Two films that best capture the surreal terror of the Los Angeles fires

Picture this: You're at a party celebrating the December holiday season in sunny Los Angeles. Or maybe you're on a date in the heart of the city, feeling the sparks and beginning to hope for the romantic promise that the next few hours might hold. After a few hours, the city around you has changed forever. If previously your thoughts were about everyday frivolity and dreams of the future, you are suddenly trapped in an actual nightmare. The future is no longer a glittering horizon that you look forward to. Instead, you're frozen in the never-ending Now, a state of readiness and alertness that both invigorates and drains you at the same time. Your mind is rushing to prioritize people, places, and the most moving things while your physical body is in a bubble of inertia. When you wake up (if you're sleeping at all), you're either greeted by a terrifying pearl or, if you're one of the lucky ones, a red sun: a normally glowing yellow orb that's gone sour. from a thick substance blocking it.

These events are all that I and thousands of other residents of the city of Los Angeles have experienced over the past several days as the wildfires that started on Tuesday, January 7th began to burn out of control of the city. As many people across the country know by now, wildfires, particularly the Palisades and Eaton fires, have destroyed dozens of homes throughout the Los Angeles area and displaced hundreds more. The destruction and damage caused by these (at press time) still raging flames is unprecedented. While the ramifications of all of this are still very much in question, my friend and colleague BJ Colangelo are rightly sounding the alarm against predatory landowners like last year's Twisters.

Except for clear and present dangers like capitalist vultures, all of us who live in Los Angeles are still worried about being stuck in the dire limbo of disaster. Two of my favorite 1980s genre films best capture this surreal horror we're experiencing right now: 1984's “Night of the Comet” and 1988's “Miracle Mile.” Both films accurately portray the mix of cataclysmic incident and everyday banality we live through, and how the landscape of the City of Angels can so subtly yet so quickly turn menacing and destitute.

Cinematographically, Los Angeles is no stranger to disaster. There are movies like “Volcano” and “San Andreas,” which feature destructive forces of nature attacking a city, which then transitions from moments of tragedy to moments of resilience and triumph—the likes of Tommy Lee Jones and The Rock pulling people out of harm's way. As thrilling an experience as these movies are, they're not exactly reality for most of us regular folks. As it turns out, disaster is rarely as clearly defined as in a typical disaster movie.

The experience of how a disaster can strike you and invade your normal life is much stranger than you might expect. As strange and disturbing as the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak was, the fact that everyone in the world was experiencing some version of the crisis made it easier to overcome. The films “Night of the Comet” and “Miracle Mile” perfectly capture the feeling of living through a localized disaster, depicting how the streets of Los Angeles can subtly turn into a real nightmare in an alarmingly short period of time. With COVID, the threat could be strangely invisible; even I, a New Yorker at the time, shuddered at the sight of hundreds of bodies being carted away from hospitals. With these fires, almost every Angeleno has seen flames raging in the distance, and even if they haven't, we can't avoid seeing the smoke.

In “Night of the Comet,” sisters Reggie (Katherine Mary Stewart) and Sam (Kelly Maroney) wander the streets of a changed downtown Los Angeles after a comet passes by, leaving everyone who saw it vaporized into dust. A cloud of cometary material and dust in the atmosphere is turning sunny Los Angeles skies an ominous red, the exact color of my bedroom as the sun struggled to peek through the clouds Wednesday morning. In “Wonder Mile,” Harry (Anthony Edwards) and Julie's (Mare Winningham) late-night date is postponed when Harry intercepts a payphone call at a diner indicating that a nuclear missile is headed for Los Angeles, setting off a chain reaction. response to events where a group of people struggle to obtain verifiable information about impending destruction. This drama, in my case, played out in my conversations with friends on the cinephile Discord channel, a couple of hundred of us trying to help each other get the facts when official media sources were either misinformed or woefully behind. The worst of it happened when the emergency warning system mistakenly sent out several county-wide evacuation orders. So some of us had a similar experience to poor Harry and Julie, running around town feeling like Chicken Little, while others were oblivious to their own business.

Of course, it is important to keep both “Night of the Comet” and “Wonder Mile” in their historical context. As both films are 1980s genre films, they are parables about the impending nuclear doom that the Cold War threatened. The metaphorical fire of this threat had ebbed and flowed since the 1950s. By the 1980s, people were convinced that the sword of Damocles was about to fall on them, especially as the actions of the Reagan administration renewed tensions between the United States and Russia. Just as it's human nature to persevere believing the worst will never happen, it's also very human to have an unshakable feeling that eventually the other shoe will drop, and the 80s was the decade when that feeling started to take over. . As we know, the shoe dropped at the end of the decade—only it wasn't mutually destructive.

Each generation has its own cross to bear; every man goes through his “interesting times,” as that infamous apocryphal saying goes. Although we've been in a pandemic (and technically still are), it seems the most pressing crisis of our generation, our Cold War, is climate change. The LA fires only confirm this. The disaster is the latest case of alarmingly unusual weather behavior, and while it's certainly not the only factor driving wildfires out of control, it's a major reason. Scientists and experts tasked with monitoring and predicting the changing conditions on our planet have been sounding the alarm about climate change for almost as long as the Cold War itself. And while humanity can directly choose whether to go to nuclear war, humanity does not have nearly as much control over climate change.

Despite being apocalyptic tales, Night of the Comet and Wonder Mile have two different endings in terms of tone. The former is a satire of a satire, the latter a tragedy, and while I won't spoil the finale of either film, you can guess what that means. However, both films have a clear sense that the world has been forever, irrevocably changed by these events. The fact that you can never go back to the way things were is basically understood by most people, but it's still surreal to see the Old World and the New happening in real time.

What lies ahead is still up in the air; as I said, at the time of this writing, the incident itself is still ongoing. However, the ripples of change are already being seen in the rest of the world, and for every vile insult hurled at Angelenos by rotten, ignorant keyboard jockeys, there are people all over the world sharing in ways to help, and generous people actually donating and helping in their own way. Despite the cautionary tales, neither “Night of the Comet” nor “Miracle Mile” is cynical at heart — humanity, or at least some beautiful memory of it, manages to survive. Both films have an emphasis on younger generations leading the way, or at least a sense of the need for renewal to avoid the kind of dead end they portray. It seems to me that in our real world some form of regeneration is imminent. After all, the city of Los Angeles is known for restoration — Johnie's Coffee Shop, the actual diner where they shot much of the movie “Miracle Mile,” is down the road from where I live, boarded up and abandoned. The streets of DTLA where Reggie and Sam tested their guns may not look the same 40 years later, but they remain the same.

Los Angeles may be hurting right now, but like a phoenix will rise from the ashes. This is no doubt a horrendous failure, but with all due respect to Harry, it's not the bug's turn yet. As Sam notes, “the burden of civilization is on us, okay?” And it's quite a b-chin.

If you want to help those affected by the SoCal wildfires, here is a list of resources.