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It is dry, very dry, across the American west at the moment. The region is already in the middle of an extreme drought before the summer has truly sunk its teeth in. Satellite images show a brown, parched landscape: reservoirs dwindling, rivers anaemic. The humidity is lower, the ground drier, the woodlands turning from forest to fuel. It is bad, and getting worse.
This level of drought can make a whole landscape feel like tinder. With this heat (it is forecast to hit forty-one degrees Celsius in Paradise, California this weekend) and this lack of humidity, everything is ready to burn. The dead leaves that have accumulated in the garden, the tree knocked over in that storm a few months ago, the stretches of grass growing brown. Everything is just waiting for the right lightning strike, the dropped cigarette, the misfiring gender reveal.
Wildfires of an increasing size and intensity have become a regular fixture of news screens over the past few years. We have seen footage of the 2018 Attica fires in Greece, of Australia being swallowed by fire in 2019, have watched the Arctic circle burn. They are one part of what David Wallace-Wells calls climate breakdown’s ‘new kind of cascading violence, waterfalls and avalanches of devastation’; reminders that it is not just a matter of deep time and a creeping erosion of normality but can be something that in a few hours can burn through a whole town, that can turn millions of acres from growing green to soot.
I love to watch fire; staring as the pale wood turns black, tender orange flame feeding and growing. For all its destruction, it is beautiful; energy release played out as flickering dance. But it is hard to make a film about fire, hard to control and shape it visually. Wildfires only now seem to be leaving their mark on cinema. They flicker up in some films but rarely seem to get full-focus. Those Who Wish Me Dead has just been released and looks directly at the violence and trauma of these new wildfires. It is Taylor Sheridan’s latest film, co-written and directed by him. The story is based in the wide, violent expanses of America that Sheridan loves and worked with so beautifully in his loose ‘Frontier Trilogy’, here the forest-clad hills of Montana.
It is a film that feels a fascination with the power of fire, the violence and implacability of it. The blazes of the film are huge, untameable, burning everything. It is difficult to animate a large, complex fire that can consume buildings, can flow across a landscape and behave as chaotically as real blazes do. To accurately fill their film with fire, the team behind Those Who Wish Me Dead constructed a large woodland set to burn. The screen is regularly filled with these flames; blooms of flames, tree canopies unfurling, blossoming and heavy with fire.
The blaze shapes the action, shepherding people around the landscape. Huge clouds of smoke cover the horizon. Ash floats through the air like early snow. A fight scene takes place in an orange fugue state, Blade Runner lighting in the Montana hills. It is a film made from a growing visual awareness of wildfire in the public eye; cinema drawn out of the yearly, whole summer long news reels of fires flaring across the screen. The human violence in the film feels so small compared to the power of the fire, sharp little axes and guns looking trivial before the flames – ‘no one makes it through that, baby’. Sheridan has tried more than anything to capture the fire’s violence, its chaotic consumption, how it tears through a place, how helpless you are before it.
And the fires are getting more violent. They now cover larger areas, last longer, burn as fiercely at night as they do at day. They are so intense, giving off so much energy, that they produce their own weather systems: fire-driven winds that can spiral into tornadoes, several-hundred foot high eruptions of flames, lightning storms. The fires have grown to such a scale that new terminology is being coined to deal with them, like gigafire - a singular fire that is burning over a million acres. The smoke they now create kills hundreds of thousands of people each year around the world, creating plumes that can be seen from space and that drift across continents. California Governor Jerry Brown described the fires as ‘a new normal’, but they are defined by their abnormality. Five of the twenty worst fires in California’s history happened in the autumn of 2017. And as the planet gets hotter, as the rain distribution across the American West becomes increasingly erratic, they will continue to grow in their abnormality, their freakish scale.
Once a wildfire has moved through an area, very little is left. Most of the shrub and grass has been burnt away. Tree trunks stand blackened, ‘the walking dead’. All the complex interrelation of the ecosystem, all its pulsating rhythms and movement of growth and decay has been translated into soot, into settled black ash. In a stable environment, the same plant and animal life would in time come back to these spaces. Now, with changing climates, the environment they grew up in may no longer welcome them back. Forests are replaced by more adaptable, rapidly-spreading shrub or grasses; habitats first burnt away and then irreplaceably lost.
It is not only the environments and habitats that are lost and changed. I am currently reading David Farrier’s new book, Footprints. It is very good, a brilliant part of the new thinking into the marks we are leaving on this planet that are stretching into deep time, about how we have made ourselves stick and last forever. Wildfires seem like the part of climate breakdown that are the antithesis of that. They are more like our erasure, a violent scrubbing out, a burning away.
Fire in Paradise is a 2019 documentary that revolves around the town of Paradise, California and the damage that the Camp Fire of 2018 caused there. It was the deadliest US wildfire since 1918. Driven by strong winds and a drought, over the course of a morning the fire emerged from the woodlands surrounding the town and razed it. At least eighty-five people died. More than eighteen thousand structures were destroyed. Fifty-two thousand people were evacuated. The documentary is very well executed, grim viewing, loaded with the personal trauma that will become increasingly familiar as this century goes on and as the spawl of climate breakdown becomes increasingly, brutally domestic.
The footage is wild, movie-like. There are videos taken on phones where people are just surrounded by fire, rows of cars drowning in flames. We see dashcams where embers skitter and flow across the road. A Paradise resident, Joy Beeson, compares the scenes to something out of the Book of Revelation and this feels true beyond the fire and hell visuals. This event is world-ending for little town. The final third of the documentary shows the destruction and its impacts on the people that lived here. Drone footage shows cars completely blackened, with any distinguishing paint burnt off. The houses have been reduced to chimney stacks and the buildings foundations are bare, skeletal remains. The intense heat has twisted the metals that are left behind so that they are left like contorted, soot-covered sculptures. The fire has stripped away everything that is personal, anything that constitutes the people that lived there now just ash and soot-black metal. With their town destroyed, the people of Paradise effectively became refugees, dispersed around the county and the state that is at this point the world’s fifth biggest economy. What happens to these up-rooted people. Where will they be in the future, this early wave of climate refugees. With everything taken away from you and moving into an increasingly unstable future, living in a country fresh from the easy-answer demagoguery of Trump, where do you turn?
More so than other climate-driven disasters, we have become accustomed to each summer seeing news reels regurgitating footage of towering flames, of landscapes left blackened, animals stuck in fences, trauma rendered in soot and ash. Here on a wet, Northern European coast, this is how I experience this strand of climate breakdown. This is part of why the footage from Fire in Paradise is both near-alien and familiar. The question for filmmakers is how to translate this new scale and intensity, the aesthetic and the trauma of the fires.
Paul Dano’s 2018 film Wildlife uses wildfire quite delicately. In this family drama, the blaze burns largely off-screen. It is a background tension and violence that the deeply personal story is scored against. Also set in Montana, the film follows a family’s disintegration in the early sixties, parents arguing with ashen skies building behind them. The father loses his job and, mired in a desperation for some purpose and validation, signs up to go away and fight a wildfire that is burning through the state. The left behind wife and son drive out one day. They leave town, following roads winding through the Montana hills, out towards where the smoke always grows from the horizon and blends into the constant grey cloud, past the firefighting camp where ashen faced men stand by battered vehicles, to the fire frontier. Standing next to the car, the son stands and looks up at the forest in flames, told by his mum to ‘see what it feels like’, to see what his dad ‘finds so important’. The sound of the fire rolls like constant, heavy traffic off-screen. The boy stands and looks at the hillside crawling with flames. The camera focuses on him, a softly lit cherubic face with fire reflected in eyes half-full with tears; a tender vulnerability before the implacability of the fire front. The camera slowly pans back and up, letting the scale of the fire fill the screen, like you are looking up at a god with the volume of it surrounding you, the trees growing in their flames. Personal trauma is reflected back in the fire; family disintegration visually mapped onto trunks splitting, leaves burning. The film is a tender interweaving of domestic drama and fire, the characters’ lives moving on around the fringes of this blaze, familiar new lives of the fire frontier, the cultural product of a country and region where wildfires are an increasingly familiar part of everyday life.
These are small, fragmentary examples of wildfires being depicted on screen that struggle to really engage with their new magnitude. David Wallace-Wells writes that “American wildfires now burn twice as much land as they did as recently as 1970. By 2050, destruction from wildfires is expected to double again, and in some places within the United States the area burned could grow fivefold. For every additional degree of global warming, it could quadruple.” The conditions that are fuelling these fires are of course not confined to the states. Rainfall globally is becoming increasingly erratic as temperatures creep up. In the coming years, I feel we will see more films that wrestle with the legacy of these new wildfires, a growing aesthetic response to these traumas that now yearly burn their way across the American West, films that are cultural products of the grinding toll of these accumulating disasters, created by the major studios that are positioned so close to the fires.
Wildlife, like Those Who Wish Me Dead and Sheridan’s other work, is a film of frontiers, of boundaries, and the transgressing of these boundaries. An increasingly popular phrase in these discussions is the ‘wildland-urban interface’ - the intersection of where civilisation and the non-human meet. In the newly unstable environment, defining, definable lines are increasingly unclear. The Camp Fire that tore through the town of Paradise grew in woodlands and the wild, and then leapt into homes. As the fires grow, they increasingly come into contact with settlements and are able to move quicker, propelled by their own heat. Rural towns are already at risk, which cities are next? Last summer, the skies of San Francisco were a sci-fi orange, a whole metropolitan area busy with the future converted into visual dystopia by smoke thousands of feet up in the sky. The fires will continue to grow throughout this century, will become even more regular and routine in their destruction across the American West. Climate breakdown is not just a problem for the future or for equatorial, developing nations; it is already deeply permeated into people’s lives in these the richest parts of the United States. It is everywhere, becoming increasingly urgent, increasingly personal with each new year.
The newsletter is going to be taking a short break for the next two months while I focus on other projects and will return for Season Two in September.
Thank you for reading along so far. Any feedback feel free to shout it at me here or over email/twitter. Stay safe and enjoy the rest of the summer.
Thanks again.