When the Hollywood sign was first unveiled in 1923, it read “Hollywoodland.” Surrounded by coastal sage scrub, chaparral, and invasive and highly flammable eucalyptus trees, that kitschy, iconic, and slightly absurd marker consisting of 50-foot-tall letters spread across nearly 500 feet atop Mount Lee has signified Los Angeles and its attendant associations for more than a century. But in some ways, that missing syllable gestures toward an even deeper truth about this region. The word “Hollywoodland” is slightly fantastical, evoking a southern California that’s as mythic as it is actual — a fitting moniker for the forge of American dreams, a place configured to generate spectacle and narrative, the maker of cellulose nitrate chimeras in the form of physical film often as combustible as the illusions it conveyed. A kingdom of imagery for an art form that, if not invented by Americans, was at least stoked to its potential here, at the western terminus of the continent. In 1923, Los Angeles was a dry, desert city of Art Deco skyscrapers and Modernist homes clinging to the hillsides of her craggy 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 stunning 10 million. And it’s on fire.
This winter has been unseasonably dry, the most parched nine-month period since irrigation transformed this region into an oasis in the 1800s. Low humidity and nearly hurricane-strength gusts from the Santa Ana winds meant that anything — a spark from a bonfire, some fireworks, a cigarette — could have lit the conflagrations of the Palisades Fire, the Hurst Fire, and the Eaton Fire, which as of writing have destroyed more than 12,000 structures, displaced around 100,000 people, and killed 24, with that last number undoubtedly expected to rise. As the fires continue to rage, nearly a week since they began on Tuesday, January 7, the rest of the United States looks on in horror at imagery that ironically, or appropriately, appears as if it came from a Hollywood movie.
A fiery, windswept avenue cast in the red luminescence of immolation, punctuated by burning palm trees, those emblems of paradise. A mansion that glows from its own incineration; a house that, based on what remains of its shape, may have been a Tudor, an ersatz bit of Anglophilia in California. A burnt street littered in charred cars that looks as if set in Mount Saint Helena or Montserrat, a modern Pompeii. Porsches, Audis, and BMWs abandoned on Sunset Boulevard, that avenue of dreams, being bulldozed to make way for emergency relief vehicles. The skyline of downtown Los Angeles, identifiable only because of the familiar circular facade of the US Bank Tower, bathed in an unearthly, lurid, hellish crimson light, a threatening sun hanging overhead. These are images released by the Associated Press, Getty, and CNN, but they recall movies 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 far back as Chicago in 1871, has an American metropolis faced such utter destruction from fire. In our hubris, we’d assumed that the era of steel and reinforced concrete made the threat of wayward embers moot. In an era of climate change — facilitated 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 acres of the area have burned at an estimated cost (so far) of $250 billion dollars. The Pacific Palisades — a neighborhood of Modernist and Midcentury architecture masterpiece homes that was refuge to German intellectuals fleeing the Nazi regime, including novelist Thomas Mann, philosopher Theodor Adorno, and playwright Bertolt Brecht — has been destroyed. The evacuation zone encompasses iconic landmarks ranging from the Walk of Fame and TCL Chinese Theater to the Brown Derby and Griffith Observatory. Celebrities, the Olympians of American popular culture, have seen their mansions razed by flames. Hundreds of thousands of middle-class and working-class Angelenos in neighborhoods like Altadena have lost everything, and insurance companies are already beginning to strategize to avoid paying out claims.
Because this is the United States in 2025, the fires are already politicized, with some on the right falsely claiming that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion hiring initiatives in the fire department are responsible for the extent of the conflagration, and conspiracy theorists from all across the political spectrum claiming that errant arsonists are intentionally burning the city down. But the only scheme needed to explain any of this is reality: The world’s temperature is increasing at a horrific rate, shaping the exact conditions for this inevitable horror. If you need to find something more exact to blame, consider instead that Los Angeles’s (Democratic) mayor increased the police department’s budget by $126 million while cutting the fire department’s by $17.5 million in her most recent city budget.
Geographer Mike Davis, the great theorist of Los Angeles, wrote in his classic City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990), that it is no mere city. “On the contrary, it is, and has been since 1888, a commodity; something to be advertised and sold to the people of the United States like automobiles, cigarettes, and mouth wash.” Indeed, Hollywood built 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 manufacturing the so-called “American Century.” When watching Casablanca (1942), it wasn’t Morocco audiences saw, but Burbank; viewers of Gone with the Wind (1939) weren’t looking at Atlanta, but Pasadena; Star Wars (1987–present) wasn’t filmed a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but in Death Valley. The burning of Sunset Boulevard suggests the dusk of that narrative, and perhaps the beginnings of a darker story. The machine that generated such dreams is now engineering environmental nightmares.
Doomscrolling through social media yesterday, I stopped at a horrific photo of the Hollywood sign, the scrub behind it burning, red glowing through the “Y” and the “O,” as fire consumed it. The caption read: “I regret to say, but this is symbolic of what’s coming to all America.” Stunned, I stopped to consider the significance of such a landmark burning — and then a few seconds of investigation confirmed that most Hollywood of results: The picture was generated by artificial intelligence. A trick, an illusion, a fantasy, as it has always produced. As in the great truths of the movies, what’s depicted has not (yet) happened — but that doesn’t make the sentiment expressed any less true.
