Believing that a civil war occurred in the early 1970s, and that the show All in the Family communicated persuasively to the combatants and affected the outcome, James Poniewozik wrote in Time magazine on June 22, 2001:

Archie Bunker spoke to a whole country engaged in a second American civil war, fighting bitterly in their own living rooms with people they loved nonetheless. If he was too unreconstructed to admire, he was too real to dismiss: if you could not see yourself, or at least someone you loved, in Archie Bunker, his performance would have been meaningless, a feel-good tonic for a few progressive troops.

By making us feel for Archie Bunker, Carroll O’Connor made us think about Archie Bunker. 

What Poniewozik considered the circa-1971 “second American civil war” is rivaled or exceeded by the painful divisions that run through America and the West today. American family members are now pitted against one another, dueling across “living rooms,” grouped by political factions, and separated by, of all things, views on the weather.

All in the Family reportedly “helped” religion, sex, war, and race relations in the ’70s. (Ask Larry Elder how well the diminishment of fatherhood, since then, has helped race relations, incidentally.) Yet in 2023, it’s climate that makes one “too unreconstructed to admire.” It’s the old crabs, see, who are repulsed by compressing life into the confines of metropolises and townhomes, reject planned fuel cost increases, defend rural farms, dislike enforcement of weird new diets, and have a distaste for globalization’s demographic, socioeconomic shifts that inflate prices and depress wages until an expansive and free life is outside of affordability.

The establishment media evidently deems “fire season” to be this decade’s “superstorms,” a new buzzword in the climate scare. From the loss of Paradise, California, to a dreadful, fatal blaze; to the blanketing of the northeast with smoke from the burning Canadian Shield forests; to the brutally horrifying deaths of children and the seemingly intentional breakdown of society’s entire safety, firefighting, and rescue capabilities in Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii, a cause of conflagrations supposedly owing to motors and farms is the shock-narrative in the message-war between the worldviews. Al Gore has stepped back from the communications front of this war to make room for other soldiers for now, but arson and human error are the major causes, and carbon dioxide remains as crucial to all plants, vegetation, and food crops as ever before.

On Fire enters the fray, and the movie world, by volunteering to carry the mantle of climate urgency signaling. The production has released promotional literature that laments devastating losses in worsening wildfire disasters and, further, says:

At its core, On Fire not only captivates with its compelling narrative that ignites hope amidst adversity, but it also delivers a profound message addressing pressing global climate concerns. The film poignantly tackles the urgent issue of the climate crisis while also paying homage to the unwavering courage and support of our fearless firefighters. 

From languaging like that, we would expect On Fire to implicate a human-caused climate crisis as the underlying force for the devastation and injustice suffered by wildfire victims. If the acting performances in On Fire are anywhere close to the way Carroll O’Connor acted as Archie Bunker, then the film looks poised to “speak to the whole country” on climate, as its own promos say, and to be a viable “feel-good tonic” for those who want to march in desperation over climate urgency. 

But is it?

The Story

Actor-director Peter Facinelli noticeably portrays Dave Laughlin, a hard-working man from a small town in northern California woodlands, with an echo of Archie Bunker. Dave is achieving (barely) adequate pay for his family, but he can still be bumbling in situations, something Sarah (Fiona Dourif), his wife, reminds him. Dave is not a definitive hero to her, though she loves him in his season of mediocrity and even in her concern about economic meagerness while she is pregnant. 

Dave also quips with a Bunker-esque tongue while playfully acting the fool or the “old man,” endearingly, with his competitive cross-country running high-school son, Clay (Asher Angel). Clay looks up to Dave — yet also past him. A scholarship to university for his talents is on Clay’s mind, and he sees that his dad has no real power to directly affect his athletic destiny.

Meanwhile, Dave is poignantly aware that a farewell to his infirm and geriatric father, George Laughlin (Lance Henriksen), is drawing nearer. As Grandpa George longs mournfully to go into the hereafter with his deceased wife (Dave’s mother), the role of family patriarch is more entirely being handed to Dave in a potent symbol of a new generation’s coming to the fore.

Whether Facinelli achieves an O’Connor-level performance as Dave Laughlin or not, Facinelli’s joking and flashing his bashful, country, in-the-know smiles with those he loves evokes the audience to feel for a man “too real to dismiss.”

Dialogues near the opening set the stage for greater purposes to come into the Laughlin family. Will George take drastic action to depart from this realm, thrusting Dave into accelerated grieving and metamorphosis, or will the elder Lauglin regain composure and patience and live out the reason for his long life naturally? Can Clay get the leg up in life that he desires, as the son of a man like Dave?

On Fire Versus All in the Family

You can “see yourself, or at least someone you love” in the Dave, Sarah, and Clay. Because you feel for the Laughlins, now you think about the Laughlins. The development of what’s meaningful for the Laughlins might make On Fire influential in ways yet to be appreciated.

The global media culture will expect a reckoning from the Laughlin family, repenting for living in the country with a work truck used for a life on the land. A presumed atonement would be retreating to high-density housing near public transit and swearing off the combustion engine. While Archie Bunker believed in “God, family, and country,” modern families learn to “shrink their footprint.”

Archie Bunker saw a dramatically changing period that put warring viewpoints in his face. Bunker witnessed that “civil war” of the ’70s “generation gap” and fought his conservative battle. Whether Archie’s character wanted to or not, the production of All in the Family (and its notoriously activist co-stars) pulled America into Marxist cultural reforms such as transforming Dad from “knowing best” to “knowing nothing.”

The Laughlins, too, face dramatic times when the world they live in is subjected to fundamental transformation. Facing a firestorm, Dave, Sarah, and Clay fight their way through spine-tingling danger. As the Laughlins and overstretched fire rescue teams heroically struggle in their barnburner of a “war,” how “reconstructed” do they come out of it?

Well, the ending of On Fire is the best part. 

After a deadly, life-altering ordeal with “pressing global climate concerns,” the remaining members of the Laughlin family aren’t exactly retreating to the dense city while singing a paeon to electric vehicles, eating bugs, and fewer children. 

One method perfected in All in the Family was to make a mockery of the fundamentally untransformed.

In On Fire, let’s say the Laughlin family laughs last.

On Fire is exclusively released in theaters on Sept. 29.