I planned to watch only an hour or so of the three-part series Trainwreck--Woodstock 1999 (Netflix 2022). But the documentary was so fascinating and appalling that like an actual train crash or a wreck on the highway, you find yourself unable to look away -- the carnage is just too morbidly interesting to ignore. So, in fact, I watched all three-hours of the show in one sitting and must say that I felt a bit soiled by the experience. Trainwreck is the sort of guilty pleasure with which we have become all too familiar. It's a blunt force documentary that harnesses our apparently unlimited appetite for sensationalist journalism that makes us indignant, even enraged, while at the same time comforting us with the specious sense that the stuff portrayed on the screen is such errant and ridiculous folly that, of course, we would never be seduced into the situations shown. This kind of documentary -- and they are legion -- shows us politics and law enforcement as ghastly freak shows; these films often feature horrifying religious cults that require of their hapless adherents awful allegiance -- we see the poor bastards suffering rape and all sorts of physical abuse while being fleeced out of their wealth. Everyone behaves badly. We have reached a point, now in the sixth year of the Trump regime (because Trump has never really vacated the chambers that we leased to him in our imagination) that we have so little esteem for our fellow citizens, so little empathy and understanding of the sufferings of others that we watch shows like Trainwreck for the sheer pleasure of hating our compatriots and despising them. This is a sorry state of affairs, but, I'm afraid, one that seems entrenched in our psyches and who am I to pontificate on this topic? I watched all three episodes of Trainwreck back to back, luxuriating in the horrors displayed by that film.
Simply put, a group of shysters and con-men conspired to revive the moribund Woodstock phenomena and stage a music festival in the summer in 1999. The only thing that Woodstock 1999 had in common with its earlier iterations -- the original three days of peace, love, and music in 1969 and the calamity in 1994 was the sheer squalor of the proceedings. Otherwise, the catastrophe in 1999 might have been produced on a different planet (the world is almost infinitely changed since 1969) -- the cast of vicious impresarios was, more or less, the same but everything else was different (with all changes going from bad to even worse.) Woodstock 1969 was a plot to exploit the kids, but the kids outnumbered their would-be predators and took over the show, making it a free concert. Woodstock 1999, similarly, was a plot to exploit the kids but the exploitation here was successful until the last night of the three-day program when the kids staged an uprising and burned everything down. The difference between the two experiences can be symbolized in the contrast between venues -- Max Yasgur's farm was a pasture with fences inadequate to control the perimeter (hence, the free show); Woodstock 1999 was staged in the very belly of the beast, in an abandoned air force base with hangars and thousands of square yards of blazing hot asphalt tarmac and the facility was surrounded by a hardened impermeable wall that kept out interlopers and that sealed the patrons into an increasingly hellish environment. The documentary implies that the final incendiary uprising was a product of conditions created by the show's promoters: to save money, they scrimped on infrastructure -- there was inadequate garbage collection, toilets that were too few and too clogged to be of any use after the first day, and no clean water for the patrons when the temperatures climbed into the high-nineties blazing off the 250,000 kids on-site and the vast fields of asphalt. Some of the acts that performed in 1969 had some redeeming artistic merit; the stuff purveyed to the mob in 1999 was nihilistic head-banger metal-music garbage, noisy stuff that is an incitement to violence when played at a moderate level on your home stereo system let alone broadcast at 125 decibels in surround-sound from enormous metal towers. When people entered the huge compound, their water was taken away from them -- this was to support 4 dollar a bottle charges on water at the vendor's tents and the huge Budweiser beer-garden. (Later, people reported that water was going for $12 a bottle.) At Woodstock 1969, the music stopped in the middle of the night and people could retreat from the noise to fuck and sleep. Thirty years later, one of the hangars on-site hosted all-night Rave parties where everyone was crazed on ecstasy, thus resulting in tens of thousands of hallucinating sleep deprived concertgoers. Needless to say the entire operation was a recipe for disaster.
The documentary is standard in form, reliably sensationalistic and indignant. The concert promoters, all of them now elderly, claim that nothing untoward happened at the show. This was the same line that they broadcast at the time of the calamity. Of course, the footage of the concert played to contest the promoter's nonchalance about the whole debacle contradicts everything they say -- we see indescribable filth, kids sucking down fecal water near the flooded toilets, rampaging mobs, and, at last, huge fireballs exploding into the air like something from Bladerunner. This is not a concert movie. Music is shown but merely to emphasize the point that the nihilistic roar coming off the stage was just another incitement to riot. After the first night (featuring Korn), the air was constantly full of projectiles, however, mostly millions of plastic beer cups that spurt and dive and cloud the air above the crowd. On the second night, Limp Bizkit played and the lead singer, Fred Durst, who seems to be some sort of swine, urged the crowd to riot, although only with semi-success. The high temperatures caused hundreds of cases of heat-stroke and heat exhaustion in the mosh-pits where everyone was picturesquely bleeding as well. Some idiot drove a van into the rave tent, slowly plowing through hundreds of drug-addled kids; the van turned out to be a rape-mobile in which young girls were being assaulted. About a third of the crowd seems to have abandoned their clothing to traipse around naked in the shit-impregnated mud. On the third night, the Red Hot Chili Peppers performed, with a guitarist, Flea, playing his axe balls-to-air naked. Someone had the great idea of distributing 100,000 candles and asking the mob to light them in honor of the victims of the school shooting at Columbine. (The witless and ineffectual guards, the so-called "Peace Patrol", had carefully confiscated everyone's matches or lighters at the gate when the show began, but, now, caution was thrown to the wind and the crowd was told to light the candles.) Predictably, the mob enraged by being mistreated for three days ran amuck and burned everything down. The crowd attacked the food court and lit it on fire. Then, they turned their rage on the merch dealers and destroyed their encampment. At last, the mob set afire all the semi-trucks that had hauled speakers and electronics and porta-potties (also set on ablaze) to the venue. The trucks were carrying propane tanks and, of course, these erupted like volcanoes into the sky. The National Guard had to be called to the scene. MTV, who had been jovially encouraging violence and bad behavior, unceremoniously fled. A sanctimonious MTV announcer interviewed 20 years later for the movie and part of the the incitement to riot at the time, said that she knew that things were out of hand on the first night when a fan tried to burn her ass with a cigar butt. The next morning everything was gone except for five million beer cups, garbage drifted a yard high, noisome burnt porta-parties and huge piles of smoking wreckage, the field of carnage punctuated by overturned cars and burnt-out semi-tractor-trailers. At a news conference on Monday, the promoters told the world that the concert, "three days of peace, love, and music," had gone-off without a hitch.
But there's an aspect to this dismal story that is weirdly encouraging. Scenes of the destruction on the third night of Woodstock 1999 show rampaging mobs of drunk, drugged naked people literally covered in human shit running amuck. This zombie mob is lit by huge explosions and mighty orange fire-balls. You wonder how many hundreds of people were killed in this chaos. But, in fact, no one was killed or even seriously injured. In order to gin up fake indignation, the film-makers turn the story into some sort of parable about toxic masculinity and rape culture. But this is completely phony too. The young women who attended the concert interviewed twenty years later said it was the best time they had in their whole lives. In fact, all of the concert-goers praised the experience as fun and memorable. Although there were undoubtedly some number of rapes and lots of fumbling groping, only four rapes were actually reported. So it's a cheap shot to turn the movie into a post-Me-too indictment of the 18 year old male gorillas roaming the shitty plains of Woodstock 1999. In fact, there's a clue to how participants viewed the chaos: one kid says: "This is real Lord of the Flies stuff." Another says: "it looks just like Apocalypse Now." In other words, the references that the kids make to the violent chaos are to movies and books. It was, of course, all play-acting. If the violence had been in earnest, hundreds would have died and every woman would have been raped. But, in fact, even in the midst of utter chaos and complete incitement to riot proceeding at 125 decibels (The Red Hot Chili Peppers played something with lyrics like "burn it all down!" when the fires where being set), no one was murdered and, apparently, only a few were hospitalized. Human beings are social animals and there are limits to what they can be urged to do -- in terms of casualties, Woodstock1999 wasn't nearly as bad as the Rolling Stones at Altamont Speedway. I think the same moral applies to the infamous Capitol Riots on January 6. The investigating committee plays footage ad nauseum of deadly-looking combat in the bowels of the Capitol. The fighting looks like the battle scenes in Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky. You wonder how many people were killed and horribly maimed in this combat. But, of course, only one woman was killed (by a police bullet) and no one was beaten to death or, even, severely injured in the fighting notwithstanding the investigating Committee's efforts to gin up hysteria about this episode. (The mob attack on the Capitol was horrific in political terms, a concerted and planned attempt to disrupt the results of the election and delay the transfer of power -- but the violence was not nearly as bad as it looks). You have to measure brutality by the number of casualties and the death count at the Capitol was one. (Of course, I'm discounting suicides supposedly caused by the riot; I have no idea how a suicide is caused by a riot and neither does the House investigating committee since there has been, more or less, complete silence on this topic.) What looks like Antietam on the screen at both the Capitol and Woodstock 1999 was more like a rugby scrum, some kind of violent play. The crowd burning everything down at the concert was intent on showy destruction but not killing or badly injuring people. The same can be said about the Capitol riot. We're not as violent as our boasting.
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