You may remember Billy McFarland, if not the name then the image that, six years ago, frequently accompanied public mention of him: an open cheese sandwich sweating gently on a bed of white polystyrene. McFarland was jailed in 2018 for fraud after the collapse, a year earlier, of his Fyre festival, the disastrous party on a Bahamian island that took down a generation of mid-list influencers.
Failure so large that it results in not one, but two documentaries, not to mention the prison sentence, might inspire shame in a lesser individual. But McFarland is back in business, and his plans are bigger than ever.
Collective delight in the epic and, given the guest list, extremely well-documented collapse of the Fyre festival, provided the rest of us with one of those rare unifying moments, a public bin fire around which, irrespective of difference, we could gather to warm our hands and unite in a sing-song. Perhaps some of that delight seeped through to McFarland, who, having left jail after serving four of his six years, has been sufficiently encouraged to announce via social media this week that he is planning a reboot of, as he calls it, “the most talked about festival in the world”.
This is rather like shilling for the airship industry by describing the Hindenburg as the most talked about mode of transport in the world, but no matter. What is fascinating is the brazenness of McFarland’s approach and the apparently transfixing effect it is already having on the sorts of people who flocked to him the first time. Or, at least, so McFarland claims.
On Instagram on Tuesday, McFarland announced that the first round of tickets for the as yet unscheduled event have sold out, a statement which he is, of course, at liberty to make. It is worth reminding ourselves exactly what transpired for the hundreds of party-goers who, urged on by endorsements from the likes of Bella Hadid and Kendall Jenner, paid thousands of dollars to fly to the private island of Great Exuma for what they thought would be the experience of a lifetime and ended up being a hellscape of disaster-relief tents and emergency cheese slices. After the festival, some of those attenders were awarded pay-outs of $7,220 each, although it was the unpaid local businesses contracted to provide services and supplies whom one came away feeling the most sympathy for.
There is, in these sorts of stories, always an appeal on the part of the huckster in question to that side of the rest of us impressed by displays of sheer nerve. Ostensibly we all loathe the con artist, but we are also enthralled by the scale of their delusions, and perhaps, by our own willingness to be taken in. Most of us at one time or another want to belong to something, and the lure of leadership of any kind can be hard to resist.
For someone like me, who is ambivalent about more or less everything, the psychology of people like McFarland, or female comparisons such as Caroline Calloway, the lifestyle influencer who sold empowerment and “creativity” to young women via a series of workshops that never took place, is fascinating. Once the events fell through, she doubled down and tried to take the meta route out by publishing a memoir called Scammer (which, true to brand, was self-published and cost $65 per copy). The archness fell flat. If, in the case of Calloway, McFarland and others like them the product is the delusion, the slightest crack in their confidence and the sea rushes in.
And while the brazenness is entertaining, our relationship with the people and things that entertain us can be not only fickle but cruel. Comparisons will be made to the former president as an example of just how far this type of American showmanship can go, but, reading about McFarland this week – the slightly hysterical ring to statements such as, “Guys, this is your chance to get in. This is everything I’ve been working towards. Let’s fucking go” – the person he most reminded me of was Charlie Sheen.
You may recall how, 12 years ago, Sheen parlayed his very public meltdown into a series of one-man shows, which he called the Violent Torpedo of Truth tour, and to which people showed up as they might once have attended a 19th-century freak show. It was ugly – I attended a show in New York and Sheen looked small and bewildered on the stage while the audience booed him – but more than that, it was an illustration of where the overrelied upon maxim “all publicity is good publicity” crashes to a halt. The American market is very forgiving, particularly when it comes to male scammers, but when it turns the dynamic is ruthless.
And so we return to the spectacle of Billy McFarland (even his name has a ring of the circus ringmaster about it), a man who, it seems to me, is engaged in pure fantasy – that an event will happen next year; that he is perceived as cheeky and irrepressible rather than a man in freefall – premised on a misunderstanding of the nature of the attention coming his way. There are, of course, more deserving targets for our sympathy, but I found myself having a small, pitying reaction to the nakedness of McFarland’s desperation this week and the size of his self-delusion. “We look forward to surprising the world alongside our partners,” wrote McFarland on Instagram, and you could feel, in yourself and other watchers, the wolf-like glee of goading him on to more ludicrous heights.
• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
