Opening Argument: A second documentary about Woodstock '99 makes different choices
I had a funny conversation once with a reporter who could not imagine what it meant, as a critic, to review a documentary if it didn't involve essentially re-reporting the story to evaluate what was true and what was false, what should have been included that was left out, and so forth. Otherwise, this reporter wondered with some sarcasm, what on earth are you critiquing? The filmmaking?
The answer, of course, is ... yes, it's the filmmaking. It's also about accuracy, of course. But more broadly, the answer is that people who make documentaries, just like people who make scripted, fictional films, make countless choices that go well beyond the reporting elements. And those choices never come into sharper focus than when two documentaries about the same topic are produced in rapid succession. That's the case as Netflix presents the series Trainwreck: Woodstock '99, only a year after HBO premiered its documentary Woodstock '99: Peace, Love & Rage.
Woodstock '99, a festival to mark the 30th anniversary of the original, is now famous mostly for its miseries, which included rape allegations, fires, violence and absolutely filthy conditions. Yes, there were musicians — Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock, Red Hot Chili Peppers, DMX, Korn, Rage Against the Machine, lots more — but when the audience sets fires and police later investigate four reports of rape and witnesses say they saw many other instances of sexual assault, the disaster tends to become the legacy.
The biggest difference between these presentations of the same weekend — the movie last year and the series now — is not how thorough they are, even though the series is about half again as long in total. The difference is in the focus. They're both thorough and they're both worth watching. But the Netflix series is interested in serving as a moment-by-moment telling of the story of how everything went so wrong from a logistics and decision-making perspective (the first episode is even called "How The F*** Did This Happen?"). The HBO film was much more interested in interrogating the cultural moment, and its connection to the anger that exploded in the crowd, and the sexual violence and destruction that followed. Both feature interviews with some of the same people, most prominently Michael Lang and John Scher, the producers/promoters of the festival. But they diverge in important ways.
In the Netflix series, the focus is on the ways in which the failures to properly plan and execute the festival — it was too hot, people didn't have access to clean water or functioning bathrooms, there wasn't enough security — caused the crowd to do what angry crowds do. In other words, in the Netflix telling, this was simply any upset mass of people deprived of water, left to bake in the sun, unsupervised, mistreated, disrespected by event organizers. For that reason, it goes into a lot of detail about exactly when and how particular breaches happened, and what the order of events was. There's more detailing of the chaos of musicians and crew escaping danger and running from fires and random vans driving into the rave tent and so forth. (In fact, when I first screened the series, it wasn't called Trainwreck. It was then called Clusterf**k, which you could argue better reflects the viewpoint of the series, treating the festival as more a giant screw-up than a culturally significant moment.)
Netflix
The HBO documentary, while it acknowledges all the logistical failures and how they fueled the chaos, is more interested in why this crowd, why at this time, why while watching these bands. That's not the same, by the way, as blaming the bands themselves, which nearly everyone in both the series and the movie — except for Scher, whose scapegoat for much of the destruction is Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst — takes pains not to do.
What the HBO film had that the Netflix series lacks is a depth of perspective on culture and music. The film features people like music journalists Steven Hyden and Maureen Callahan, culture critic Wesley Morris, Black Thought of The Roots, writer and former MTV personality Dave Holmes — performers, writers and critics who provide context in addition to eyewitnesses who can detail events. The film also explores race in a way Netflix leaves alone, as when Morris talks about DMX "licensing," as he puts it, this crowd of young white people to yell the N-word with him. What, he wonders, was the effect of doing that on this crowd that was so heavily young white guys? What was it like for the Black people who were there? Peace, Love & Rage also notes that this was the time of Girls Gone Wild and magazines like FHM and Maxim, which might have influenced not just the decisions women made about going topless, but the entitlement the men at the festival seemingly felt to chant at women, to surround them, to yell at them when they were on stage, all with the demand that they take their tops off. They yelled it at strangers; they yelled it at Rosie Perez; they yelled it at Sheryl Crow. Whatever you believe about these things, they're part of the cultural context.
What you get instead in the Netflix series are interested parties arguing for their own blamelessness and making kind of bland assertions about cultural dynamics. Limp Bizkit's former manager, Peter Katsis, talks about how "the aggressiveness of the audience really embodied the rock-and-roll spirit." One person who worked on the festival says there was a very nebulous discussion of the lineup and the possibility that the booking process had set the stage for problems, but there's no details about why. Katsis also says Limp Bizkit was a "[champion] of the underdogs of the world," a claim that isn't interrogated in the slightest. It's fair to ask — and Morris would have asked, Hyden would have asked, Callahan would have asked — which underdogs? All of them? Or only some? (There's a wild moment in which one attendee and Limp Bizkit fan raves about how Fred Durst wasn't a rock star type; he was relatable, in part because he wore baseball hats backwards. This gentleman must feel at home in a great many places.)
It also must be said that the Netflix series seems ill-equipped to handle the story of the festival's reports of sexual violence. The fact that women reported being raped doesn't come up until the last eight minutes of the third and final episode, as a kind of add-on about the aftermath of the festival and how sad it was for the organizers to find this out when previously they had been arguing that it had gone well except for the riot. It's a strange and off-putting approach, particularly since MTV personality Ananda Lewis — by far the most prominent Black interviewee and probably the most prominent woman — is given the task of providing practically all the context they even attempt.
Lewis talks about how racism and sexism can encourage people to feel entitled to do whatever they want, but then it's over to Lang, who claims not to have realized that there were rapes or issues with the treatment of women until after the festival. (Perhaps he didn't, but there's footage in the HBO film of The Offspring's Dexter Holland on stage telling the crowd to quit groping the women who were crowdsurfing.) And then we hear from Scher, who says that four reported rapes really isn't that many. There's pushback to that from a couple of interviewees, but by then, the series is wrapping up.
It's a huge missed opportunity. For instance, Lewis says at one point that a guy in the crowd tried to burn her with a cigar, but that's included within a discussion of a "generational shift" that built hostility toward MTV and so-called corporate music. What if they had associated that attempted assault (which is what it is) alongside the other assaults rather than alongside the other stuff about MTV? What if they had not exiled this part of the story to a postscript, but explored it throughout these episodes?
So yes, it's the filmmaking. Both the film and the series have a place in documenting Woodstock '99, and if you are a festival-disaster completist, you'll want to see both. But you get more context, more thought and more analysis from HBO, while you get more of an exact timeline of what was set on fire and when from Netflix. It's not that either is right or wrong, but it's a fascinating opportunity to compare approaches. And as long as we are in the age of Peak Streaming Documentaries (remember Fyre Festival?), we'll probably see this happen over and over.
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