I grew up in Los Angeles. I grew up first in a canyon enclave minutes from the beach, then on the wide streets of the Pacific Palisades. This means I've spent my life watching my hometown destroyed on screen. In the movies and series, Los Angeles has endured meteor strikes, alien invasions, fires, floods, zombies, volcanoes, earthquake catastrophes, and multiple sharknadoes. Living in Los Angeles as a movie fan or TV viewer is like watching Hollywood rejoice in its ruins. We often shared that joy.
Mike Davis, a scholar who has cataloged urban destruction in fiction, wrote in 1998 that “no other city evokes such dark joy.” Davis dates the earliest example to 1909. Modern shows like Fox's insane premiere drama 9-1, which besieged the city with earthquakes, landslides, and the destruction of the Santa Monica Pier by tidal waves, certainly took their toll. Please keep coming. Fire has taken on a shine of its own, spawning dramas like “LA Firefighters” and “Emergency: LA,” the docu-drama “LA Fire & Rescue,” and a wealth of B-movies like “Heat Twister.”
“A city on fire is the most profound image of Los Angeles,” Joan Didion wrote in an essay titled “Santa Annas.” Several friends sent me this information this week as wildfires ravaged the city, displacing more than 150,000 residents so far. But footage, and disaster movies and very special episodes, never prepare us for real disaster. There's no resolution at the end of time, no bittersweet song that plays during the credits sequence.
When I was in high school in the 1990s, nearby Malibu experienced fires, floods, and major earthquakes. If these disasters were natural, then there was also the man-made disaster of the Los Angeles riots sparked by the acquittal of the police officer who was videotaped beating Rodney King. The riots began in South Central, miles away and off the highway, but the smell of smoke filled the entire city for several days.
To our callous teenage eyes, these catastrophes felt cinematic, Biblical, something out of The Four Horsemen. “This is the apocalypse,” my friends and I joked with each new disaster. “No one should live here.” But to be honest, in a way it was exciting to live so close to danger, so close to what we've seen on screen. Hollywood had imagined them, and this time they became reality, but not too real. The worst thing about the Northridge earthquake was books falling off the shelves in the school library. I put them back.
A few years ago, during the pandemic lockdown, I found a strange sense of comfort in 9-1-1. I left Los Angeles for college and then moved to New York City, where I spent most of my adult life. As a result, the show's imagined disasters felt ridiculous and distant. And like the 1970s “Emergency!” series that pioneered first responder dramas, “9-1-1” teaches that every disaster has a neat solution, and that police officers, firefighters and paramedics It suggested that medical technicians could handle any catastrophe.
It was strange to watch this real-life disaster unfold from about 3,000 miles away. On Wednesday, I rushed to a media event holding my phone in front of my face and playing a Fox 11 video of the local library burning down. Palisades Charter High School, my alma mater and the setting for many Hollywood productions, was also destroyed by fire.
Later that same night, I returned home to find that most of my former Palisades neighborhood was gone. The seaside restaurant where I spent my adolescence relaxing and the gas station where I bought cigarettes were all burnt down. For a while, on Thursday morning, the New York Times homepage posted a video of the ruins of Via de la Paz, where my family lived for more than 20 years until the late 2000s. “Look,” I thought gloomily as the video of the city played on repeat. “You're famous.”
It's another thing to imagine a disaster of this magnitude while watching the insane “9-1-1” crossover. It's another thing to witness the real version, even in a safe, abstracted place. I wish I could have been there to help. I'm glad I wasn't there. It somehow feels very personal, but I know none of this is about me. My social media feed is a scroll of friends waiting to evacuate, friends being evacuated, and friends who have already lost their homes. The places that made me, those are lost too.
Once again, Los Angeles is starring in a thriller, a disaster show. It's a monster movie about climate change, and there's a certain kind of arrogance in believing that a city on a fault line so close to such beautiful and dangerous nature is safe.
I want the end credits to play now.
