There is a bungee-strap battle that goes down inside a geodesic “Thunderdome” arena and, one year, revelers found a 23-foot-tall, 50-foot-long hedgehog temple erected on the playa in Nevada, where Black Rock City has risen nearly every Labor Day week for the past 40 years. And let’s not overlook the central wooden effigy itself, collapsing and engulfed in flames as steampunk Mad Max extras dance and laugh and cry.
Of all the dazzling visuals and surreal art that burst out of Burning Man, the large-scale, weeklong desert event that is now so vital that it has spawned its own subculture, it’s the images seen about seven minutes into HBO‘s The Man Will Burn that are truly surprising: Rather than “Burners” running wild in costumes and dancing in the dust, the four-part documentary opens on a boardroom, with charts indicating cash flow. And then there are the actual people who, all year long, schlep to the office and run the business of Burning Man. Here, they are arguing about how to pay for it.
If you were left wondering whether the series, which began streaming weekly on HBO Max on July 9 and concludes Thursday, was a deliberate provocation, the series’ directors, Jehane Noujaim and Vikram Gandhi, cleared that up while speaking with The Hollywood Reporter last week.
