paradise lost/paradise regained
by
Douglas Messerli
Ron
Howard (director) Rebuilding Paradise / 2020 / I watched this film on
Laemmle’s (Los Angeles Laemmle theaters) Virtual Cinema on-line.
Film
director Ron Howard has for years made some of the most traditionally-crafted
of Hollywood pictures. Interestingly, however, in a few of his works such as Frost/Nixon
and now in his documentary of this year, Rebuilding Paradise, he
allows nature and those who inhabit it to provide the language of his movie—and
by language, I do not merely mean the characters’ everyday chatter, of which we
experience a great many passages throughout this film, but the complex
interplay of natural and man-made sounds which make up the first passages of
his newest film.
What Samuel Johnson wrote of Milton and
his Paradise Lost, if we simply change the subject of his sentence, “the
author Milton” to the fiery inferno itself with which this film begins, might
apply here as well. “[Nature] seems to have been well acquainted with [it’s] own
genius….: the power of displaying the vast, illuminating the splendid,
enforcing the awful, darkening the gloomy, and aggravating the dreadful.”
Los
Angeles Times critic Justin Chang captures it almost perfectly in the very
first paragraph of his July 31 review of the film:
The
sound of the wind is rarely as sinister as it is at
the beginning of Rebuilding Paradise,
Ron Howard’s
harrowing and heartrending new
documentary. The
loud 40-mph gusts we hear are a grim
omen, and they
soon merge with other noises—anxious
radio chatter,
screaming sirens, the crackle of flames,
the pop-pop
of exploding tires—to form a chorus of
fast-mounting
dread. Through it all we hear a
succession of human
voices, trying to remain steady but
finally abandoning
any pretense of calm: “Please, we need
your help,
Lord,” a woman prays. “I’m scared,”
another sobs.
“I’m scared.”
Indeed these and the many others the film
features should be frightened, as within just a few minutes on November 8, 2018
a fire on a far ridge rushes across the canyon, snapping down towering power lines—which
the local server, PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric) have reportedly turned
off, but have left flowing with electricity—closing off pre-planned routes of
escape, and allowing those who try to escape after being ineffectively alerted,
to fend for themselves as they and their families must speed through completely
darkened skies except for the endlessly crackling flames surrounding them.
85 others, some too old to run, many who
left just seconds too late, died in the fire, several in their cars and others
within their houses and other outbuildings to which they had retreated imagining
they might protect themselves. Deer, horses, and other animals, some of which
we observe in the flight I described above, were immolated. Over 14,000 homes disappeared
under the heat of the flames, while a few small neighborhoods were completely
spared. Yet the entire town with a population 26,218 people were dislocated as
the ashes continued to flare up for days, live wires piled up along the city’s
winding roads, and, as they later discovered, chemicals, both man-made and
created by nature, polluted their wells and other water sources—pollution that
might take as many as 25 years to completely clean up.
Most of the townspeople had loved their
mountainside “paradise” with the kind of passion one doesn’t often observe in
such communities. Some vowed to return despite the wavers in their voices and
the fears their words expressed; contrary neighbors declared there was no
possibility of return. Stowed up in small hotels, trailers, and other people’s
homes in nearby towns such as Chico, Oroville and elsewhere.
At the first town meeting weeks later, those
who wanted to rebuild gathered, angry at the turn of events, the lack of proper
escape routes, PG&G, and their increasingly tense relationships with FEMA (The
Federal Emergency Management Agency) who demanded a retreat from the properties
onto which citizens had moved temporary trailers and other housing units,
before they could begin the citywide clean-up.
No wonder Erin Brockovich, who had
famously fought and won against PG&E in the Hinkley case of 1993, showed
up, warning them of just how aggressively the huge power and electric company
would fight their case and insisting that they pick a seasoned lawyer.
PG&E eventually settled for 25
billion, but with some of that money going to local utilities and a substantial
amount to insurers covering other fires previous to the Camp Fire that
devastated Paradise, individuals had a difficult time in perceiving how much
they might each receive in order to rebuild. This was further muddied by the
fact that PG&E filed for bankruptcy.
Fortunately, this idyllic community was
not short on local heroes, particularly police officer Matt Gates whose endless
work to man, sometimes almost singled-handedly, what was left of his small
force, resulting a divorce from a wife who felt herself and children abandoned;
the town mayor, Steve “Woody” Culleton, who describes himself as the town drunk
until he sobered up and was elected to office, and who was one of the first of
the townspeople to file for the rights to rebuild his home; and school
superintendent Michelle John, who worked endlessly to keep the Paradise
students together while educating them in makeshift shopping center spaces and
other schools throughout the region. She, along with the help of her husband,
who died soon after from a heart attack caused, evidently, by the long hours
they both worked, was determined to have her high school students, almost every
one of whom she knew by name, to return to the one basically undamaged school building
and to hold the graduation ceremony, as they had in the past, in the high
school stadium.
In order to accomplish this, she and her
school board had to convince FEMA to allow them to remove most of the
surrounding birch trees, still perceived as a fire threat and with many of them
perceived as being in danger of falling.
Together, along with numerous other
community boosters, they rebuilt a sense of spirit and urgency to “rebuild”
their former Paradise. When the high school opened, she and her board expected a
2019-20 school season with about 600 students returning; 900 showed up.
Paradise, however, lost about 90% of its
population, with the current number of citizens amounting to about 4,600. And
despite the many figures throughout Howard’s film who express the joys of living
in a world into which most of them were born, it is clearly not everyone’s idea
of a paradisiacal community. It’s numerous annual city celebrations and parades
may seem slightly intrusive and purposely retro to some, like me, who view the
film. After all, my earliest years were spent in a town of 400, with the city
to which we later moved having a population of 15,000 when I grew up.
The
citizens, before the fire, were mostly white, although there do appear to several
Hispanic families at 7.0% of the population. In the 2010 census, Paradise
reported 92% of its population as white, 0.4% as black, 1.1% as Native America,
1.3% as Asian, and 1.6% as Pacific Islander.
44% of the town’s population in the 2010
census represented married couples, with 21.6% having children under the age of
18 living in their homes. 11% had a female homeowner with no husband present,
while 4.3% were owned by males with no wife. Only 0.8% represented themselves
as same-sex married couples.
In short, this town consisted of
basically white, married families, many of whom had other family members, parents,
uncles, aunts, and grown-up children living nearby.
Finally, even those who, by film’s end,
have returned know the odds they face—with rising temperatures, canyons full of
firs and other older trees, as well, most particularly, stuffed with small
replants which served as fodder to sweep the fire to Paradise at such an
alarming rate—that despite their enthusiasm for staying put, there may be tragic
fires in their or their children’s future.
One young male homeowner, as his eyes
swept over the hills below, reminisced (my words summarizing his statements):
These were all cherry trees which blossomed each year for a brief period of
time. I didn’t have to go to Japan to see them, I watched them from my patio
and my bedroom window. When I rebuild I will replant all the ones I lost.
Despite this lovely film’s title, we
cannot know for certain whether or not the Paradise these citizens recall can
truly be “regained.” But for them, we can only share their sorrow for their
lost past and through our empathy wish them the best in rebuilding the world
they so loved.
Los
Angeles, August 7, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (August 2020).
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