Directors Jehane Noujaim and Vikram Gandhi chronicle the highs and lows of the festival, which sees tens of thousands of artists and fans descending on the Nevada desert every year
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 premise
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 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?
Much to the chagrin of board member, investor and Elon’s brother Kimbal Musk, 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, and Ray, a Black veteran in rural North Carolina, both of whom had been planning to attend Burning Man for the first time.
What works
The festival is photogenic, with its combination of eclectically dressed participants, dazzling pyrotechnics, self-conscious evocation of the Mad Max movies, precariously magnificent DIY art projects, and evocative expanses of Nevada desert. The festival and its environs are so inherently captivating that you can appreciate the proficiency of the doc’s drone-heavy cinematography.
An assortment of veteran burners appear, including artists, logistical organizers and general enthusiasts steering the narrative. You can come away from The Man Will Burn with a solid if thoroughly sanitized version of what the festival is now.
What doesn’t
The series is overwhelmed by an excess of material and an insufficiency of clarity and rigor. It 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.
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, 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.
The episodes tiptoe around the town-and-gown conflicts between Burning Man and local businesses and law enforcement in Gerlach, Nevada. They tiptoe around larger aspirations for the festival, including the buying up of surrounding land and talk of some sort of “philosophical center.” They tiptoe around a burgeoning coup among the board and traditional leadership, with Musk as a potential villain. Then the doc just stops talking about them.
The verdict
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.
