This Week in Entertainment: California Wildfires?

While the recent shortage of divorces and drug charges continues to take its toll on the entertainment news community, actual reporters have had the grim privilege of covering catastrophic flooding in Mexico, out-of-control conflagrations in California, and civil unrest in Burma and Pakistan.

One has to wonder, then, what content-starved editor was handed oversight of the Los Angeles blaze when this turned up on the BBC website.

While any of us — even those of us with a multi-platinum (or whatever) selling sex tape — are worthy of human compassion, Pamela Anderson was probably the last person on your mind when you heard that hundreds of thousands of people had fled wildfires in southern California (her or Olivia Newton-John, depending on whether or not you’ve ventured outside of an underground bunker in the last thirty years).

Los Angeles, like any tourist destination, is a city that has reinvented itself in commodity form. No other place on earth, however, has monopolized televisual tourism like the City of Angels: for most tourists, a Los Angeles vacation begins and ends at the Academy Awards, or the Emmys, or the last season of The Hills. Many people associate the entire entertainment industry with Hollywood, meaning that any experience with this sort of media registers, on some level, as a brush with Los Angeles culture.

A brief survey of this commodity-Los Angeles — its sex, its fame, the eerie sedation of its teeming consumer base — should (it goes without saying?) give us no insight into the real-Los Angeles, the second largest city in the world’s third most populous nation, and one of the most diverse urban centers anywhere, ever. Baywatch may have taken place in Malibu, but it didn’t really take place in Malibu. Television may borrow from real life, but it isn’t really life… right?

Whether it’s snarky journalism or a genuinely slippery grasp on reality, an international news outlet's use of star maps to explain human tragedy does have weird and sinister implications. It also has an uncomfortable resonance with Jean Baudrillard’s “Precession of Simulacra,” which opens with the idea that human reality has already been overrun by digital and consumer models.

A Baudrillardian reading is pretty simple here: our ability to deal with real events has been warped by our penchant for fame and celebrity news. "Reality" (the fires) ceases to apply — all that applies is how this reality, or its mirror image (the map), might be packaged for easier consumption.

So, all of southern California becomes Los Angeles, and Los Angeles becomes Malibu. Can't handle the wide swath of destruction or the loss of human life? That's fine, let's just switch over to James Cameron, and see how the flames are faring against one of his many, many palatial homes. It's a tad reminiscent of the Greek fire coverage, and the perpetual updates on the Athenian acropolis — though those fires were much more lethal, and the Acropolis much less awesome.

If you think I'm picking on the BBC unfairly, you may be right — while this single graphic begs for commentary, the BBC's coverage was articulate and responsible for the most part. This, unfortunately, is more than can be said for local television news. CBS ranks as the most surreal network, featuring — among other sequences — a reporter’s onsite narration of the destruction of his own house, and an anchor’s misty-eyed recollection that wildfires always make for the most beautiful sunrises.

Which begs the question: is there no escaping television, on television? Is this universe so contained that it can't penetrate its own gee-whiz logic? Even FEMA’s valiant effort at moral bankruptcy missed the reality bandwagon, proving that cynicism does not always equal a firm grasp of practical deception (or anything at all).

The real danger here is that our packaging has begun to preempt our content, even when discussing the suffering of fellow human beings. This can be true in any media, though many print publications, and some online vendors, still outperform their lesser counterparts in cyberspace and on the airwaves.

Along with CBS and BBC's cocksure cartographer, FEMA demonstrated the worst-case scenario of our information age — a scenario in which data must compete in a market of apathy and sensationalism, in which all events are scripted in the media before they have begun. News is not the product here: entertainment is, and it is a brand of entertainment that feeds off of death and calamity. Its success relies on the fungibility of information — on the easy transformation of reality into a circus, and on our own easy transformation into spectators.