Why Are We Obsessed With the Destruction of L.A.?

The clip is short — about 30 seconds — yet it evokes an entire Hollywood history. Posted to Los Angeles Dodgers Aerial Photography, a little-followed account on X, formerly known as Twitter, it opens on an out-of-focus shot of Dodger Stadium, filmed through a rain-slicked helicopter window. The rhythmic thump of propellers is the only sound we hear. Eventually the camera focuses, and we see what it is we’re meant to see: The stadium appears as if it’s sitting in the middle of a moat amid Elysian Park’s sparse red-brown hills. Its iconic palm trees jut out of the water like props in a postapocalyptic movie. In the background, the downtown skyline emerges from a pillowy haze.

The post itself doesn’t tell us what we’re looking at. Its caption, as sparse as those hills, offers only “Dodger Stadium this morning” — Aug. 20, the day that Tropical Storm Hilary doused Southern California with unusually heavy rains — followed by a wave of innocuous Dodgers-related hashtags. But to anyone who grew up watching the bombastic disaster flicks of the 1990s and aughts — fare like “Escape From L.A.,” “Independence Day” and “The Day After Tomorrow” — it might have seemed as if some of Hollywood’s prophecies had finally come true. The movie industry’s obsession with Los Angeles’s destruction has made this kind of image a key part of the country’s psyche, after all. In his film essay “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” Thom Andersen argues that, if Hollywood’s obsession with the topic is any indication, the destruction of Greater Los Angeles is one of those widely held fantasies, like the bootstrapping myth, that binds Americans into something like a common purpose. In John Carpenter’s 1996 B-movie classic, “Escape From L.A.,” an earthquake floods the San Fernando Valley and cuts Los Angeles off from the rest of California, turning the city into an island. The nation’s newly elected, fanatically evangelical president condemns all those he considers heathens to life in L.A.

In these movies, Los Angeles represents some moral offense rectified only by the region’s drowning (or burning, or crumbling). When the aliens in “Independence Day” position a ship over the U.S. Bank Tower in downtown Los Angeles, ditsy rooftop revelers gather atop the skyscraper to welcome them — only to become the first of the invaders’ victims, incinerated by a laser beam. In the thriller “2012,” Los Angeles is among the first cities claimed by an ancient prophecy of doom. The movie’s protagonist escapes by plane just as an earthquake along the dreaded San Andreas Fault demolishes the city; we’re treated to gratuitous images of terrified motorists disappearing into the earth, dying as they lived, sitting in traffic. In a cheekier take, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s “This Is the End” stages the biblical apocalypse as a bummer disruption to a Hollywood party, casting L.A. as Sodom’s logical successor.

This subgenre suggests that the city is a stand-in for America’s worst tendencies — environmental depredation, materialism, the worship of celebrity, venal capitalism. It’s as if we might exorcise these flaws by ritually punishing L.A. via film. Within the context of Tropical Storm Hilary, X users assimilated that brief stadium clip into a series of disaster narratives that had the yearning quality of wishful thinking. Don Van Natta Jr. of ESPN posted a still of the venue and proclaimed, very matter-of-factly, that “Dodger Stadium is an island.” That loosed a cascade of critics. Holier-than-thou urban-planning enthusiasts chirped that the supposed flooding was the city’s comeuppance for its poor land-use policies. Amateur historians claimed that the stadium was built onto Chavez Ravine, the site of a Mexican district that was destroyed to make way for what was then the Brooklyn Dodgers’ new home in Los Angeles, and therefore prone to flooding.