Art has long found inspiration, and foreboding, in the Santa Ana winds

“The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.” – Joan Didion
There’s always been a black hole in the center of the California sunlight, and the Santa Ana winds blow through it. It’s where the best Los Angeles writers have done their work: literati like Nathanael West (“The Day of the Locust”), John Fante (“Ask the Dust”), Raymond Chandler (“Red Wind”) and, of course, Joan Didion.
The dread carries over to music, too, and the shiny hits of the city’s recording studios. “Here come those Santa Ana winds again …” You can hear the line in your head, can’t you? – the gentle sneer of Donald Fagen as the narrator in Steely Dan’s “Babylon Sisters” admits that the California night before him, with its young lovelies and “show folk on the sand,” is a lie he tells himself to avoid thinking about everything the wind brings.
The Beach Boys have a 1980 song titled “Santa Ana Winds” – of course they do. It’s perversely upbeat, though, and unironically sunny, which is surprising given how skillfully Brian Wilson once sang of the undertow eating at the sand beneath the California dream. Wilson remains one of the great pop poets of L.A.’s sunshine and shadow, along with Jim Morrison of the Doors and Randy Newman, whose “I Love L.A.” contains not only a shout-out to the Santa Anas but the immortal lyrics “Look at that mountain/look at those trees/Look at that bum over there, man/He’s down on his knees.” That’s the town in a fractal.
Even more recently, the L.A.-based rock band “Cold War Kids” released “Santa Ana Winds” (2010), a bouncy Vampire Weekend-soundalike whose lyrics speak of taking “the elevator to the Getty’s highest place” to “see the cliffs fall to the sea” and that ultimately conjures the spirit of Didion herself, the high priestess of the apocalypse.
Didion always fancied herself a prophet, I think – no one titles a collection of essays “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” without at least one eye on the horizon – and when her visions of the city and the fires that would take it came true this month, she was quoted everywhere. “The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself,” Didion wrote in her 1969 essay “The Santa Anas,” a piece much excerpted but worth reading in its brief entirety, for its meteorological details and its premonitions of a city’s and country’s fiery future.
For every Didion or Chandler, there have been a dozen writers who get the city and its mythology wrong. Anyway, it’s impossible to talk of the winds as metaphor without acknowledging the reality currently upon us. As of this writing, per California’s state website, 124 separate wildfires in the L.A. area have burned 40,588 acres and destroyed over 12,300 structures, most of them people’s homes. At least 23 have been killed and tens of thousands evacuated amid winds that have reached 100 miles per hour and carried embers for miles. The biggest fire, in Pacific Palisades, is only 14 percent contained, and the latest high-threat wave of Santa Anas is expected to last at least into Wednesday. It is a cataclysm that may yet attain the scale of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 – a foundational American catastrophe.
The internet is, as always, both boon and bane in this crisis – an ill electronic wind that somehow manages to blow a fair amount of good. Facebook has allowed Angelenos to let friends and family across the country know they’re safe and GoFundMe.org has amassed nearly 1,200 verified pages for victims of the fires seeking immediate and long-term financial assistance.
By contrast, social media is awash with rumors and conspiracy theories. An acquaintance told me that Los Angeles had turned away Canadian firefighters because their trucks’ emissions didn’t meet California state standards, an easy-to-disprove falsehood that she’d heard via Instagram but that fed her generalized anger at all things “woke.” Which was doubtless the point of the rumor in the first place.
Watching the devastation on cable news or TikTok – the images that looked “just like a movie” – you had to wonder whether this is what the pioneers pushed West for until they finally reached the sea. Was it worth it? It had to be, otherwise everything America thought about its manifest destiny – about why we came here in the first place – would be revealed as a delusion, something Didion also wrote about, 34 years after her essay on the Santa Anas in 2003’s “Where I Was From,” as she re-examined her own propensity for California mythmaking. That may even be why we built the Dream Factory at the frontier’s end in Hollywood, to assure a nation of moviegoers that everyone who reached the New World got their piece of the pie. Instead of just the ones who got there first and had the money and pull to dictate whose stories got told and whose remain secret.
There’s a lesson there. The Santa Ana winds, Los Angeles, apocalypse – these three have always combined for a dark trinity of hope and disaster that has defined the West Coast since its colonization by Europeans. (And even before: Didion wrote of Native Americans throwing themselves into the sea when “the bad wind” blew.) But one might add a fourth strain, that of the land’s plunder by important but shadowy men, and a secret history that only gets teased out later, if at all, in movies like 1974’s “Chinatown” – the buried bones of how the city got its water and power, the unseen forces that decreed whose neighborhoods got built and whose got demolished, the decisions that turned the L.A. basin into a clogged neural network of automobiles. The car capital of the world, once synonymous with the freedom of the open road, is jammed with commuters immobilized on their way home to houses that have burned to the ground.
From all these certainties and doubts, we fashion movies, Rorschach tests of a nation’s nightmares. “Earthquake” (1974) and “San Andreas” (2015), “Volcano” (1996) and “2012” (2009) – all simultaneously rehearse and exorcise our anxieties in Sensurround. In the movies, California and Los Angeles have become psychic arenas where America hashes out the conflicts between its ideals and its brute realities, between Shirley Temple soft-shoeing down a plantation stairway with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Rodney King being beaten to a pulp by LAPD officers on a nighttime freeway. Between the endless open legs of a Busby Berkeley chorus line in a Warner Bros. musical and the nagging subconscious knowledge that the San Andreas fault is out there throbbing in the dark, ready to give way. Like a sequel, the winds return every year, bigger than before. Is this the year the fires will be too fast and furious to contain?
The subliminal message running like a zephyr through all these songs and books and films is this: If America is the Land of the Free, California is where that freedom gets put to the test. It’s a place where you can reinvent yourself as whomever or whatever you want, from Marilyn Monroe to Marilyn Manson, and then see how close it takes you to the flames. And it will take you close to the flames. Because that kind of freedom frightens some people, they look to the fires and earthquakes, the mudslides and flash floods, as a form of divine retribution – forget it, Jake, it’s Babylon – when it’s just the folly of believing a hostile landscape could ever be tamed into a city for 18 million people.
A final thought: For all the art that speculates about L.A.’s landscape and its meanings, there may not be enough about the humans at the top, their power and their greed. They’re there – John Huston’s Noah Cross in “Chinatown,” Daniel Day-Lewis’ Daniel Plainview in “There Will Be Blood” (2007) – but their real-life analogs have generally made sure the spotlight stays elsewhere. Their modern versions bankroll the oil companies and lobby the politicians and seed our digital ether with conspiracies that cause people to blame “woke” rather than a climate crisis upon which humans and governments might possibly act, given enough civic willpower. Some of them may even own the companies that produce the songs and make the movies, but no one ever writes anything about them. Maybe, once the winds die down and before the next fires kick up, someone should.