Imagine: you're out at a party, celebrating the December holiday season in sunny Los Angeles. Or perhaps you're on a date in the heart of the city, feeling sparks and beginning to be hopeful about the romantic promise the next few hours might hold. Then, a few short hours later, the city around you has changed irrevocably. Where your thoughts were previously of everyday frivolities and dreams of the future, you're suddenly trapped in an up-to-the-minute nightmare. The future is no longer a glittering horizon that you're looking forward to exploring. Instead, you're frozen in a never-ending Now, a state of readiness and alertness which is both invigorating and draining you simultaneously. Your mind rushes to prioritize people, places, and the most mobile of things while your physical body is in a bubble of inertia. When you wake up (if you sleep at all, that is), you're either greeted by a horrific inferno or, if you're one of the lucky ones, a red sun: the typically shining yellow orb turned sour by the plume of thick substance that's blocking it.
These events are all things that myself and thousands of other residents of the city of Los Angeles have experienced over the past several days, when the wildfires that started on Tuesday, January 7, began to burn out of the city's control. As many people around the whole country know by now, the fires, especially the Palisades and Eaton fires, have destroyed numerous homes of dozens throughout LA county, and have displaced hundreds more. The destruction and damage caused by these (at press time) still-raging blazes is unprecedented. While what the aftermath of all of this will be is still very much in question, my friend and colleague BJ Colangelo is rightfully already sounding the alarm against predatory land owners like the kind seen in last year's "Twisters."
Other than clear and present dangers like those capitalist vultures, all of us who live in LA are still concerned with being stuck in the disaster's eerie limbo. Two of my favorite genre films from the 1980s happen to best capture this surreal terror that we're currently living through: 1984's "Night of the Comet" and 1988's "Miracle Mile." Both movies accurately depict the mixture of cataclysmic incident and everyday banality that we're living through, as well as how the landscape of the City of Angels can so subtly but so quickly turn ominous and destitute.