Many moons ago, I moved from New York City to the San Francisco Bay Area. Shortly thereafter, a colleague asked if I was planning to go to Burning Man.
I responded by asking a question that countless millions have asked over the years, “What’s Burning Man?”
The quick read I got from my co-worker was that Burning Man was about a ton of people tripping out in the blazing hot desert and all of the things one can imagine transpiring from there.
Even though I was a single young gent and theoretically eligible bachelor at the time, I knew immediately that I had zero interest in attending due to the fact that I despise the following:
- Crowds
- Heat
- Feeling dirty (the incessant dust in Black Rock City, Nevada is legendary)
- Did I mention that I despise feeling dirty?
Crowds, heat, dirt, dust… no thank you.
Add in the fact that psychedelic-style (and most) drugs don’t interest me, and I felt pretty solid on being out on the whole Burning Man-style lifestyle.
Burning Man has been around in some form since 1986, and has gotten increasingly popular over time. Wikipedia defines it as a “week-long-scale desert event focused on community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance.”
When I learned that a documentary about the event, called The Man Will Burn, was to be released on HBO Max, my first thought was “why now, and what’s the focus of the doc going to be?”
The official trailer doesn’t answer the first question, and… doesn’t really answer the second one either, I’m afraid:
The trailer gives off more of A Celebration of 40 Years of Burning Man vibe. If that’s your thing, coolio for you, I guess?
“Imagine that you were put upon a desert,” voiceover in the trailer tells us. “You’re surrounded by thousands of other people. But together you form a city in which anything that was, was more intensely so.”
I completely get that many people deeply believe that attending Burning Man constitutes a life-altering experience. I mean, hell, one of my childhood friends didn’t attend my wedding because it conflicted with his Burning Man schedule. But I was genuinely surprised how lightly it treads on challenges the festival has faced in recent years ranging from negative environmental impact to sexual assault to how the ethos of the festival has been flipped by tech bros and obnoxiously rich people taking over the event.
To be fair, the trailer does lightly touch on how some years have been plagued by rain and we hear someone saying, “we fix a thing and then we run into another crisis,” but mostly the trailer seems to focus on something else we’re told: “This place relies on one thing – collective human joy.”
The trailer ends with a title card announcing: LIVE THE EXPERIENCE OF BURNING MAN.
The Man Will Burn is a four-part documentary series, and premieres on July 9th, 2026 on HBO Max.