Blessed with impressive multi-year access to the Burning Man Festival, its participants and bureaucracy, but undone by indecisiveness in its structure, themes and purpose, Jehane Noujaim and Vikram Gandhi’s The Man Will Burn is an engaging puzzlement.
Over its rushed and disjointed four-hour running time, the HBO docuseries offers some sense of the community that Burning Man offers and cultivates, as well as its evolving infrastructure and internal political conflicts; some awareness of the inherent and overwhelming whiteness and privilege underlying the event; some insight into several tumultuous years in Burning Man’s history; and some interest in the challenges facing Burning Man as it looks to the future. But at nearly every turn, the series is overwhelmed by an excess of material and an insufficiency of clarity and rigor.
The Man Will Burn
The Bottom Line
Engaging, but rarely digs deep.
Airdate: 9 p.m. Thursday, July 9
Directors: Jehane Noujaim and Vikram Gandhi
Ultimately, The Man Will Burn is a little too much of an extended commercial for an event that doesn’t need to advertise, and not enough of a deep dive. That said, if a well-shot, well-sourced Burning Man commercial is what you’re looking for, there’s plenty of good stuff here.
The Man Will Burn begins in the days leading up to a big announcement about the 2021 festival. As you might recall, there was an ongoing global pandemic and events were still being canceled with regularity, but CEO Marian Goodell and the Burning Man board and community were split. Was it better to call off the 2021 event, giving attendees an additional year of vaccinations and COVID mitigation in the name of bringing the festival back in triumphant form in 2022? Or was it necessary to bring Burning Man back for the sake of the values of the brand, its passionate devotees and its economic solvency moving forward?
Much to the chagrin of board member, investor and Elon’s brother Kimbal Musk — who gives the strong impression that “entitlement” is a genetic condition — the decision was made to put Burning Man on hold for one more year. This was also a disappointment for Lindsay, a professor teaching online courses out of Pasadena, and Ray, a Black veteran in rural North Carolina.
Both Lindsay and Ray had been planning to attend Burning Man for the first time, creating a point of entry for viewers, explaining the allure, from their perspectives, of deciding to become “burners.” The point, presumably, is that no two new attendees are identical.
We hear and see how the festival, a mixture of culture, art, music, sex and drugs, appealed to them. At the same time, we learn about Burning Man’s origins, going back to its Bay Area roots, the mission that expanded into the Nevada desert and then around the world. We meet several of the original founders, birthed from the Cacophony Society, including John Law and Michael Mikel, as well as the newer generation of leaders who took the reins in 1999 with the founding of Black Rock City LLC.
Like any business/creative endeavor, there were various agendas at play in the planning and orchestration of Burning Man, and while Goodell and Musk might have wanted different things, they only wanted the best for Burning Man — an amiable spirit of accommodation that isn’t the least bit convincing, but emanates from the close involvement between the filmmakers and Burning Man Project (BMP).
Or, put a different way, my kingdom to hear what Goodell and other Burning Man idealists actually think of Musk and the festival’s reliance on a whole lot of Silicon Valley millionaires and billionaires who think they know what’s best.
Instead, the documentary finds that, despite superficial conflicts, everybody wants what they think is best for Burning Man, and the disagreements are profound but benign. This means a lot of people reciting various party lines regarding the festival and its idealism, to the point that Burning Man becomes borderline indistinguishable from the various cults that have been the focus of recent documentaries, including two seasons of The Vow on HBO, both co-directed by Noujaim. Except there was less concern for NXIVM ultimately looking good in The Vow.
The festival is photogenic, with its combination of eclectically dressed (and underdressed) participants, dazzling pyrotechnics, self-conscious evocation of the Mad Max movies, precariously magnificent DIY art projects, and evocative expanses of Nevada desert that, every year, are transformed into a symbolically functional town with a population that can exceed 80,000. The festival and its environs are so inherently captivating that you can appreciate the proficiency of the doc’s drone-heavy cinematography without dwelling on the truth that Burning Man is a very ambitious festival populated by geniuses, artists and risk takers while The Man Will Burn has no artistic ambitions of its own and takes no risks. The show does not reflect the sensibility of the thing it’s documenting, nor does it attempt to.
An assortment of veteran burners appear in the documentary, including artists, logistical organizers and general enthusiasts steering the narrative. I think you can come away from The Man Will Burn with a solid if thoroughly sanitized version of what the festival is now — an event where the biggest adversaries to makeshift paradise are cell phones and social media influencers and the media, which continues to treat Burning Man with sensationalistic voyeurism. This, we’re told, caused major problems when details of destruction and devastation were allegedly misreported during the rain-soaked 2023 event. Here, we’re reassured that everything was perfectly fine, and the photography of the flooded desert plains is so beautiful that only a square would quibble with the repeated “It’s okay! We’re all okay!” party line.
The doc gets some drama from the 2021 cancellation and ensuing “renegade” event, the attempt to bring the festival back under the organizational umbrella the following year, and then the 2023 deluge. Subsequent years have included even more drama of their own, particularly when it comes to Burning Man’s financial issues, but The Man Will Burn just stops at 2023, as if all problems were overcome or at least not worth pursuing even three years down the road. This is just one of many places that the series approaches the precipice of breaking with the “This is a community for outsiders and it’s a family!” agenda, but goes no further.
The episodes tiptoe around the town-and-gown conflicts between Burning Man and local businesses and law enforcement in Gerlach, Nevada. Then the doc just stops talking about them, having never established a history of concerns darker than “Where will the hippies poop if there aren’t enough port-a-potties?” The episodes tiptoe around larger aspirations for the festival, including the buying up of surrounding land in the desert and talk of some sort of “philosophical center.” Then the doc just stops talking about them. You sense that there’s a burgeoning coup among the board and traditional leadership, with Musk as a potential villain. Then the doc just stops talking about it, concluding with wholly implausible protestations of respect from seeming foes. Nearly every storyline involving one of the featured characters reaches a point of superficially happy resolution and then the documentary moves on.
At no point does it feel like Burning Man or its key figures are pressuring the filmmakers to push a specific version of reality, nor does it ever feel like HBO has requested that any rough edges be sanded off. But the sense throughout is of filmmakers more eager to casually participate than interrogate, to gawk and listen to cultish ramblings instead of asking hard questions. There’s an edit of The Man Will Burn that would be shorter, tighter and perhaps more sensationalistic, and one that would be longer, richer and more complex, but instead we get an in-between series that’s fun, shallow and, finally, bland in a way Burning Man has always tried to avoid becoming.
