Netflix’s Woodstock ‘99 Documentary Failed To Learn The Lessons Of ESPN’s Outstanding ‘Hillsborough’ Documentary

With the specter of the “back to school” season looming, the dog days of August are the perfect time to kick back and stream some documentaries of limited educational value. Let’s call the genre doxsploitation. For instance, Victoria’s Secret: Angels and Demons was terrifying, in terms of revealing the brand’s extensive ties to Jeffrey Epstein, not to mention a redemption narrative that concludes with a corporate decision to empower women by selling them underwear that fits.

However, Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99 is probably the biggest of this summer’s doxploitation titles. Whether you’ve already seen it, I would like you to watch Hillsborough, the ESPN 30 for 30 doc about the 1989 English soccer disaster where 97 Liverpool fans were crushed to death leading up to a match against Nottingham Forest.

You might quite reasonably ask, “if I want to watch thousands of Limp Bizkit fans set things on fire, why would I watch a documentary about a soccer tragedy?” Simply put, what Hillsborough gets right will give you a good BS detector for all of the things Trainwreck gets wrong.

Whenever things go wrong at a big public event, we tend to look at what teams or what bands are involved. If it’s not our team or not our band, it is very easy for compassion to evaporate. For example, the “jokes” after eleven Who fans were crushed to death in Cincinnati back in 1979, or the 100 Great White fans who died in 2003 in the Station nightclub fire. More generally, when bad stuff happens in the crowd at a sporting event, many fans will say “my team’s would never.” In reality, what matters is not which bands or which teams, but infrastructure and greed. This dynamic plays out at the festival and the soccer pitch.

Hillsborough is hard to watch. It narrates the events leading up to the fateful day of 15 April 1989, and gives a detailed account of how an English FA Cup semi-final turned into a disaster that claimed almost one hundred lives. The bulk of the documentary, however, focuses on the aftermath. On the day of the tragedy, a narrative emerged that blamed the behavior of drunken, ticketless Livepool fans trying to force their way into the grounds for the deaths that occurred. In reality, the disaster was the result of gross incompetence of the police, and their failure to anticipate the crowds or to manage them safely. This is a massive oversimplification of a complex event, but the cops tried to cover their butts by blaming the victims, and it took more than two decades for the truth to come out.

Woodstock ’99 and an English FA Cup semifinal a decade earlier are two very different events. One person died as a direct result of attending Woodstock ’99. As the documentary makes clear, there were at least four rapes, and probably more. What people remember about Woodstock ’99 was the massive damage to property and the number of fires set by attendees on the final night who had had Enough. Woodstock ’99 booked loud and angry bands — Korn, Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock — with loud and angry fans. There is a lot of bro energy on display in the documentary on stage and off, and it’s easy to find people suggesting that fans of those bands setting the venue on fire is no surprise. At the same time, if you took 250,000 fans of Hall & Oates, Steely Dan, and Mazzy Star, made them live in one another’s poop and pay $12 for a bottle of water, they might act up too. What matters about both events have is not what bands or what team, but rather the complete failure by the people running the event to have appropriate infrastructure in place for the crowds they sold tickets to.

The most important differences between the Netflix Woodstock ’99 documentary and the ESPN Hillsborough documentary revolve around questions of responsibility and accountability. Netflix lets the Woodstock organizers off the hook; ESPN follows the long quest for justice pursued by the families of survivors. Both offer a traditional documentary blend of talking heads and archival footage, but for Woodstock, the majority of those talking heads were people involved in staging Woodstock ’99, while for Hillsborough, we hear mainly from survivors and the families of the victims.

The time scale of these disasters vary, too. In Hillsborough, we see bad planning and bad decisions cause 96 deaths in a matter of minutes. Trainwreck traces a situation that devolved over the course of a weekend. If the arc of the soccer documentary is from institutional incompetence to institutional mendacity as a coverup, what animates the Woodstock ’99 disaster is greed. Festival organizers did not permit outside food or water, reasonable for a 2 hour movie, but not for a long weekend. As supplies dwindled, vendors with remaining water gouged their already high priced water. Bottled water was the only safe option, as the public water supplies were contaminated with feces from the overflowing porta-potties. We do hear from some festival attendees, including one woman who got trench mouth from drinking the water, but we hear much more than we should from organizers making excuses, and invoking the “kids who had a blast.”

For Gen Xers, the commentary from Boomers involved in the original 1969 Woodstock adds insult to injury. They lament that the 1999 event did not have the same “spirit” as the original. One imagines that allowing people to bring food to share might have helped keep that spirit alive. Ironically, if you want to find a festival with the “Woodstock Spirit” in 2022, your best bet is the Gathering of the Juggalos.

Jonathan Beecher Field was born in New England, educated in the Midwest, and teaches in the South. He Tweets professionally as @ThatJBF, and unprofessionally as @TheGurglingCod. He also sometimes writes for Avidly and Common-Place.