A well-dressed man floats dead in a pool. Police and press observe the scene, jotting down notes and flashing bulbs. The camera sits underwater, at the bottom of the pool, angled upwards. The face of the dead man looks bloated and ridiculous. A narrator describes the action as it occurs. Black and white, we are watching a true murder mystery, and at the center of the pool lies its subject.
Billy Wilder, the film’s director, captures our attention through the use of voice-over and the thick mist of suspense. Who is this man? Flashback to Joe Gillis, the dead man, still alive and struggling as a B-movie screenwriter trying to hawk a baseball flick. Toiling away, he describes the scene of Los Angeles in 1955: mostly inhabited by failed screenwriters. After a chase by repo men, Gillis parks in the garage of a luxurious mansion and runs to the door, where he’s greeted by a strange bald butler (Erich von Stroheim). Apparently the man thinks Joe’s an undertaker, and shows him upstairs where he first meets the incredible Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a once-famous silent movie star.
Sunset Boulevard is Billy Wilder’s ode to the Hollywood tragedy; Norma Desmond, played in fully authentic extravagance by Gloria Swanson (herself a former silent film star), is crazed by a desire for the return to glory. She holes up in her mansion, working on a tired script about a beautiful princess. Joe Gillis, desperate and looking to make his own money, agrees to help her. The strange bald butler mostly watches on.
In its Hollywood eccentricities, Sunset manages to capture the fatally flawed notion of fame. The film industry is a fast-moving, quickly evolving machine that leaves the imperfect in the dust. Unable to face the prospect of irrelevance, and so conditioned to be treated as royalty, Norma Desmond lives entirely disconnected from reality, watching her own movies over and over again. It is in fact profoundly tragic, but the film has such an energy that never once does it feel bogged down by gloom. Rather, it is a swift, clever satire- both a celebration of the moments of joy that come out of fruitful work and the illusions of entitlement and self-obsession that fuel so many hapless dreamers.
Sunset Boulevard creates an atmosphere thick with cigarette smoke, serving as a truly self-conscious analysis of the film industry. Clearly, nothing has changed. Joe Gillis does nothing to free himself from Norma’s clutches, entering a pampered vegetative state that deludes him into becoming childlike. And who wouldn’t wish to live in the lap of luxury, as Norma does? The famous staircase scene, with Norma’s cringe-inducing soliloquy, is the pitch-perfect culmination of a pointed critique: reality blurs with the moving pictures.
