Nothing is more beautiful than a city in flames. It is said that, on the night of July 18, 64, Nero delighted in the warm-colored arabesques of the burning of Rome. The terrace of the imperial palace offered an ideal viewpoint. And although the anecdote of the bloodthirsty madman enjoying the spectacle of his city in the grip of misfortune is not absolutely attested historically, it is credible. Because nothing is fascinating like a fire. Whether or not we are a paranoid emperor, the large orange tongues that lick and devour beams and walls with the greed of a legendary dragon mocking the water cannons and seaplanes that it does not even notice captivate us. at the same time as they make us anxious.
I remember myself witnessing in July 2020, at sunset and from the roof terrace of a large Marseille house, a fire which had started in the pine forests which run between Martigues and Marignane, on the other side from the harbour. Ten or fifteen kilometers away, not only the black cloud of smoke, but also the flames were visible to the naked eye. A fire twenty or thirty meters high in front of which we could do absolutely nothing, but which we had spent the evening watching, as if hypnotized.
Fascinating flames
Cinema has well identified the hypnotic character – and in a certain way exciting, unfortunately, even if we would only like to be saddened or frightened – of the drama that is the fires. Hollywood, in the age of blockbusters, has particularly seized on it. And the most enjoyable city to set aflame, in the age of entertainment society, is obviously Los Angeles. World city, oasis where dollars flourish and Coca-Cola flows in the middle of the desert, a throbbing and sick heartentertainment planetary, founded by Spanish explorers, gold prospectors and cowboys.
The poster of Los Angeles 2013by John Carpenter (1996), where the silhouette of Kurt Russell mounted on a large engine stands out against a background of palm trees eaten away by flames, is the perfect example of this aesthetic of catastrophe. We could further cite Terminator 2. Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991), Last Days of Los Angeles (Mark Atkins, 2011) and many other blockbusters produced in recent years with varying degrees of virtuosity.
A neighborhood reduced to ashes
Also, when one of my oldest friends, who lives in Los Angeles, sent me a video taken from the window of his car, a film lasting almost a minute showing, reduced to ashes, the neighborhood where his wife America grew, with a few supermarkets and school buildings continuing to burn here and there between the charred palm trees, this appalling picture seemed strangely familiar to me. However, despite their macabre beauty which would not have been out of place in a Hollywood film, the images of this fire did not fascinate me, thus contradicting my experience in Marseille.
Because if Hollywood has so many times shown the Californian capital on fire, this time I had the strong impression of witnessing the realization of an eschatological prediction. Less religious than ecological, although the two are not necessarily to be distinguished when one has faith. The desolate landscapes, modeled on those described by Cormac McCarthy in The Road (2006), also reminded me of the warnings expressed by the authors of the report Limits to growth (Meadows, 1972), so brilliantly directed by Abel Quentin in Hut (The Observatory, 2024). They were also the actualization of the giant fire in Los Angeles depicted, among other disasters (stock market crash, migration crisis, famine, etc.), by Stephen Markley in The Flood (2024), a novel of anticipation describing the appalling consequences of climate change.
So are we there?
