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Rating: The images speak for themselves: dirt everywhere, a horde of high teenagers wallowing in the mud, the throwing of bottles, nudism, extreme price gouging. A series of horrors that extend to rapes, drugs being peddled like candy, bonfires, vandalism, destruction, thefts.
In the history of music festivals, Woodstock 1999 can easily be placed in one of the lowest circles. The lord of the flies, someone says in the documentary. As the images (often shocking) roll by, the image of fire raining from the sky over Sodom and Gomorrah lodges in my head. The miniseries does nothing to tone down the extreme judgments (often deserved), instead, it seems only to want to emphasize everything, contenting itself with editing images that are already worth the product on their own and juxtaposing statements and interviews that often do nothing but reiterate the obvious or provide somewhat generic explanations.
There are many different obscenities over the three days. On one hand, the tentacled monster of greed, which is the most frightening. How could they not have organized a proper cleaning service between the days of a festival of 250,000 people? The documentary speaks generically of cost-cutting, with the outsourcing of cleaning to external companies. But I really can't explain such enormous filth. Didn't they do anything at all?
Greed is sublimated in the prices set by vendors, who are given the freedom to set the rates in monopolistic conditions. A bottle of water then cost 65 cents, but during the festival, the price skyrockets to 4 dollars (later up to 12). Imagine twelve hours under the sun at nearly forty degrees, people drunk and high, desperately in need of water but unable to afford to spend what today would be 8-10 euros each time. Over twelve hours, how much water would they need to drink to remain hydrated? The documentary talks about a liter an hour. Perhaps it's excessive, but certainly this lever on prices represents one of the deepest triggers of the crowd's anger.
The dirt, the stench, the little water, the endless queues for the toilets. The anger builds up quickly. And if we want, it's the most normal and human thing in this collective psychosis. What seems more alien, inhuman, impossible to me, is the sly and cunning passivity of the organizers. In this, there is a noticeable distance between today's world and that of 1999. Such a mess in 2022 would not last more than a few hours. Back then, even though there was a dedicated pay-TV for the festival, at press conferences they could still play with the nuances of the words, downplay, arbitrarily limit responsibilities.
In all this, I see a condensation of the most sordid drives of rampant capitalism, which turns human beings into laboratory rats forced to take a certain path and respond to certain impulses. But here, in 1999, perhaps there still exists a certain idealistic spirit, that crowd did not expect to be so obscenely robbed. And so they rebel, as soon as they realize they are not truly under the control of the police, they devastate and set everything on fire. Because Woodstock had become the incarnation of the capitalist demon. In a sense, that violent rebellion is a last gasp of dignity against power, but at the same time, it nests within infinite depravities. It's sad to think that today, for us, those prices would be completely normal, we would accept them passively. The most disheartening thing is to ascertain that, despite everything, that blood-sucking model has won, triumphed.
A crowd that is a victim, but not only. We are on the coordinates of a rave party, so great is the desire to get high and have sex. The groping is countless, and today it would rightly cause a scandal. In this, I see an improvement compared to late '90s society. Sure, it's disheartening when this horny violence is attributed to the influence of films like American Pie and Fight Club. In my view, all this is the ultimate offspring of a decade of end-of-history, the triumph of prosperity but without yet seeing its side effects. American success with no more enemies on the horizon, a generation of increasingly spoiled young people little inclined to sacrifice, but not yet so soft as to passively endure everything. If we want, Woodstock '99 is the funeral rite that certifies the death by "suicide" of a model of civilization. Before the Twin Towers, before terrorism and the financial crisis. It's a human failure, self-destruction dictated solely by the exaggerated size of appetites, titillated by a world without fears anymore.
The documentary meritoriously shows the different dynamics of this terrible festival, without delving too deeply into the problematic knots and without actually managing to gather sensational interviews. There is a watermark that recalls a certain disaster movie sensationalism, rather than an investigation on still balls on the objective responsibilities, on the concrete data of the violence, on the identity of that brutalized crowd. It says a bit of everything, gives us a decent primer, but does not answer the most disturbing questions, also useful for understanding who we are today, that arise spontaneously in front of this Apocalypse Now.
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