There are films I watch once, films I watch twice, and then there's Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd.
It hasn't always been that way, of course. But it's the way it is now. And, to think, it all began some time ago from that glorious beginning, that one movement of the camera across the title printed on a street curb, followed by a voice, that voice, and then come the police, racing to Norma Desmond's house, where there's a man floating in the pool, a murdered man, a dead man...
The floating body used to belong to Joe Gillis, a hack screenwriter whose stories suddenly stopped selling so well. The voice-over belongs to him, too, coming out of the grave, from the great beyond, narrating the film for us. A story about Joe Gillis meeting Norma Desmond and the complications that lead her to put him in that pool. It's a noir convention, and a noir story, but I've always had a hard time thinking of Sunset Blvd. as a noir film. It has many of the standard elements, that's true, but it's so infinitely more sad and tragic and nostalgic than something like Wilder's own Double Indemnity. The characters in Sunset Blvd. are sympathetic, not nasty and mean. Maybe the film belongs in its own genre, one closely related to another maybe-noir about a screenwriter, Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place.
It's also a "waxwork" film, a film that pays thematic and practical homage to the Hollywood of yesteryear, to the silent cinema and its icons. Now, waxworks: that's what Joe Gillis calls Norma Desmond's friends, those who come over for cards sometimes. One of them, the one in the above still, is played by Buster Keaton, for example. Fiction and reality mix. Also in the film are Gloria Swanson, Cecil B. DeMille, and Austrian actor-filmmaker Erich von Stroheim, all stars of an earlier period of filmmaking. Therefore, at the same time as the story of Sunset Blvd. is paying its respects to its own ancestors, Wilder is bringing them to a screen, paying them in a more tangible way as well.
But, there's a complication. For, as much as Wilder seems to defend the silent period through Norma Desmond, his own film relies incredibly on sound, that which Norma Desmond detests. From the voice-over to the music to the amazing dialogue, Sunset Blvd. is a film in a style and technique of its own time, if not even slightly ahead.
I love this image, along with many others in the film. This one, however, always reminds me of a scene in Lolita: an early part of the novel, in which Humbert Humbert sees Lolita reclining in her yard, and, though he desires her, still stays in the background, waiting to make his move. The three arches in the background give it all a sort of classical beauty, too. Like an old Hollywood set, perhaps in a DeMille picture.
As a counterpoint to the previous still, with its vast open space, Wilder brings us inside, into Norma Desmond's large and foreboding house. Notice how full the space is here. The entire screen is covered in textures: skin, cakes, a musical ensemble, paintings, a tiled floor. Later, Joe Gillis will tell us that the house is filled with "junk", but I don't think he's right. Wilder arranges it all so well, filling the emptiness in a way that would make Josef von Sternberg proud. In fact, some of the shots in this scene remind me of shots in The Blue Angel.
A twirling umbrella frozen in time. Well, I froze it. Wilder lets it twirl. Looks kind of like a giant eye, doesn't it?
Another detail: a page from the script Joe is secretly writing with a woman he's fallen for. In the end, this will prove to be his downfall as a lovelorn Norma Desmond, who is in love with Joe, learns of this romance and takes a gun to her cheating lover. That's how she sees it, anyway.
"Well, you'll make a rope of words and strangle this business!" Norma warns Joe when she first learns that he's a writer.
Rather fitting, too, that in a film which is so much about the collision of image and sound, whether historically or within a single frame, it is the written word that makes the difference, that brings Joe a new love and words that lead him to risk, and finally lose, his life.
There's also something of McLuhan in
Sunset Blvd. In the case of Norma Desmond, she's fallen a technology behind the world, and has learned to privilege only one sense, the visual, over all others. She is obsessed with sight. When, at the film's end, she descends her marvelous stairs for the last time in a self-imposed fantasy of celebrity, of being back "in pictures", it is her sight that fails her: she doesn't see the police, the murder, the consequences. In other words, she has lost sight of reality.
Joe, too, is an interesting case. For instance, McLuhan often wrote that technology is an extension of the body: wheels, for instance, are the extension of feet, and automobiles are the extension of everything, the whole human figure. So, what does Joe Gillis say when the debt collectors want to take his car away?
"If I lose my car it's like having my legs cut off."
I wonder if Marshall McLuhan ever watched
Sunset Blvd. I don't see how he couldn't have.
Finally, to the character who, as I watch and re-watch the film, comes increasingly to the forefront of its narrative: Max von Mayerling, Norma Desmond's sole servant, first husband (she had three), and first director. He made her a star, and he continues to make her a star, even if her audience has progressively shrunk to just one. As we and Joe eventually find out, it's Max von Mayerling who writes Norma the fan letters that keep her hopes of "a return" to the silver screen alive, who keeps
her alive.
It is the above shot that is the emotional core of
Sunset Blvd. Max Mayerling, so beautifully lit by Wilder, tells Joe the truth about himself and his relationship with Norma. Interestingly, it also Max who most survives the film itself. Joe Gillis, though he controls the story with his voice-over, is dead, and Norma, though her image is the last we see in the film, is insane. Max Mayerling, the devoted, survives them both. The poor fellow cannot escape, must keep on living. What a sad, tragic character. Subtle but devastating.
Speaking of the last shot in the film, here it is:
Norma Desmond, a once-great star in the Hollywood universe, now fading, blinking out of existence. Still, though her last rays reach us only now, she has actually been gone for a long time, her last shots of light plummeting through space while their source has already been extinguished, visible only because space is vast and memory moves no faster than the speed of light.
But, at least she went out, crushed under the weight of her own delusions as she was, in a magnificent and spectacular explosion.
Sunset Blvd. is one of the greats.
