LA Is Burning with Dennis Broe

A recording of this February 15, 2025, event is available on our YouTube channel.

Politicians are blaming the destruction and loss of life in the Los Angeles wildfires on each other, but the truth is the fires are the result of not even years or decades but centuries of neglect. Dennis Broe examines this history and sheds light on the ingrained power, the structural class and racial imbalances, and the wanton devastation of a city organized not for its people but for its elites. Using Mike Davis’s classic Ecology of Fear as a blueprint, Broe will put the still smoldering fires in context by looking at five areas: the geological long durée of a land of fires, earthquakes, tornados and mudslides; the ecological relationship of the fires to ever more intense global warming; the neoliberal moment of the deterioration of the state in its domestic and global dimensions; the region’s sedimented class and racial inequalities (exemplified by the recently devastated African-American community of Altadena); and the altered character of Los Angeles–and especially “Hollywood”–as no longer simply a site of imagined disasters but one that is now all too real.

Dennis Broe, a journalist, critic and scholar who has taught at the Sorbonne and spoken at many MEP events, is the author of many books on film noir, media, and television, including five novels set in Los Angeles in the 1940s and 50s, the latest of which is The Dark Ages, about the coming of McCarthyism to Hollywood.