The HBO docuseries “The Man Will Burn” does not provide much information about what the typical bathroom experience entails at Burning Man, the quasi-utopian festival that has occurred in the Nevada desert almost every summer during the past four decades.
For most people inclined to watch four hour-long episodes about this widely mythologized “happening,” that might not matter. For me, a middle-aged former festival-goer whose enthusiasm long ago was smothered by a list of anxieties specific to outdoor communal settings, very much including the restroom situation, it was the only element of suspense.
Suffice to say, this well-made infomercial, directed by Jehane Noujaim and Vikram Gandhi, was in no danger of converting me to Burner-dom. But if you’ve ever wondered what the fuss is about, “The Man Will Burn,” at its best, captures with visceral detail both the scale of the event and the joy it creates for people who have restructured their lives around it.
Episode No. 1 covers Burning Man’s birth as the whimsical project of its idealist founder, Larry Harvey. He staged art gatherings in the Black Rock Desert that grew steadily in the 1990s and 2000s into colorful, hedonistic and eventually trendy bacchanals premised on free expression and resistance to authority and consumer culture.
Each event culminates with the torching of a giant statue meant to represent the “default world” that the congregants — also known as Burners — aimed to escape.
The filmmakers embedded with leaders of the Burning Man Project, the San Francisco-based nonprofit that organizes Black Rock City, the temporary community that forms in the desert — complete with its own newspaper, radio station and philharmonic orchestra — based nominally on a list of 10 core principles.
These include gifting, leaving no trace, radical self-reliance and communal effort, but unfortunately, nothing governing hygiene, which is bad news for first-time Burners, who are required to ring a bell and make a “dust angel” on the ground. I think I got sand in my swimsuit area just by watching this happen.
Burning Man’s CEO and the point-of-view figure is Marian Goodell, who seems as if she exists to have been played by the late Catherine O’Hara in a mockumentary on the subject. The series begins with her leadership in jeopardy as the organization wrestles with how to move forward after missing two years thanks to COVID.
This provides the filmmakers with a story arc and a convenient antagonist in the form of Kimbal Musk, who has a perfectly villainous name, face, personality, wardrobe and apparent worldview. He received a seat on Burning Man’s board of directors as a condition of a large donation from his brother Elon (of whom you might have heard).
By dividing its characters into an easy binary of good (the organizers and the Burner faithful) and evil (Musk and other dissidents), “The Man Will Burn” misses opportunities to engage with some of the deeper questions that arise when a subversive concept is assimilated into the mainstream.
Because, whatever its anticapitalist origins, Burning Man now looks like the kind of consumerist experience it once existed to oppose, wherein anything vaguely countercultural is isolated and monetized into oblivion.
The revolution might not be televised, but it is available in the form of all-inclusive, third-party VIP camping packages that can cost up to $150,000.
“The Man Will Burn” pays lip service to some of these dynamics — the event’s lack of diversity, its gentrification by the influencer class, its longstanding popularity among Silicon Valley tech dudes thanks to its location and libertarian streak.
But it would have us believe that these elements are secondary to the wonder of Burning Man, the hard work that makes it happen and its healing powers for wayward souls recovering from grief or trauma.
Case in point, the concluding chapter covers the calamitous 2023 event, in which heavy rains turned the setting into a disaster zone. It’s a compelling play-by-play, but feels almost like a digression, an excuse to look away from what it really means (if anything) to “burn the man” in the 2020s, when so much of the event’s utopian vision has already vanished into the desert dust.