The Man Will Burn is a four-part docuseries, directed by Jehane Noujaim and Vikram Gandhi, that explores the history of the Burning Man festival, which has taken place in Nevada’s Black Rock desert almost every year since 1986. The filmmakers got five years’ worth of access to the offices of the Burning Man Project (BMP), the organization that organizes the week-long event that brings together tens of thousands of people in a community called Black Rock City, where creativity reigns, and no money is exchanged.
Opening Shot: Old footage of a dry, sandy landscape, and a large wooden statue of a man. “Every religion began with somebody in a desert,” a voice says.
The Gist: The first episode explores the history of Burning Man, where founder Larry Harvey (who died in 2018) first gathered a small group of like-minded people on a California beach in the ’80s and burned a wooden figure of a man. The communal spirit of the bonfire brought strangers together, and he and the other founders kept constructing more elaborate figures. The crowds got so big by the early ’90s that the founders moved things to the Black Rock desert, onto what “Burners” call “La Playa,” the beach.
The footage of BMP shows CEO Marian Goodell and the organization’s board—which includes Kimbal Musk, representing his brother Elon’s financial interest in the festival—wrestling with whether to hold the festival in 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic, which caused the cancellation of the festival in 2020, is still raging, and Goodell and others don’t think gathering 80,000 people in one place is a good idea from a public health standpoint. Also, the festival’s international fans won’t be able to travel to it, making the crowd less diverse than usual.
Musk, however, insists the same thing that other old-timers do: That the festival is supposed to be dangerous. “The man must burn,” he tells the gathered board members. It’s tech money and other 21st century interests that the founders and Goodell need to fight against. But the festival is still an outlet for individuals to come together in a creative, peaceful community. We see profiles and interviews with people looking to attend the festival for the first time, as well as artists and attendees who have been coming for years—including, of all people, Grover Norquist.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Man Will Burn has a bit of the same feel as Lolla: The Story of Lollapalooza.
Our Take: Burning Man is often the butt of jokes in sitcoms and late-night monologues, where it seems that it’s basically a place where middle-aged men go to take some hallucinogens and get back in touch with their manhood. But The Man Will Burn shows that the festival is definitely more than that; it’s a community that comes together to be free and creative, and it seems that the community it’s built is more varied in gender, age and race than people realize.
While the filmmakers’ method of sprinkling the history of the festival into the goings on in 2021 and after is clever, we almost would have appreciated the more straightforward storytelling method here. One that would have explored the beginnings of the festival and its particularly wild early years, before getting into its modern era, where social media influencers and tech money are fighting against the spirit of the festival that the founders intended.
Still, the scenes from 2021 are fascinating to watch, because the decision to cancel that year wasn’t universal or particularly popular, even within the organization or its board. And the presence of conservative fans like Norquist, and more libertarian participants like Musk, point to a side of the festival that not everyone realizes is there and has influence.
The subsequent episodes will examine the renegades that came to Black Rock in 2021, and will be put in the context of the festival’s early days, where things where more anarchic and included groups that would shoot off guns for fun. But as we see the festival get back in gear post-COVID, it’ll be interesting to watch how much Musk and others influence the direction of the festival.
Performance Worth Watching: Marian Goodell, who took over running the festival after Harvey’s death, is certainly under a lot of pressure in 2021, but also knows that she can’t start a super-spreader event just to keep Burning Man in the forefront of its participants’ minds.
Sex And Skin: There is some nudity in the archival and current footage, which is just part of the freedoms the participants in the festival want to experience.
Parting Shot: Scenes of the festival’s anarchic early days, and a mention of some bad things that happened in 1996. Over that footage, someone says if people try to do a burn on their own, “someone could die in the desert.”
Sleeper Star: We liked seeing Ray Christian, a former Army paratrooper, planning to go to 2021’s Burning Man. It would be his first time there, and he’s looking forward to going despite being in his fifties.
Most Pilot-y Line: There is something about the Musk family that’s completely off-putting, and Kimbal Musk is off-putting in a completely different way than his brother Elon is.
Our Call: STREAM IT. The Man Will Burn gives an effective overview of Burning Man, a festival that’s misunderstood by many, while examining how its spirit of creativity and community struggles against the reality of the 2020s.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
