Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard is the story of an aging silent screen star and an
opportunistic young screenwriter whose symbiotic relationship leads to both
murder and madness. Using a style
influenced by German Expressionism and a storyline that looks back to the
silent days of cinema, Wilder manages to make a film that looks ahead to
present day culture, inventing the post modern film.
The film belongs to the film noir cycle. Rather than support the standard conventions
of the genre, however, Wilder deconstructs many of them. The film contains a
voice over narration much like earlier noirs, but the narrator is revealed to
be dead in the first scene. The film then flashes back to the standard man on
the run tale, as Joe owes money and his car is to be repossessed. This
storyline is quickly pushed aside once he arrives at a seemingly vacant mansion
in Beverly Hills. Here we are introduced to Norma Desmond and her butler, Max.
Desmond is established as the femme fatale type, but rather than being the
sexpot of other noirs, she is older and past her prime. The lighting is low key
and contains many shadows as well as deep focus photography. This is on display
during the end of the film when Norma is in the foreground on her bed and Joe
enters in the background, both clearly in focus.
Though released during the refined period
of noirs, Sunset Boulevard falls
under the baroque phase of the genre in every other way. In his Notes on
Film Noir, Paul Schrader describes the final phase of noir as a “period of
psychological action and suicidal impulse. The noir hero, seemingly under the
weight of ten years of despair, started to go bananas.” (Schrader, 59) This is
a perfect description of Norma Desmond. Having been out of the limelight for so
long, she has lost her grasp on reality and is suicidal to the point that the
locks have been removed from her bedroom doors. Roger Ebert seconds this characterization
of Desmond, “The point in Sunset Boulevard is that she has aged not in the
flesh, but in the mind; she has become fixed at the moment of her greatness and
lives in the past.” (Ebert, 438) Schrader continues to assert that “The later
noir films finally got down to the root causes of the period: loss of public
honor, personal integrity, and psychic stability.” (Schrader, 59)
Another tenant of the Baroque phase
is that the films are often hybrids of genres, in this case, a hybrid of both
noir and satire. The film satirizes Hollywood. As pointed out by Ebert, an example
is found in the famous exchange between Norma and Joe: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” Hardly anyone remembers
Joe’s next line: “I knew there was something wrong with them.” (Ebert, 439) The
satire cut so close to home, that MGM head Louis B. Mayer told Wilder following
a screening, “You bastard, you have disgraced the industry that made and fed
you” (Dickstein, 279) The hybridization is also found in the character of
Desmond herself. She is both the femme fatale of film noir, dealing in sexual
allure and entrapment, as well as the German Expressionistic vampire figure that
sucks the life out of ineffectual men. (Dickstein, 281) .
German Expressionism is a major
influence on the film. Wilder began in the German cinema and it apparent
here. The mansion scenes were filmed in
a gothic set inhabited by shadows, crooked lines, and a creepy organ. The dead
monkey and his funeral harkens back to creepiness of German cinema. Gloria
Swanson’s “carnivalesque” acting style and heavy make up as Norma pays tribute
to the performances in films such as Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu. The
film chooses to use expressionistic techniques to “convey Wilder’s sense of two
Hollywood generations, both out of touch with anything real: one immured
narcissistically in its past glories, the other trapped in the tawdry
superficiality of the present.” (Dickstein, 280)
In addition to its use of German
Expressionistic style, Sunset Boulevard
also employs some of the classical Hollywood style. Continuity editing is used
and no attention is called to transitions from shot to shot. Aside from a
framing device, the narrative of the film is linear and there are no loose ends
at the end, only loose screws. Betty Shaffer is the passive love interest, who
does little to drive the plot and she is presented as the wholesome type seen
in hundreds of Hollywood films. It is also able to fit into the genres
described earlier.
This is where the classic Hollywood
style ends. The protagonist is a white male, but he does not drive the story. Joe
spends most of the film reacting to Desmond. There is no real antagonist. Norma
does antagonize Joe; but she is more of a product of her time than a villain.
Her relationship to Joe is not a simplified one, but full of neediness and subtext.
The narration gives us Joe’s side of the story which goes against the objective
point of view found in most films utilizing the classic Hollywood style.
With Sunset Boulevard, Wilder truly does bite the hand that feeds him. “The
mood of the film is immediately established as decadent and decaying by the
posthumous narrator, a dead man floating face down in a Beverly Hills swimming
pool” (Dirks, web) Wilder presents a Hollywood willing to chew someone up and
spit them out, applaud them one day and forget them the next. The toll
Hollywood takes on a person is shown in the juxtaposition of Joe and Betty. Both
screenwriters, Betty is new to the game, eager to work long nights and then
take strolls through the Paramount back lot. Life is still magical to her. She
has a naiveté about the business that Joe, in contrast, doesn’t. He is cynical
and has tired of working hard only to achieve credit on “a couple of
B-pictures”. Betty represents the way Hollywood wants to be seen and Joe
represents how it actually is.
Several noir themes are found
throughout the movie. The Hollywood cynicism
seems to indicate that the American Dream is a lie. In the case of Norma and Max, it is impossible
to maintain it. Social norms are no longer
meaningful. Rather than present a love story that leads to a nuclear family,
Joe and Norma uses each other for their own personal gain. Joe needs a house and
money. Norma sees Joe not as a true companion, but as more an audience. She spends
more time performing Sennett routines and Chaplin impressions than she does
trying to bed him. (Dickstein, 283) Although they are clearly not in love, they
are still the perfect match for each other. They “feed upon each other as
performer and audience, actress and writer, grand dame and cheap gigolo: Both
in the sunset of their careers” (Dickstein, 283)
Wilder suggests that gender roles no
longer apply either. Norma holds the
purse strings, forcing all the men around her to become dependent on her. The use of literary allusions such as Great
Expectation, the story of Salome, and Sampson and Delilah all point to themes
of imprisonment, sexual bondage, and female hysteria. (Dickstein, 283) The age
difference further illustrates this idea. Like Charles Foster Kane and Susan
Alexander, Joe and Norma are a May-December romance, only this time Norma is
the December.
Wilder’s status as an auteur is easily
seen in the film. Like Fellini’s La Dolce
Vita, Sunset Boulevard contains
two styles that Wilder is widely known for. It is clearly a noir in the vein of
his previous films Double Indemnity
and Ace in the Hole. It is more
satirical than these films however, and in this sense is more in line with
Wilder’s later comedies The Apartment
and Some like it Hot. The film acts
as a transition for Wilder.
His films all contained similar ideas.
His view of humanity is a jaded one. His
characters are always out for their own personal gain. Ray Milland will lie to
his family and sell out his own livelihood for a drink in The Lost Weekend, Ace in the
Hole’s Kirk Douglas will allow a man to die in a shaft to get the exclusive
story, and Jack Lemmon will pimp out his own home for job advancement in The Apartment. He also feels that the
pursuit of happiness is a trap. No matter how hard his character’s attempt to
achieve their goals, it always backfires. He is almost socially conservative in
his punishment vice seeking.
Wilder’s cynicism is more than likely
a product of his life before arriving in the U.S. His family was killed in concentration camps
during WWII which lead to his self exile to America. His story is not unique, however. The effects
of the Second World War gave many of the noir films from this period a
pessimistic outlook on life that spoke to an American people worn down by the
horrors of war and the great depression that preceded it. The film arrived just before the Eisenhower
conservatism swept in and provided America with a reason to be hopeful again. American
cinema used this newfound cynicism to look back to the silent age, the last
time America had been hopeful. The casting of silent star Gloria Swanson adds
an aura of realism and her performance is reminiscent of the acting style of
old. Morris Dickstein discusses this in his essay on Sunset Boulevard, “Though
Swanson tells William Holden that, ‘We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces,’ her
own face is often a garish mask of self-absorbed posturing and melodrama;
precisely what the 1940s saw when it glanced back at the silent film era.” (Dickstein, 280)
The audience didn’t seem to hold the
era in very high regard. The film featured cameos from many great stars of the
era, including H.B. Warner and Buster Keaton. People who had been vastly loved
by audiences just 20 years earlier were now reduced to a walk on role. These
cameos act as a mirror to the plot, reminding the audience that even though
Norma Desmond is fictitious, her situation is not. The house the film is set in underscores this.
It is, like Desmond, a decaying remnant to the silent film days. (Dickstein,
279) It wouldn’t be until a few years later that the time would be looked at
fondly in films such as Singin’ in the
Rain.
The most poignant example of the fallen
silent era is Max Von Mayerling, played by Erich Von Stroheim in an almost
autobiographical role for Von Stroheim. He
was a real life silent film director who often worked with Gloria Swanson. Max,
who had once called the shots on film sets and had been Desmond’s first
husband, has been reduced to a literal servant to the star. He is devoted to
Desmond to the point of writing her anonymous fan letters and even playing the
mock director to her as she makes her final psychotic performance at the film’s
end. As Ebert writes, “Because he believes, because he is devoted to her
shrine, we believe. His love convinces us there must be something worth loving
in Norma Desmond, and that in turn helps explain how Joe Gillis can accept
her.” (Ebert, 438)
Sunset Boulevard seems to be as much
about the present day as it was of its time or the silent era. That Norma’s
comeback in the public eye is a result of a murder scandal rather than her
talent serves as a perfect allegory for today’s celebrity culture. Fame is no
longer based on talent, but personal lives. The obsession with beauty in Sunset
Boulevard is another parallel to modern culture. Norma spends day after day
preparing herself to be camera ready, not realizing the toll it is taking on
her face. Even Betty, the purest character in the film has gotten a nose job in
response to advice from casting directors.
Social status is judged by appearance.
The paparazzo of today is still as
aggressive as they were then. For every Hedda Hopper of 1950, there is a
Geraldo Rivera interviewing a convicted murderer today, a glamorization of the
degenerate. Just as Joe Gillis was
forgotten the moment he was pulled from the pool, so are the victims of today. Norma
Desmond, however, will be remembered.
The film seemed more broadly comedic
and satirical at the time, but because of where our culture is today, the film
stands as more relevant and true to modern audiences. The treatment of
Hollywood as a type of fleeting royalty has gone a long way in maintaining its
status as a masterpiece. With its hybridization of genres, mixture of real life
personalities and fictional characters, view of cultural imperialism, and
deconstruction of both the noir conventions and silent days; it could also be
said that Sunset Boulevard is the first postmodern film. Not only does the film
serve as a bridge between Wilder’s noirs and his comedies, but it is a bridge
between the past and the future.
Works Cited
Dickstein, Morris. "Sunset Boulevard (1950)." The A List: The National Society of
Film Critics'
100 Essential Films. Ed. Jay Carr. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press,
2002. 279-83. Print.
Dirks, Tim. AMC
Filmsite. Ed. Tim Dirks. American Movie Classics Company, n.d. Web. 18 Apr. 2013.
<http://www.filmsite.org/suns.html>.
Ebert, Roger. The Great
Movies. New York: Broadway Books, 2002. 438-39. Print.
Schrader, Paul. "Notes on Film Noir." Film Noir Reader. Ed. Alain
Silver and James Ursini. New
York: Proscenium Publishers, Inc., 1996. 53-59. Print.
