TV Review - Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99
Images courtesy of Netflix.
Content warning: sexual abuse.
Woodstock ‘99 is undergoing a change in public perception. People generally acknowledged its disappointment as the death of alt-rock, a passé expression of American machismo, and the infiltration of brands into 90s counterculture. Now after the rise of, among other things, the #MeToo movement, this event fits into another, darker timeline. It’s within this context that the Netflix Original documentary, Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99 strives to situate itself. Unfortunately, however, its efforts come off half-hearted.
Trainwreck comes a year after competitor HBOMax released the documentary Woodstock ‘99: Peace, Love and Rage which overshadows this latest release in many aspects. The narrative in Peace, Love and Rage set the grounds for the story properly, albeit while being a little over-moralising and drawing strange lineages to Coachella. It also had an extremely similar line up of interviewees and identical selections of archive footage. On the other hand, Trainwreck seems calculated, the contextualising information withdrawn so as to appease stakeholders or an American public who will draw immediate conclusions about whether something is “woke” or not.
It should be noted that WS’99 was, more than a rock concert, an expression of Americana. Despite the claim in the first episode that the lineup represented “the biggest acts in the world”, no Britpop bands were booked. Instead, punters listened to a strangled rendition of Jimi Hendrix’s Star Spangled Banner by Wyclef Jean (included in both documentaries), an anti-abortion ballad called “In America” by Creed and Andy Dick exposing himself and singing sex comedy in the name of free speech.
In this way, opening with organiser Michael Lang’s premise of a festival to counter the active-shooter violence of Columbine is appropriate, although it is overly noble and sympathetic. Allowing the boomer Woodstock executives Lang, Aaron Sadovsky, and especially John Scher, to represent themselves in interviews is too lenient considering their malfeasance. MTV published an article in October 1999 about how nude female attendees had been posted on Woodstock.com non-consensually. Truly if all things are considered they displayed a systematic disregard for duty of care and while Trainwreck does trend towards exposing this, it really does not go in hard enough.
The saving grace of Trainwreck is the young people’s perspective. The selections from interviewees paint a story of how Generation X, full of youth and naïveté, were led into a nostalgic brand identity that did not fit them for neoliberal, corporate greed. Of particular note are the contributions from staff Lee Rosenblatt, Lisa and Pilar Law and Colin Speir. It is a shame that these do not make the majority of the documentary, and that its strong editing work cannot save it. Netflix loses this round, but anything can happen next: all’s fair in the free-love streaming war.
Check out Belanco’s Blog and Letterboxd.
Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99 is streaming on Netflix now.