers of Horror, 1.

36 Leslie A. Hahner, Scott J. Varda, and Nathan A. Wilson, “Paranormal Activity and the Horror of Abject Consumption,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 30, no. 5 (2013): 362–76.

37 David Hancock, The Countercultural Logic of Neoliberalism (New York: Routledge, 2019).

38 Cornwall, “Introduction,” 1.

39 Claire Sisco King, “It Cuts Both Ways: Fight Club, Masculinity, and Abject Hegemony,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 4 (2009): 367, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420903335135.

40 Ijeoma Oluo, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America (New York: Basic Books, 2020).

41 Barry Brummett, “Burke’s Representative Anecdote as a Method in Media Criticism,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 1, no. 2 (1984): 164, https://doi.org/10.1080/15295038409360027.

42 Brummett, “Burke’s Representative Anecdote,” 163.

43 Ibid., 164.

44 Ibid., 164.

45 Jen Chaney, “Which Fyre Festival Documentary Is Right for You?” Vulture, January 16, 2019, https://www.vulture.com/2019/01/fyre-festival-documentary-netflix-hulu-review.html; Keith Uhlich, “‘Fyre’ and ‘Fyre Fraud’ Review,” Hollywood Reporter, January 15, 2019, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-reviews/fyre-fyre-fraud-review-1175860/.

46 Angela J. Aguayo, Documentary Resistance: Social Change and Participatory Media, Illustrated edition (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019), 62.

47 Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 115.

48 Nichols, Representing Reality, 116.

49 Ibid., 34.

50 Ibid., 34.

51 Brown, Ruins, 35.

52 Asen, “Neoliberalism.”

53 Joshua Gunn and Dana L. Cloud, “Agentic Orientation as Magical Voluntarism,” Communication Theory 20, no. 1 (2010): 51, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2009.01349.x.

54 Gunn and Cloud, “Magic,” 51.

55 Creed, Barbara, Phallic Panic: Film, Horror and the Primal Uncanny (Melborne, AU: Melbourne University Publishing, 2005).

56 Kelly, “The Wounded Man.”

57 Paul Elliott Johnson, “The Art of Masculine Victimhood: Donald Trump’s Demagoguery,” Women’s Studies in Communication 40, no. 3 (2017): 229–50, https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2017.1346533.

58 James Cairns, The Myth of the Age of Entitlement: Millennials, Austerity, and Hope (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017).