Postcard From the Edge: L.A. in the Line of Fire
For those of us who grew up on the Westside, an apocalypse was always on our minds. We couldn’t help it. We lived in the shadow of Mike Davis and Joan Didion, who loomed in the air like a pair of sour, secular saints. “The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself,” Didion wrote, and we believed it, not without reason. The city has burned, after all, at various historical flash points — the Watts Riots, the 1992 Uprising, the sundry Malibu fires over the years — and the image has reinscribed itself upon us over and over, as in Ed Ruscha’s legendary 1968 painting The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire. It’s almost like this city expected to burn, or as if — before it actually happened — we wanted it to, as if L.A.’s uncanny, impossible beauty also deserved to be punished.
Well. There’s more to any city than just its image of itself, more even — perhaps especially — to this one, which has been endlessly maligned over the years for its very fixation on image. That insult may or may not be true, but Los Angeles is also a very real place where working people live, people whose lives and livelihoods (and, yes, self-images, because one thing this city has always understood is that images are also actualities) have now been violently upended.
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What will become of us? I say “us” now because the one leveling fact is that everyone here — every plutocrat, every immigrant, every studio boss and every struggling writer — has been dragooned into a common experience whether we want to see it that way or not. Nature, like death, has a way of reminding us that we’re cut from a common cloth, and there’s no real way of partitioning ourselves from it. The lines we draw, of class and identity, are real enough, but we should all understand, even those of us who were lucky enough not to lose our houses (this time), that experience is coming for us all, and there is no way to outrun it or outthink it. The people in the Palisades Highlands know that now, and so do people in its Bluffs and Temescal Canyon’s Marquez Knolls, neighborhoods that were once, before what I’m tempted to call the Carusofication of the Palisades in general, solidly middle class.
The truth is, that middle class hasn’t entirely evaporated. Contrary to what one reads on the Internet, and in certain gleeful social media posts, the Pacific Palisades isn’t just an enclave of the wealthy. It is, or was, one in part, but the middle and working classes tend to be more resilient, more ingrained than is commonly supposed. Scratch the surface of the gentrified, Erewhoned Pacific Palisades of recent vintage, and you will find many of those people are still there. The Palisades Bowl Mobile Estates burned, too, and that was solidly middle class. And scattered throughout there are — were — single-family houses that hadn’t been torn down and replaced with McMansions, residents who have been there (as there are in Malibu and in my own native Santa Monica, too) for decades, since before the ferocious waves of gentrification that sprouted and have only increased since the Reagan ’80s, and who have simply refused to be displaced.
Refused, at least, until now. Because displacement has hit the Palisades rich and poor alike — whether temporarily or permanently, we shall see. But the Palisades I remember was sleepy, disjointed, somehow, from ordinary time. It was the province of skateboarders and surf punks, people who roamed Palisades Village (the neighborhood, not the mall) in tatty T-shirts and flip-flops, sporting tans they had earned without working on them, darting in and out of Mort’s, Village Books and Hacienda Galvan. It seemed that place was never going to change, not just in the delusional way we all tell ourselves things never will, but because if you lived in the Palisades, you belonged to the Palisades, and no one who didn’t live there would ever fully understand. Perhaps that was a lie — obviously, it was — but some portion of it remains the truth nevertheless, because that was the thing that united its residents, the ones who have remained through all the economic transformations of the past half-century. You had to live there. You did.
Will it recover? It’s too soon, again, to know. Will the movie business — and here I mean not really “The Business,” with its box office projections and viewing numbers and proprietary algorithms and dreams of endless consolidation, but rather the working people, the writers and producers and below-the-line people who actually make movies, many of whom lived in the Palisades — recover? That of course depends upon whom you ask. The truth is, these fires might be causally disconnected from those other things (at least in any direct A-to-B way) that have shrunk the pie in Hollywood over the past few decades — the corporate mergers and the rise of the streamers, which have dismantled the basic models of moviemaking — but will act, I suspect, in concert with them. What will happen is what has been happening: People will be driven from the business, and those who remain, most of them, will be paid even less, except for the vanishingly small few who will be paid more. That’s the path we’ve been on, and I suspect it will take more than a handful of measly fires around town, fires that are larger in aggregate than the entire island of Manhattan, to change that.
Then again, perhaps not. History teaches all of us that material conditions tend to force people’s hands (working people tend to understand this quicker than wealthy ones) and eventually things do have to change. “Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression,” the poet of another city, Saul Bellow, once wrote, “if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.” That’s true. And if you uproot one thing — this is me, not Bellow talking — you tend to uproot the adjoining likewise.
These fires are not an isolated event. Rich people and poor people are affected by them, and more to the point, they take place in the context of the climate crisis and of late capitalism, the economic situation in which we all live. One needn’t be any kind of visionary to see a connection between the Palisades Fire, or more specifically the gloating that has sprung up in certain corners of the Internet, and the support that has arisen around Luigi Mangione. And whichever way one feels about Mangione, that villain or folk hero depending on your perspective, the reasons for that support should at the very least be legible. Anyone who isn’t role-playing should hope for a far more serene solution (I certainly do) than letting a thousand Mangiones bloom, but events like these tend to create desperation, which isn’t exactly in short supply these days to begin with.
The alternative, the panacea for that desperation if there is one, is solidarity. Which is in short supply, but needn’t remain so, because events like this can create pockets of neighborliness, too. But anyone who thinks the egregious, and obvious, failures of both local and state government, which are legion, can be solved simply by installing an opposite-party alternative should think twice about that. Whatever solutions may exist to this crisis, again, if there are any, won’t be solved by following our more partisan impulses. Not at all.
Will Los Angeles recover? Yes and no. I’m no Nostradamus, either, but it’s easy to see — because we just had a world-altering pandemic a few years ago, too, after all — that people will go about their business. Residents will rebuild along the scars of what was there before, probably, and everyone will imagine, because we rarely learn our lessons, we can go on the way we used to. We are a forgetful people here in Lotusland, peculiarly so. But the city will never be the same, both because it’s always changing more than we care to admit and because it’s not just our physical geographies that have been devastated — not just Malibu and the Palisades, but Altadena, Pasadena, Encino and so on — but also our knowledge of what it means to inhabit them. This is a fragile place. And when you combine fragility with forgetfulness, you wind up with conditions that are conducive to eco- and other forms of catastrophe, but also — because forgetfulness is the root of hope, and because being forced into confrontation with that fragility might be the one thing that can save us — for other possibilities.
Mike Davis, the other esteemed prophet of modern Los Angeles, wrote almost a quarter century after his legendary essay, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” that “Californians are notoriously solipsistic about their disasters and tend to save their sympathy for themselves.” This is perhaps historically true, and there are other reasons besides economic disparity that some people have imagined a sense of justice, or at least of perverse satisfaction in the face of these fires. People might resent Los Angeles because it represents something about America they can’t quite accept and because — it must be admitted — we do have a tendency toward solipsism. They hate us because they ain’t us, but also because we pretend, erroneously, that we are not like them, and they are not like us. But this time, it doesn’t matter. Because the disasters that are happening all over, beyond this city’s geographic and imaginational borders, have taken an interest in everybody, whether or not we are able to find it within ourselves to breach the walls of our own self-involvement. They have arrived, and they will affect, like these fires do, each and every last one of us. All of us, really. All.
Below, read some of The Hollywood Reporter’s coverage of the L.A. Wildfires.
“I Lost My Home in the L.A. Wildfire. This Is What I’m Holding On To.”
A Lahaina Fire Survivor’s Step-by-Step Guide to Recovering From Tragedy and What to Do First
How Watch Duty Became an Essential Resource for Angelenos During Wildfires: “We Get Love Letters”
Ali MacGraw, Whose Malibu Home Burned Down in 1993, on Devastation of Loss and Best Ways Forward
‘Point Break’ Screenwriter Peter Iliff on What Pacific Palisades Means to Him and Westside Recovery
Palisades Fire: How the Will Rogers Ranch Horses Were Saved
The Long, Emotional Road to Rebuilding Mental Health After the Fires
Film and TV Production In L.A. Was Already Plummeting. Wildfires May Hasten the Exodus
When Even Indiana Jones Is a Climate Refugee
During Wildfires, Angelenos Sought Comfort in a Familiar Refuge: Movie Theaters
This story appeared in the Jan. 17 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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