Picture it: You're out partying, celebrating the December holiday season in sunny Los Angeles. Or maybe you're on a date in the heart of the city, feeling the sparks and starting to hope for the romantic promise the next few hours may hold. Then, a few hours later, the city around you changed irrevocably. Where before you thought of everyday frivolities and dreams of the future, you are suddenly trapped in an actual nightmare. The future is no longer a glittering horizon that you look forward to exploring. Instead, you are frozen in the endless Now, a state of readiness and alertness that simultaneously invigorates and drains you. Your mind rushes to prioritize people, places, and the most moving things while your physical body is in a bubble of inertia. When you wake up (if you sleep at all, that is), you'll either be greeted by a ghastly inferno or, if you're one of the lucky ones, a red sun: the typically glowing yellow orb turned sour by the pillar. of dense matter blocking it.

These events are all things that I and thousands of other residents of the city of Los Angeles experienced over the past few days as the wildfires that started on Tuesday, January 7th began to burn out of control of the city. As many people across the country know by now, the fires, particularly the Palisades and Eaton fires, have destroyed dozens of homes across LA County and displaced hundreds of others. The destruction and damage caused by these (at press time) still raging fires is unprecedented. While the fallout from all of this is still very much in question, my friend and colleague BJ Colangelo is rightly already sounding the alarm against predatory landowners as seen in last year's Twisters.

Aside from clear and present dangers like those capitalist vultures, all of us living in Los Angeles still worry about being stuck in the eerie uncertainty of disaster. Two of my favorite genre films from the 1980s happen to best capture this surreal terror we're currently living through: 1984's Night of the Comet and 1988's Miracle Mile. Both films accurately depict the mix of cataclysmic incident and everyday banality we live through, and how the landscape of the City of Angels can so subtly yet so quickly become terrifying and wretched.

Cinematically, Los Angeles is no stranger to disaster. There are movies like "Volcano" and "San Andreas" which depict destructive forces of nature attacking a city that then turn from moments of tragedy to moments of resilience and triumph - like Tommy Lee Jones and the Rock pulling people out of danger. As exciting an experience as these movies are, they're not quite the reality for most of us average, everyday people. Disaster, as it turns out, is rarely as clearly defined as it is in the typical disaster movie.

The experience of how a disaster can engulf you and invade your normal life is much stranger than you might expect. As strange and disturbing as the 2020 outbreak of COVID-19 was, the fact that everyone in the world was going through some version of the crisis made it perversely easier to deal with. "Night of the Comet" and "Miracle Mile" brilliantly capture the sensation of living through a localized disaster, showing how the streets of Los Angeles can subtly become a liminal nightmare in disturbingly quick time. With SOVID, the threat could be strangely invisible; even I, a New Yorker at the time, was spared the sight of hundreds of corpses being taken out of hospitals. With these fires, almost every Angeleno has seen the fires continue in the distance, and even if they haven't, we can't avoid seeing the smoke.

In Night of the Comet, sisters Reggie (Kathryn Mary Stewart) and Sam (Kelly Maroney) find themselves wandering the streets of a changed downtown Los Angeles after the passing of a comet causes everyone who sees it to evaporate into dust. A lingering cloud of cometary material and dust in the atmosphere is causing sunny Los Angeles skies to turn an eerie red, the exact color of my bedroom as the sun struggled to peek through the clouds Wednesday morning. In "Miracle Mile," a late-night meeting between Harry (Anthony Edwards) and Julie (Mare Winningham) is delayed when Harry accidentally intercepts a call on a payphone outside a restaurant indicating that a nuclear missile is headed for Los Angeles, starting a chain. reaction to events where a collection of people struggle to obtain verifiable information regarding impending destruction. This drama played out in my case through my conversations with friends on the cinephile Discord channel, several hundred of us trying to help each other get to the facts when the official media sources were either misinformed or woefully behind. The nadir of all this happened when the emergency warning system mistakenly sent several evacuation orders throughout the area. So some of us had a similar experience to poor Harry and Julie, running around town feeling like Chicken Little, while others mindlessly went about their business.

Of course, it is important to keep both Night of the Comet and Miracle Mile in their historical context. As genre films of the 1980s, both films are parables about the impending nuclear doom that threatened the Cold War. The metaphorical fire of that threat ebbed and flowed from the 1950s onward. By the 80s, people were certain that the sword of Damocles was about to fall upon them, especially when the actions of the Reagan administration renewed the tension between the US and Russia. Just as it's human nature to cope believing the worst will never happen, it's also very human to have an unshakable feeling that the other shoe will eventually drop, and the 80s were the decade when that feeling began to take hold. it happens to everyone. . As we know, the shoe dropped by the end of the decade - just not mutually destructive.

Every generation has its own cross to bear; every man lives through his "interesting times" as that infamous apocryphal saying goes. Although we were in a pandemic (and technically still are), it seems that the most pressing crisis of our generation, our Cold War, is climate change. The LA fires only further confirm this. The disaster is the latest incident of disturbingly abnormal weather behavior, and while it's certainly not the only factor in how out of control the fires have become, it is a major contributor. Scientists and experts tasked with monitoring and predicting the changing conditions of our planet have been sounding the alarm about climate change for almost as long as the Cold War itself. And while humanity can directly choose whether to start a nuclear war, when it comes to climate change, humanity doesn't have nearly as much control.

Despite being apocalyptic stories, Night of the Comet and Miracle Mile have two different endings when it comes to tone. The former is a wry satire, the latter a tragedy, and while I won't spoil either film's finale, you can guess what that means. What both films share, however, is the distinct sense that the world has been forever, irrevocably changed by these events. This fact that we can never go back to the way things once were is basically understood by most people, of course, but it's still 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 writing, the incident itself is still ongoing. However, the waves of change can already be seen flowing through the rest of the world, and for every vile invective directed at Angelenos by rotten, ignorant keyboard jocks, there are people all over the planet sharing ways to help, and generous people actually donating and helping. in his own way. Despite being cautionary tales, neither Night of the Comet nor The Miracle Mile are cynical at heart—mankind, or at least some fond memory of it, manages to survive. In both films there is an emphasis on the younger generations leading the way forward, or at least a sense that renewal is needed to avoid the kind of impasse depicted in them. It seems to me that, in our real world, some form of renewal is inevitable. Los Angeles is a city familiar with renewal, after all—Johnny's Cafe, the actual diner where much of the Miracle Mile was filmed, sits down the road from where I live, boarded up and abandoned. The DTLA streets where Reggie and Sam tested their guns don't look the same 40 years later, but they do.

Los Angeles may be sick right now, but it will rise from the ashes like a phoenix. This is a terrible failure, no doubt, but with all due respect to Harry, it's not the insects' turn yet. As Sam notes, “the burden of civilization is on us, okay? And that's quite the b-beard.

If you want to help those affected by the SoCal wildfires, here is a list of resources.