Scandal sells, or so it’s said, but few have captured the zeitgeist with quite the velocity as the rise and fall, in April 2017, of Fyre. The luxury music festival – a Bahamas-set Coachella with villas and supermodels, it promised – collapsed into financial fraud and memes of drunk twentysomethings scrambling for Fema tents and styrofoam tray meals, all direct to our screens.

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Now a lifetime in the online news cycle later, the interest in Fyre still simmers. The festival is investigated in two separate, competing documentaries released this week: Netflix’s Fyre: The Greatest Party that Never Happened, announced last December and released on Friday, and Hulu’s Fyre Fraud, which dropped unannounced on Monday.

Seen by many as a savage play by Hulu in the ongoing streaming wars – Fyre Fraud launched the day Netflix’s review embargo lifted, effectively tying the two films together in search results – the release of Fyre Fraud, directed by Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason, has redirected the drama of the original scam back off the screen. And while both companies have found rich source material (and sources) from Fyre festival, does more footage bring more insight?

To refresh the memory of those on a social media break two years prior, now convicted entrepreneur-cum-con artist Billy McFarland, age 25, and his business partner, rapper Ja Rule, promised a luxury music festival in the Bahamas, replete with cabanas, catered food and, if you believed the lush promotional videos, a bikini-clad Bella Hadid. Moneyed millennials bought tickets, which were heavily promoted on Instagram, only to find upon arrival an unfinished camp site, plain cheese on bread rather than high-end cuisine, and no performers. Panic, Snapchat stories and internet outrage ensues; the festival is canceled, and McFarland is sentenced to six years in prison and $26m in fines for fraud.

Both documentaries acknowledge the hilarity in that story while also examining the subject soberly. But since the release of Fyre Fraud, what started as an amusing example of corporate oneupmanship has morphed into a larger referendum on the ethics of both films.

A source for Hulu told Entertainment Weekly that the company surprise-released their film ahead of Netflix because it “was felt that Fyre Fraud provides context that may color viewers’ feelings about Netflix’s Fyre”. Specifically, Fyre Fraud – the only one of the two films to acknowledge the other’s existence – criticizes its competitor’s conflicts of interest. The Netflix documentary, directed by Chris Smith, is produced in part by Jerry Media (AKA FuckJerry) and Matte Projects, two companies behind the supermodel-filled promotion of the actual Fyre festival. Hulu’s Fyre Fraud takes shots in particular at Jerry Media, suggesting that the company continued to promote Fyre festival despite knowing months in advance that it would fail.

In response to criticism over Jerry Media’s involvement in the film, Netflix released the following statement on Tuesday: “We were happy to work with Jerry Media and a number of others on the film. At no time did they, or any others we worked with, request favorable coverage in our film, which would be against our ethics. We stand behind our film, believe it is an unbiased and illuminating look at what happened, and look forward to sharing it with audiences around the world.”

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In turn, Chris Smith, the director of Netflix’s film, has called foul on one of Fyre Fraud’s aces: an exclusive interview with Billy McFarland, for which he was compensated (though you wouldn’t know it from watching the film). Speaking to the Ringer on Tuesday, Smith revealed that when the Netflix team approached McFarland for an interview, he requested $125,000 because “[the Hulu team] were offering $250,000 for an interview”. Smith declined the interview because “after spending time with so many people who had such a negative impact on their lives from their experience on Fyre, it felt particularly wrong to us for him to be benefiting”.

When contacted by the Ringer for comment, Furst confirmed that the Hulu production paid McFarland, but disputed McFarland’s figure. “I can’t tell you the amount,” Furst said, “but what I can tell you is that if you printed [$250,000], that would be a lie. That was not the amount. It was less than that. I don’t know why Chris [Smith] is quoting him that way. We both made a film about the same person. We know the person is a compulsive liar.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Billy McFarland. Photograph: Netflix

Furst then defended his and Willoughby-Nason’s decision to feature McFarland as part of the effort to provide the fullest picture possible of Fyre festival. According to Furst, the Fyre Fraud team began production in July 2017 to make “not just a comedy, not just ‘Look at these millennials who got caught on an island’, but a bigger thinkpiece about our generation that was a cautionary tale with deep implications that relate to our political system, to our current president.”

On that front – situating Fyre festival amid a thousand other narratives about millennials and the world they inhabit, from job precarity to climate change to fear of missing out – Fyre Fraud proves more compelling than Netflix’s alternative. For the most part, the documentaries align in their depiction of what led up to the Fyre debacle, though the Hulu film plays its cards tighter, dropping footage reveals, its McFarland interview and acknowledgement of the other documentary like well-paced reality TV. Fyre Fraud cannily splices from touchstones of pop culture (Family Guy, Chappelle’s Show) and more effectively replicates the experience of scrolling through Instagram on-screen – pins drop through old posts to identify who’s having more fun than you – while capturing the frenetic, pastiched quality of millennial media (images of McFarland, plastered on top of each other, to the intro of the Black Eyed Peas’ Pump It, for example, or the video game-esque spinning head of a disgraced McFarland acolyte).

It also draws from a wider and more distinguished array of legal and cultural experts – New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino, psychology expert Maria Konnikova, lawyers involved in a civil suit against Fyre and McFarland’s former employees. Ultimately, the Hulu film digs deeper into the burning pit of Fyre, weaving strands of politics, generational history, con artistry, music festival culture, and social media into the mix. (It also digs deeper into the culpability of Ja Rule, who left the Netflix film largely unscathed).

But as the rival movie drops have revealed, each film has strategically filtered out potentially unflattering information, decisions refracted through each other into questions of what’s outside the frame. The effect of watching two films on one of the most spectacular scams in recent years, is to feel … a bit scammed. Who to believe, in this dizzying jigsaw of cons, performances and people trying to present themselves in the best light? Only in conversation do they reveal which pieces are left out.

In other words, to watch both documentaries, coupled as they are with the offscreen drama, is to feel the vertigo of too much screen time – you’re more informed, but without reliable ground to view it clearly. Two movies about smoke and mirrors, about the pretense of self-presentation and the foil of millennial “authenticity” end up exposing what’s potentially misleading about each other. Two movies depicting the excesses of demonstrative wealth and the compulsion to one-up your social media friends, released by two media titans fighting for your streams. Two movies on an event that poured gasoline on social media’s combustible snark and schadenfreude, now the subjects of an online tit-for-tat. Like a circle, a federal judge said of Billy McFarland’s compulsion to lie, there’s no end.

Which isn’t to say that the documentaries aren’t intriguing, or light on the task at hand, or scintillating in their positioning of Fyre festival as the allegory of millennial adulthood. They may be self-serving, but does that discount them? We’re still entertained.