It is late January 2025 and my eyes are still affixed to the websites and reels and headlines about the Los Angeles fires. A lot of my family and friends live there. I have spent the last two weeks texting people I know to see if they’re okay and following their temporary dislocation and participation in heroic relief efforts. Everyone I know is safe, but there are not many degrees of separation between me and people who’ve lost their homes. I can’t seem to stop scrolling and watching, gutted by the endless images of burned down neighborhoods but uplifted by the generosity and coordination demonstrated by first responders and communities helping those who’ve lost everything. 

I write about the social meaning of home spaces and possessions. I have also written about how disasters showcase this meaning. I have noted that when there is a disaster, we lose the opportunity to say goodbye to something we may have hoped would outlive us.

In the news media, it is not unusual to highlight the emotional toll felt from the loss of possessions in stories about home fires, sometimes accompanied by rationalization about that loss if no people or animals were hurt. In story after story this month, I heard people say “at least nobody was hurt.” In my past writing about home disasters, I posited that “to focus too much on the importance of stuff can make people seem materialistic or somehow immoral. Imagine the outcry if someone said, ‘We lost Grandma, but thank goodness her table was salvaged…’” It’s not that people are intentionally trying to avoid stigma when reflecting on the devastation of their losses; it’s that it is normal to express gratitude for lives saved even in the midst of property and possession loss. Disaster is not only personally emotional, it also brings forth the notion that particular emotions are defined as socially acceptable in certain contexts. 

For this moment, I am setting aside analysis of the immense toll of emotional and physical turmoil of losing lives or a home and all its material contents. I am also setting aside analysis of the political claims being tossed about related to the Los Angeles fires. My focus here is on the ways that news and social media outlets portray people’s relationships with their homes and their stuff – especially when lost as a result of a disaster – and what this says about families specifically and cultural values generally. Despite the devastating size and impact, the LA fires are not necessarily different from the disasters I’ve written about in the past in terms of demonstrating the social significance of homes and possessions. But there seem to be a few ways that the news coverage of the loss of homes and their contents in Los Angeles differs from other accounts from other places and times. Here I elaborate on these ways.

In the coverage of the LA fires, stories of homeowners quickly choosing which items to grab on their way out the door and images of firefighters retrieving photo albums and what they perceived to be family heirlooms – keeping them safe in a place far from a burning home or placing them gently on the sidewalk across the street from a house in flames – kept showing up on my feeds. I watched a reel showing firefighters stacking photo albums next to a grandfather clock – soot-covered but salvaged – across the street from a burning house. I read an article about a cherished ring in a safe that firefighters found and protected.

What was this about? In my research on love letter curatorial practices and my most recent study of the social meaning of vacation homes, I describe a strategy of the possessors of these objects and places: imagined future kinship nostalgia. This is a motivating factor when people save and carefully and intentionally store objects such as heirloom decor items or photos (or when they create moments that yield saved photos). People do this because these items are meant to be discovered or viewed or reminisced about in the future by those experiencing them today. Doing this preserves a family story over time, presumably unless disaster strikes. Often it may represent a moment as ideal, removed from (or sometimes as evidence of overcoming) visible hardships. The stories and images of firefighters saving seemingly cherished things reinforces the value of preserving family stories for future generations’ imaginings of the past nostalgically. That these mementos were preserved from a disastrous fire becomes part of the preservation story. But it is not that the image of firefighters saving photo albums tells a happy story, nor is it the case that the firefighters personally know the people who may want to look back fondly on past photos. It is that deciding to save these items and having the event shared in the media tells a larger cultural story: the items have been deemed worthy of preservation because they represent the family story that must also be preserved. Thank goodness they were saved. That these stories were featured as part of the ongoing news during the fires suggests family story preservation – even and perhaps especially if it is preserved in physical form – remains a strong cultural value.

The coverage of the LA fires was also unique relative to stories from other disasters in its focus on celebrities and their families who lost their homes and possessions, including those who filmed themselves as they discovered that they had lost their home (and then were interviewed afterward on television). Images and interviews of celebrities involved in donation drives and financial contributions followed as the fires lessened. Even though news accounts of disasters often include private video footage of the experience and interviews about loss from people experiencing the disaster, these stories felt decidedly different from past news accounts of fire disasters, including the one in Paradise, California in 2018.

Why? What makes the depiction of a disaster different if famous people are part of the story? Two reasons. First, celebrities are in an interesting social position – they are people who experience hardship just as anyone might, but they are also likely to be affluent. They may have multiple homes, making them far less economically precarious than many people who lost everything. As I noted in my past writing about disasters and the meaning of home possessions, “stuff matters differently depending on your access to the stuff in the first place.” The critique of celebrities not doing enough, or even not deserving sympathy, was related to their perceived status as wealthy homeowners who could afford to rebuild without much sacrifice. Second, celebrities occupy a somewhat contradictory position: they need to be relatable, but they also need to be set apart from other people. They need to be normal and have families like we do, but they also need to somehow be superhuman. They need to be real enough so that fans can see them as worthy of their dedication and support. But they need to be a little bit unreal in order to retain their status as famous. I don’t know what it’s like to have an eight million dollar mansion. Someone in that social position may as well be a fictitious character to me. But hearing about their very real loss of family mementos and the emotional trauma of seeing their neighborhood vanish? This humanizes even the most untouchable icon.

The LA fire story being told through the lens of fame aligns with the fact that Los Angeles is viewed in the cultural imaginary as a magical place, artificially removed from the hardships of real life. It is not as if Los Angeles is Disneyland, but it does get portrayed as a mystical magical place, with characters and plots and the glitz of a movie set, where dreams come true, idealized stories are told, and magical moments are part of a morning stroll to a coffee shop. But it is a fallacy to believe that an entire city – one filled with racialized income inequalities, disagreements about water policy and access, and devastating effects related to climate change – is somehow magically removed from real life. Anyone who lives there who struggles can tell you that. Anyone with a healthy dose of cynicism about what is real and what is fake can tell you that.

The fires made the magic really come crashing down. They made Los Angeles a really real place, ironically stalling the industry dedicated to creating fictional places, people, and plots. If it could happen in La La Land, it could happen anywhere. Not even magical places are removed from the possibility of devastation. They are filled with real families, homes, and possessions. And an occasional celebrity or two, who – as human beings – are part of the real families that reside there or hope to reside there again someday.

Family life is often romanticized in movies, but we also do this in our real lives (and in news stories about real lives) when we preserve mementos that may not capture the harsh realities of life’s hard moments. It will be interesting to watch the family stories from these devastating fires continue to be told through nostalgic renditions of home spaces and domestic objects. It will also be intriguing to watch the collective story of the fires be told – to see what mementos are nostalgically lifted up as cherished symbols of a city that – for the sake of the cultural imaginary – aims to retain its magic.  

Michelle Janning is Professor Sociology at Whitman College and the author of several books about how homes and domestic objects tell the story of what’s really going on in today’s families, including Investing in Enchantment: Money, Market, and the Family Vacation Home.