Playing With Ironies

When Sunset Boulevard was first introduced into the world of cinema, it was met with a wide variety of responses from both the movie-going public and Hollywood itself. While many of these reviews lauded Sunset Boulevard, recognizing it for the definitive work on exposing the sinister nature of Hollywood, some filmmakers and producers felt that the subject matter was too controversial and that director Billy Wilder had vilified the film industry with his flagrant disregard for his colleagues and the studios during the golden age of Hollywood. After one screening, director Louis B. Mayer castigated Wider saying, “You have disgraced the industry that made and fed you. You should be tarred and feathered and run out of Hollywood.” However, in this film, Wilder determinedly challenges the sparkling façade created by Hollywood, revealing how studios abandon and discard the talent of older actresses in favor of a younger generation of glamorous starlets.

For Norma Desmond, an aging and fading silent film star, the studio’s love for young and alluring leading ladies causes the downfall of her career and her spiral into a lifestyle that desperately clutches to a world that resides in the past. Joe Gillis, the film’s narrator, compares Norma’s current life with sleepwalking, telling the audience that “she was still sleepwalking along the giddy heights of a lost career,” hinting that like a sleepwalker, it would be dangerous to wake her from her dream world. In Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder explores the juxtaposition of reality and fiction. Although this collocation is not completely manifested until the end of the film, Norma repeatedly demonstrates that she is indeed sleepwalking, blurring the reality of her faded stardom and the bleak reality. At the end of the film, Norma is so immersed in her illusion of former glory that when Joe attempts to force her to face reality, she is pushed beyond the limits of her sanity and is completely overcome by her own private reality and fame.

Through his use of lavish and dramatic images, director Billy Wilder further enhances the distinction between reality and Norma Desmond’s own perception of that reality. When Joe first arrives at Desmond’s mansion, a dilapidated and timeworn house, neglected by the world, he compares it to the character Miss Havisham, from Dickens’s timeless classic Great Expectations. Similar to Miss Havisham, everything in Norma’s ostentatious mansion traps her in the past: the display of photographs, the nightly showings of her movies and even the counterfeit fan-mail sent by her butler, until, as Joe observes, “she was afraid of that world outside, afraid it would remind her that time had passed.” Yet both Joe and Max, the butler, are willing to indulge Norma’s fantasies, further skewing her perspective and hold upon reality. Joe uses Norma for his own pecuniary gain but fails to see that she is like a vampire, sucking the real life from his veins until he becomes another victim of Hollywood like Norma. Conversely, Max, through his ardent devotion perpetuates her false reality in another way. Instead of using her and consequently becoming a victim himself, Max contentedly fuels her fantasy by sending her the forged fan mail, widening the gulf between Norma and truth. Despite his hope to spare her the reality of her fading stardom, Max is partly responsible for Norma’s loss of sanity because he essentially feeds her the lies she longs to hear until the Norma in the mirror, the brilliant star, becomes the real Norma, forsaking the aging ingénue. Yet Wilder, through his film, cracks the mirror right down the middle, breaking the hypnotic spell Hollywood holds over its audiences of today and yesteryear.