January 9, 2025

‘YOU CAN TASTE THE FIRES IN THE BACK OF YOUR THROAT:’

Of course, there have been wildfires before. We’re accustomed to images of the Sepulveda Pass engulfed by flames. The specter of natural disaster has always lent Los Angeles an air of risk, a kind of sexiness.

There’s nothing sexy about right now. This is about the end of a place. In the future, the fires will be a demarcation. There will be the times before and after the disaster, and the one will be remembered as this happy, gauzy surreality that never was.

So far, the fires appear to have spared our house and all the things inside: photographs of my wife and me, bowls and pieces of jewelry that my wife has collected from around the world, the two knockoff paintings I bought in an alley in Shanghai, our children’s bedroom, documents, screens, kitchen appliances, books, lots of books filled with notes and scribblings from graduate school. All the unimportant things. If things get worse, I expect we’ll get a text from one of our neighbors.

No one knows what comes next. What Los Angeles will be. This is the city of unreality, and the city has always been comfortable in that unreal state—it has always felt at home in it. But now?

Now, everything feels dark and overwhelming. Los Angeles is cold and overcast and rainless. Everyone is asking where they’re supposed to go, and whether it’s safe to go home, and whether this street or building they used to know is still there. We are floating.

At Hollywood in Toto, Matt Morova explores “Why Blade Runner Ruled the ’80s:”

Even the violence we see in “Blade Runner” had been done before. Yet director Ridley Scott’s film rejuvenated and re-contextualized the archetype into something new and bold: A hardboiled detective in the future. It was revolutionary and disturbing, as all great art is.

2. Reagan’s 80s — The ’80s was the neon-glow decade. Think “Morning in America.” That “Shining City on the Hill.” Aerobics and health crazes (You think the latter is crazy now? Well, it all started in the ’80s).

We were collectively trying to shrug of inflation, malaise and the dirty hippy vibes of yore. It was slick, Miami Vice slick, with hot cars and hot babes and hot pants.

The Go-Gos and cocaine ruled … GO GO! The film’s dystopian vision couldn’t be more different.

Into that slick marketing campaign a shadow was born: Cyberpunk. A dark, dirty, grunge-y attack on corporate gloss.

Blade Runner was a dazzling preview of Los Angeles in 2019; like Pottersville in It’s a Wonderful Life, I wouldn’t want to live there, but it certainly would be intriguing to visit for a weekend. But the dystopian hellscape of Los Angeles in 2025 is far more terrifying than even Ridley Scott could have envisioned in the early 1980s.

And while it’s currently a hellscape, it’s soon to be purgatorial as well — “Gooder and Harder, California” has been a recurring headline here for several years, but L.A. citizens are going to see an entirely new level of Gooder and Harder in their efforts to rebuild:

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll