When the Hollywood sign was first unveiled in 1923, it read “Hollywoodland.” Surrounded by sage scrub, chaparral and invasive and highly flammable eucalyptus trees, this kitschy, iconic and somewhat absurd marker consisting of 50-foot-tall letters spanning nearly 500 feet atop Mount Lee, has signified Los Angeles and its associated associations for more than a century . But in some ways, that missing syllable points to an even deeper truth about this region. The word “Hollywoodland” is somewhat fantastical, evoking a Southern California that is as mythical as it is factual – a fitting name for the forge of American dreams, a place designed to generate spectacle and stories, the creator of chimeras of cellulose nitrate in the form of physical film is often just as flammable as the illusions it conveys. A kingdom of images for an art form that, if not invented by the Americans, at least came into its own here, at the western end of the continent. In 1923, Los Angeles was an arid, desert city with Art Deco skyscrapers and modernist homes clinging to the hills of its rough neighborhoods, an urban landscape of coyotes and bobcats. Today, the city of Los Angeles is home to nearly four million people, and the county a whopping 10 million. And it’s on fire.
This winter has been unusually dry, the most parched nine-month period since irrigation turned this region into an oasis in the 19th century. The low humidity and near-hurricane gusts of the Santa Ana winds meant that anything – a spark from a bonfire, some fireworks, a cigarette – could have ignited the blaze of the Palisades Fire, the Hurst Fire and the Eaton Fire. of writing have more than destroyed 12,000 structures, approximately 100,000 people displacedAnd 24 killedwith the latter number undoubtedly expected to rise. As the fires continue to rage, nearly a week after they started on Tuesday, January 7, the rest of the United States is watching in horror at images that ironically, or appropriately, look like they came out of a Hollywood movie.
A fiery, windy avenue, cast in the red glow of sacrifice, punctuated by burning palm trees, the emblems of paradise. A mansion glowing from its own combustion; a house that, judging by what remains of its form, might have been a Tudor, an ersatz piece of Californian Anglophilia. A burned-out street littered with charred cars that looks like it’s set in Mount Saint Helena or Montserrat, a modern-day Pompeii. Porsches, Audis and BMWs left on Sunset Boulevard, that avenue of dreams, are being bulldozed to make way for emergency vehicles. The skyline of downtown Los Angeles, recognizable only by the familiar circular facade of the US Bank Tower, is bathed in an unearthly, lurid, hellish crimson light and a menacing sun hangs above. These are images released by the Associated Press, Getty and CNN, but they are reminiscent of films like Independence Day (1996), Volcano (1997), and San Andreas (2015). Over the course of a century, Los Angeles provided us with the visual vocabulary of its own destruction.
Not since San Francisco burned down after an earthquake in 1906, or perhaps even as early as Chicago in 1871, has an American metropolis experienced such total destruction by fire. In our hubris we had assumed that the age of steel and reinforced concrete made the threat of wayward embers moot. In an age of climate change – made possible by oil and gas, reinforced concrete and steel, the same technology that once protected us from nature – this is clearly no longer the case. More than 40,000 hectares of the area have been burned at an estimated cost (to date) of $250 billion dollars. The Pacific Palisades – a neighborhood of masterpieces of modernist and medieval architecture that was a refuge for German intellectuals fleeing the Nazi regime, including novelist Thomas Mann, philosopher Theodor Adorno and playwright Bertolt Brecht – has been destroyed. The evacuation zone includes iconic landmarks ranging from the Walk of Fame and the TCL Chinese Theater to the Brown Derby and the Griffith Observatory. Celebrities, the Olympians of American popular culture, have seen their homes destroyed by flames. Hundreds of thousands of middle-class and working-class Angelenos in neighborhoods like Altadena have lost everything, and insurance companies are they are already starting to devise a strategy to prevent claims from being paid.
This being the United States in 2025, the fires have already been politicized, with some on the right falsely claiming that Diversity, equity and inclusion drive hiring initiatives in the fire service for the size of the fire, and conspiracy theorists from across the political spectrum claiming that errant arsonists are deliberately burning down the city. But the only scheme needed to explain all this is reality: the world’s temperature is rising at a terrible rate, creating the exact conditions for this inevitable horror. If you need to find a more precise culprit, consider that the (Democratic) mayor of Los Angeles increased the police budget by $126 million, while cutting the fire department budget by $17.5 million. in its most recent city budget.
Geographer Mike Davis, the great theorist of Los Angeles, wrote in his classic City of Quartz: Unearthing the Future in Los Angeles (1990), that it is not just any city. “On the contrary, it is a commodity, and has been so since 1888; something to be advertised and sold to the people of the United States, such as cars, cigarettes, and mouthwash. Hollywood did indeed build the dream of American greatness: Warner Brothers, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Paramount created a pantheon – Clark Gable and Cary Grant, Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland and Elizabeth Taylor – essential to the production of the so-called “American century.‘When looking Casablanca (1942), it was not Morocco that the audience saw, but Burbank; viewers of Gone with the wind (1939) looked not at Atlanta, but at Pasadena; Star Wars (1987-present) was filmed not long ago in a galaxy far, far away, but in Death Valley. The burning of Sunset Boulevard suggests the twilight of that story, and perhaps the beginning of a darker one. The machine that produced such dreams is now creating environmental nightmares.
While scrolling through social media yesterday, I stopped at a gruesome photo of the Hollywood sign, the brush behind it burning, glowing red through the “Y” and the “O,” as the fire consumed it. The caption read: “I’m sorry to say, but this is symbolic of what is coming to all of America.” Stunned, I stopped to ponder the meaning of such a blazing milestone – and then a few seconds of research confirmed most Hollywood results: the image was generated by artificial intelligence. A trick, an illusion, a fantasy, as it has always produced. As in the great truths of the films, what is depicted has not (yet) happened – but that does not make the feeling expressed any less true.
