From Beach Bonfire to Desert Metropolis
In 1986, a group of starving artists built an oversized wooden stick figure, hauled it onto a San Francisco beach, and set it ablaze as police and onlookers watched in disbelief. Forty years later, Burning Man has become the festival to end all festivals—a sprawling spectacle of music, art, and self-expression that draws tens of thousands to the Nevada desert every summer. It is a pilgrimage for Bohemians and billionaires, a byword for woo-woo hipsterism, and a countercultural institution wrestling with contradictions between its libertine ideals, corporate reality, and the presence of figures like Grover Norquist and Elon Musk’s brother.
Capturing the Uncapturable
“It’s such an immersive experience that it seems impossible to capture on film,” says Jehane Noujaim, co-director of The Man Will Burn, a new docuseries that premiered on HBO this month. Noujaim, known for her documentaries on Al Jazeera’s coverage of the 2003 Iraq invasion and the NXIVM sex cult, did not set out to chronicle Burning Man. Her curiosity was piqued while trying to clear footage she shot at the festival for The Great Hack, her documentary on the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. “I spent about eight months trying to get permission to use that shot—the longest time ever for a shot,” she says. “I didn’t know Burning Man had a CEO or a board.”
Once introduced and trusted, Noujaim learned of a vast film archive the festival had been privately compiling since its earliest days, hoping an independent filmmaker might turn it into something. That hooked her and brought Vikram Gandhi, director of Barry and Kumaré, aboard as co-director. Their collaboration resulted in a four-part deep dive tracing the full arc of Burning Man’s social experiment as the festival confronts Covid, a board revolt, and global warming.
A Love Story and a Power Struggle
Noujaim and Gandhi frame Burning Man as a love story between Larry Harvey, a protest artist who saw the festival’s future when it was still a modest gathering for Bay Area eccentrics, and Marian Goodell, his longtime partner and right hand who has carried that vision forward as festival CEO since Harvey died at age 70 from complications of a stroke in 2018. Viewers meet Goodell as she grapples with canceling the festival for the second straight year because of the pandemic. Kimbal Musk, an outsized presence on the Burning Man board, sees her caution not as prudence but as an opening for a leadership change, rallying a faction of disgruntled board members to his cause. Individual festivalgoers weigh the risks of joining a renegade gathering determined to return to the desert regardless of the consequences.
To Burning Man organizers, it seemed like the worst possible time to have cameras around. But Noujaim and Gandhi pushed for access anyway. “It was a really important time to go deep and understand why so many people around the world care about it so much that they would push through a pandemic and still go even when it was canceled,” Gandhi says. “When we were starting our shoot at the renegade burn, we didn’t know if it was going to be a triumph or another Fyre Festival.”
Principles and Paradoxes
Decommodification, radical inclusion, and civic responsibility are among Burning Man’s guiding principles. Since the turn of the century, the festival has been held at Black Rock City, a semicircular community 100 miles from Reno that is built up and torn down without a trace each year. But it’s the spiritual hold on longtime pilgrims that can make devotion look like delusion to outsiders, to the point where a Burning Man reference on a dating profile is taken as a red flag.
“My first film was about me impersonating a religious leader and starting a fictional religion,” Gandhi says, referring to Kumaré. “All the thought process I had when making the film was about creating a story, a creation myth, some kind of sacred space—it’s all very similar to what Harvey designed for Burning Man. But the main difference is people come up with their own faith system. It has all the things in our religions—place, self-references, rituals—but really no dogma.”
Inclusion and Inequality
There’s much to admire about Burning Man’s big tent: peaceniks in communion with gun nuts, Google co-founder Sergey Brin grabbing a chow hall shift, Norquist extolling the virtues of the cashless barter system. Yet a community built around letting everyone find their own truth inevitably leaves room for blind spots. For all its humanistic virtues, Burning Man has long struggled with the perception—and reality—that it caters primarily to white people with the time and means to take a week off around Labor Day. The film pushes against that perception, following a Black ex-paratrooper on a pilgrimage to address his battlefield PTSD. Still, the experience on the playa has become more stratified—backpackers in pole tents while A-listers drop tens of thousands on air-conditioned RVs.
Even the non-profit behind Burning Man has begun to look like a cash grab to festivalgoers who see its $60m operating budget and sprawling real estate portfolio and wonder how much higher ticket prices can climb. “It’s almost like Burning Man has become expensive because the world is expensive,” Gandhi says. “But actually the ticket is probably cheaper than Coachella—which is, what, like $600 now? But I agree that it’s changed and money has become a much bigger part of it.”
A Balanced View
The Man Will Burn could have played up scandalous aspects: power struggles, nudity, psychedelic use, deaths in the desert, or the torrential rains that turned the playa into a muddy quagmire. Instead, Noujaim and Gandhi deliver a thorough and balanced view—one that will inspire FOMO in some and leave others feeling they’ve experienced enough without ever going. “One of the things that’s so awe-inspiring is that you’ve never actually seen so many resources going into something that only exists for a week and is burnt later,” Gandhi says. “It’s a spiritual experience you could look at two ways: you could see it as rich people burning money. Or you could see it as a rare ritual that exists in the world that maybe you’re not part of. But we don’t really have things like that.”
