The Two Movies That Best Capture The Surreal Terror Of The LA Fires

Imagine: you’re out at a party, celebrating the December holiday season in sunny Los Angeles. Or perhaps you’re on a date in the heart of the city, feeling sparks and beginning to be hopeful about the romantic promise the next few hours might hold. Then, a few short hours later, the city around you has changed irrevocably. Where your thoughts were previously of everyday frivolities and dreams of the future, you’re suddenly trapped in an up-to-the-minute nightmare. The future is no longer a glittering horizon that you’re looking forward to exploring. Instead, you’re frozen in a never-ending Now, a state of readiness and alertness which is both invigorating and draining you simultaneously. Your mind rushes to prioritize people, places, and the most mobile of things while your physical body is in a bubble of inertia. When you wake up (if you sleep at all, that is), you’re either greeted by a horrific inferno or, if you’re one of the lucky ones, a red sun: the typically shining yellow orb turned sour by the plume of thick substance that’s blocking it.

These events are all things that myself and thousands of other residents of the city of Los Angeles have experienced over the past several days, when the wildfires that started on Tuesday, January 7, began to burn out of the city’s control. As many people around the whole country know by now, the fires, especially the Palisades and Eaton fires, have destroyed numerous homes of dozens throughout LA county, and have displaced hundreds more. The destruction and damage caused by these (at press time) still-raging blazes is unprecedented. While what the aftermath of all of this will be is still very much in question, my friend and colleague BJ Colangelo is rightfully already sounding the alarm against predatory land owners like the kind seen in last year’s “Twisters.”

Other than clear and present dangers like those capitalist vultures, all of us who live in LA are still concerned with being stuck in the disaster’s eerie limbo. Two of my favorite genre films from the 1980s happen to best capture this surreal terror that we’re currently living through: 1984’s “Night of the Comet” and 1988’s “Miracle Mile.” Both movies accurately depict the mixture of cataclysmic incident and everyday banality that we’re living through, as well as how the landscape of the City of Angels can so subtly but so quickly turn ominous and destitute.

Cinematically, Los Angeles is no stranger to having disaster visited upon it. There are films like “Volcano” and “San Andreas,” which feature destructive forces of nature attacking the city that then pivot from moments of tragedy to moments of resilience and triumph — with the likes of Tommy Lee Jones and The Rock pulling people out of harm’s way. As thrilling an experience as these films are, they’re not quite reality for most of us average, everyday folks. Disaster, as it turns out, is rarely as clearly defined as it is in the typical disaster film.

The experience of how disaster can creep up on you and invade your normal life is a far stranger one than you’d expect. As strange and upsetting as the outbreak of COVID-19 was back in 2020, the fact that everyone in the world was going through some version of the crisis made it perversely easier to cope with. “Night of the Comet” and “Miracle Mile” capture the sensation of living through a localized disaster brilliantly, depicting how the streets of Los Angeles can subtly become a liminal nightmare over a distressingly quick period of time. With COVID, the threat was able to be weirdly invisible; even I, a New Yorker at the time, was spared the sight of hundreds of corpses being carted away from hospitals. With these fires, pretty much every Angeleno has seen the blazes carrying on in the distance, and even if they haven’t, we can’t avoid seeing the smoke.

In “Night of the Comet,” sisters Reggie (Catherine Mary Stewart) and Sam (Kelli Maroney) find themselves wandering the streets of a changed Downtown LA after the passing of a comet causes everyone who witnessed it to be vaporized into dust. The lingering cloud of comet material and dust in the atmosphere causes the sunny skies of LA to be turned an ominous red, the exact color of my bedroom as the sun struggled to peek through the clouds Wednesday morning. In “Miracle Mile,” a late night date between Harry (Anthony Edwards) and Julie (Mare Winningham) is postponed when Harry happens to intercept a call on a payphone outside a diner that indicates a nuclear missile is headed for LA, starting a chain reaction of events where a collection of people struggle to obtain verifiable information regarding the impending destruction. This drama played itself out in my case via my conversations with friends on a cinephile Discord channel, the couple hundred of us trying to help each other get facts when official media sources were either misinformed or woefully behind. The nadir of all this occurred when the emergency alert system sent out several county-wide evacuation orders in error. Thus, some of us had a similar experience to poor Harry and Julie, running through town feeling like Chicken Little while others obliviously went about their business.

Of course, it’s important to keep both “Night of the Comet” and “Miracle Mile” in their historical context. Being genre films of the 1980s, both movies are parables for the impending nuclear doom that the Cold War threatened. The metaphorical fire of that threat had ebbed and flowed from the 1950s on. By the ’80s, folks were certain that the Sword of Damocles was about to fall on them, especially as the Reagan administration’s actions renewed tension between the USA and Russia. Just as it’s human nature to cope by believing that the worst will never come to pass, it’s also very human to have the unshakeable feeling that the other shoe will eventually drop, and the ’80s was the decade when that feeling started to get to everyone. As we know, a shoe did drop by the end of the decade — just not a mutually destructive one.

Every generation has its cross to bear; every person lives through their “interesting times” as that infamous apocryphal saying goes. Even though we’ve been in a pandemic (and are technically still in it), it seems our generation’s most pressing crisis, our Cold War, is climate change. The LA fires only confirm this further. The disaster is the latest incident of troublingly abnormal weather behavior, and while it’s certainly not the only factor in how out of control the fires have become, it’s a major contributor. Scientists and experts whose job it is to monitor and predict changing conditions on our planet have been sounding the alarm about climate change for almost as long as the Cold War itself lasted. And while mankind can directly choose whether to begin a nuclear war, when it comes to climate change, humanity doesn’t have nearly as much control.

Despite being apocalyptic tales, “Night of the Comet” and “Miracle Mile” feature two divergent endings when it comes to tone. The former is a wry satire, the latter a tragedy, and while I won’t spoil the finale of either film, you can guess what that implies. What both films share, however, is the distinct sense that the world has been forever, irrevocably changed by these events. This fact of never being able to go back to the way things once were is basically understood by most people, sure, but it is nonetheless surreal to see the disconnect between the Old World and the New happening in real time.

What lies ahead is still up in the air; as I said, at the time of this writing, the incident itself is still ongoing. Yet the ripples of change can already be seen flowing through the rest of the world, and for every disgusting invective leveled at Angelenos by putrid, ignorant keyboard jockeys, there are folks all around the planet sharing ways to help, and generous people actually donating and helping in their own ways. Despite being cautionary tales, neither “Night of the Comet” nor “Miracle Mile” are cynical at heart — humanity, or at least some beautiful memory of it, manages to survive. There’s an emphasis in both films on the younger generations leading a path forward, or at least a sense that a renewal is needed so as to avoid such a dead end as depicted in them. It seems to me that, in our real world, some form of renewal is imminent. LA is a city that’s familiar with renewal, after all — Johnie’s Coffee Shop, the real diner where they shot a large portion of “Miracle Mile,” sits down the road from where I live, boarded up and abandoned. The DTLA streets where Reggie and Sam tested out their guns doesn’t look the same 40 years later, but it abides. 

Los Angeles may be hurting right now, but like a phoenix, it will rise from the ashes. This is a horrific setback, no doubt, but in all deference to Harry, it’s not quite the insects’ turn yet. As Sam observes, “the burden of civilization is on us, okay?” And that’s pretty b–chin’.

If you wish to help those impacted by the SoCal wildfires, there is a list of resources here.