Los Angeles Is Starring in an All-Too-Real Disaster Story

"To live in Los Angeles as a moviegoer or a TV watcher is to see Hollywood delight in its ruin. No other city seems to excite such dark rapture."

"The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself, Joan Didion wrote. Images and disaster movies never prepare us for real devastation; there's no resolution at the end of the hour."

"There were fires in the 1990s in nearby Malibu when I was a high school student, and also floods and a significant earthquake. These disasters felt routine, like part of our city’s identity."

"Mike Davis, a scholar who taxonomized the city's destruction in fiction, wrote in 1998 about how the earliest examples of cinematic catastrophe in Los Angeles date back to 1909."

Read at www.nytimes.com