Mark Reviews Movies: BRING YOUR OWN BRIGADE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 5, 2021

On the day of the wildfire in 2018 that devastated the town of Paradise, California, there were four other wildfires, which were left mostly unreported and remain mostly forgotten, in the state. Filmmaker Lucy Walker, who was in California from London and working on a project about an earlier fire at the time, noticed this fact. She, like many others, was also noticing a sharp and observable increase in wildfires around the world. Something is causing this, and Bring Your Own Brigade tries to uncover the root causes, making a series of convincing and damning arguments along the way.

None of this is pretty, in terms of what Walker discovers, what the answers and potential solutions say about humanity, or the filmmaking, which likely is a result of allowing a sense of urgency (a necessary reflex, under the circumstances) to overcome any sense of narrative consistency and flow. This is an ambitious project, tying together a worldwide phenomenon, a geographically specific history of disaster and commerce, personal stories at two different locales and from two very different demographic groups, and a lot of science that plays like a sort of detective story. If Walker stumbles, that's almost to be expected.

The stumbles, though, might not even matter, especially when it comes to presenting those personal stories from survivors of two wildfires in California. The first group, of course, comes from Paradise, which is still working to rebuild after the 2018 Camp Fire, started by a faulty electrical line, essentially destroyed the town and the nearby unincorporated community of Concow.

At least 85 people were killed in the fire, and Walker uses both satellite imagery, mapping how quickly and far the flames spread within a matter of hours, and footage recorded by those escaping Paradise to tell that story. We've seen such footage before, but there are details here, such as a bulldozer driving through flame-engulfed cars in order to clear a way for operable vehicles and scenes of recovery workers finding bodies (blurred, obviously), that add to the sense of horror we have already felt about the tragedy.

The other location is the much-different Malibu, a wealthy area in Southern California—home to the rich and famous. The Woolsey fire is one of those other four, other than Paradise, that occurred on November 8, 2018. Walker drives with a local firefighter, who notes that most of the staff had been laid off on account of the time of year, meaning that her department and others aren't prepared for wildfires this late in the season.

By the way, that decision came, in part, because the residents voted against paying more in taxes for a regular firefighting brigade. It's a detail that almost would have been forgotten, considering how much more information Walker offers throughout this film—except that people voting against their interests and putting a little more comfort over survival eventually becomes one of the most infuriating trends of this narrative.

We see the videos. We listen to people talk about their brushes with death, knowing that loved ones were trapped in their homes, and returning to plots of scorched foundations, rubble, and the ashes of their possessions and memories. It's heartbreaking, and as confounded and frustrated as Walker becomes with some of the decisions made after the wildfire, she never loses this sense of compassion (although it clearly, based on the tone of some of her narration, is a bit of a challenge).

What's the cause, then, of all of this loss? Climate change is a too-obvious answer. Indeed, Walker is wise enough to know that, despite the overwhelming scientific and physical (as in we can see it happening in real-time) evidence supporting the seemingly unstoppable changes to this planet, even raising the specter of climate change could stop people from listening to her argument, supported by a series of experts. Dropping that, Walker moves into what's certain to be other controversial realms of history and discussion, but they're necessary ones.

Here, things become more like an academic lecture, although we get plenty of archival photographs and film (including fires throughout the decades in some of the same places experiences wildfires now), as well as catchy terminology like the "fire-industrial complex," to prove the case and make it much easier to understand. Part of it is the logging industry, and those satellite images of the Camp Fire becomes doubly important in making this argument.

Lined up with the rapid spread of the wildfire is land owned by and regularly re-planted by a major timber company. An earlier fire in the area lined up with that land, too, and, in terms of timing, also coincided with the planting of young sapling—basically rows upon rows of easily combustible fuel for any fire.

There's a lot more, such as the attitude that any fire in nature needs to be extinguished and an abandonment of the kinds of controlled fires that Native Americans in the region would do before Europeans arrived in California, and all of it is convincing. The solutions, if people are going to continue building in areas that are almost guaranteed to be wildfire-adjacent, seem obvious, sensible, and, ultimately, cost-efficient. If our recent and ongoing experiences with a global pandemic are any indication (One expert makes that connection directly here), we should be able to know that certain people aren't going to follow along or comprehend such things.

Knowing it, though, doesn't make it any less upsetting. Bring Your Own Brigade makes a solid case for the causes of and answers to the scourge of wildfires, but since it's up to us to listen to the argument and follow the sound advice, we're probably doomed to keep repeating all of this.

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