![]() It’s a tough, smart, impressive movie, and one of its virtues is that Walker, a British transplant to Los Angeles, doesn’t seem to have figured it all out before she started shooting. In “Bring Your Own Brigade,” the director Lucy Walker doesn’t simply look at the fires she investigates and tries to understand them. In the age of enduring drought and climate change, the wildfires never seem to go out in the West, where so many burned in July that the smoke reached the East Coast. Decades later, she returned to the topic, using a phrase - “fire season” - that now feels obsolete. It was two years after the Watts uprising, but Didion wasn’t writing about race and reckoning, she was creating a poetically apocalyptic image of the city and, by extension, California. “The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself,” Joan Didion wrote in 1967. The air quality here is almost always poor, of course, but I tend to switch on the air filter only when the smoke comes, filling the basin and darkening the sky. A few times a year, I pull out our HEPA filter and begin reassuring worried friends and family members that, no, the city of Los Angeles, where I live, isn’t burning - or at least not yet. ![]()
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