I grew up in Los Angeles, first in a canyon enclave minutes from the beach, then on a wide street in the Pacific Palisades. This means that I have spent my life watching my hometown destroyed onscreen. In films and series, Los Angeles has endured meteor strikes, alien invasions, fires, floods, zombies, volcanoes, seismic catastrophe, multiple Sharknados. To live in Los Angeles as a moviegoer or a TV watcher is to see Hollywood delight in its ruin. Often I shared that delight.
“No other city seems to excite such dark rapture,” Mike Davis, a scholar who taxonomized the city’s destruction in fiction, wrote in 1998. Davis dates the earliest examples to 1909. Contemporary shows like Fox’s bonkers first-response drama “9-1-1,” which has besieged the city with an earthquake, a landslide and the destruction of the Santa Monica Pier by tidal wave ensure that the hits keep coming. Fire exerts its own dazzle, birthing shows like “L.A. Firefighters” and “Emergency: L.A.” as well as the docudrama “L.A. Fire & Rescue,” as well as a wealth of B-movies such as “Heat Twister.”
“The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself,” Joan Didion wrote in an essay titled “The Santa Anas.” Several friends forwarded it to me this week, as wildfires burned through the city, displacing more than 150,000 residents so far. But images — and disaster movies and very special episodes — never prepare us for real devastation. There is no resolution at the end of the hour, no bittersweet song to play over a credit sequence.
There were fires in the 1990s in nearby Malibu, when I was a high school student, and also floods and a significant earthquake. If these disasters were natural, there was also the man-made calamity of the Los Angeles riots, spurred by the acquittal of police officers who had been videotaped beating Rodney King. Those riots began in South Central, many miles and freeways distant, but for several days the whole city smelled like smoke.
To our callous teenage eyes, these catastrophes felt cinematic, biblical, Four Horsemen stuff. “This is the apocalypse,” friends and I would joke about each new disaster. “No one should live here.” But in some ways, if I’m honest, it was exciting to live in proximity to danger, so close to things I had seen onscreen. Hollywood had imagined them, and now they were made real but not too real. The worst of the Northridge Earthquake was that it knocked the books from the shelves of our school library. We put them back.
A few years ago, during the pandemic lockdowns, I found a strange comfort in “9-1-1.” I had moved away from Los Angeles for college and then to New York City, where I have spent most of my adult life. So the imagined disasters of the show felt silly, remote. And as with “Emergency!,” the 1970s series that pioneered first-responders drama, “9-1-1” suggested that every calamity had a tidy resolution, that police officers, firefighters and emergency medical technicians could handle any cataclysm.
It has been strange to watch this real disaster unfold from almost 3,000 miles away. On Wednesday, I hustled to a media event with my phone held in front of my face, playing and replaying a Fox 11 video of my local library burning to the ground. Palisades Charter High School, my mother’s alma mater and the site of many Hollywood productions, was also aflame.
Later that same night, back at home, I learned that most of my former neighborhood in the Palisades is now gone. A beachside restaurant where I lazed as an adolescent, the gas station where we bought cigarettes — these had burned, too. For a while, on Thursday morning, the New York Times homepage led with a video of the ruins of Via de la Paz, where my family lived for over 20 years until the late 2000s. ‘Look at you,’ I thought bleakly, as I played the video of the street repeatedly. ‘You’re famous.’
It is one thing, watching a delirious “9-1-1” crossover, to imagine calamity on this scale. It’s another to witness the real version, even at my safe, abstracted remove. I wish I were there to help. I am glad I am not there. I know that none of this is about me even as it feels somehow very personal. My social media feeds are scrolls of friends waiting to evacuate, of friends evacuating, of friends whose homes were already lost. The places that made me, those are lost too.
Once again, Los Angeles is starring in a thriller, a disaster show. A monster movie where the monster is climate change, with a dose of hubris for believing that a city on a fault line in such beautiful, perilous proximity to nature could ever be safe.
I would like the end credits to roll now.
