Sunset Boulevard Introduction Introduction
Release Year: 1950
Genre: Drama
Director: Billy Wilder
Writer: Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, D.M. Marshman Jr.
Stars: Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim, William Holden
Norma Desmond makes most crazy celebrities look like little more than a pack of babbling Muppets.
If you want to see a true image of an insane, deluded star, look no further than Sunset Boulevard. It beats all the supposed "reality" of reality TV. Kardashians, eat your hearts out. That is, if Norma doesn't beat you to it.
Sunset Boulevard is about a young, down-on-his-luck screenwriter named Joe Gillis, who, purely by chance, ends up working for an actress from the silent film era named Norma Desmond (played by real silent-era goddess Gloria Swanson). She's a somewhat-crazy has-been celebrity who is desperately planning a comeback. Joe gradually goes from helping Norma write a script for her (probably terrible) comeback movie to becoming her kept-man.
And it all goes downhill from there.
As you can guess by the very first scene of the movie—in which Joe appears dead in a swimming pool, before his voice narrates the rest of the movie in flashback—things don't exactly end well.
But an unhappy ending is inevitable in a movie like Sunset Boulevard. This isn't your grandmother's feel-good flick. In fact, it's a stirring indictment of the evil magic of the cult of celebrity and a searing look into the desperate illusions that underlie the lives of (at least some) of the people trying to make it big in Hollywood.
Basically, fame = bad news.
Despite its oh-so-depressing finale, by and large, everyone loved Sunset when it came out in 1950. The vast majority of reviews were totally positive, and it netted a Best Screenplay award at the Oscars. Its reputation has only ballooned since then: it was one of the first twenty-five movies deemed worthy of cultural preservation by the Library of Congress in 1989, and it made it into the top 20 of both of the American Film Institute's "100 Years, 100 Films" lists. It just goes to show that the nightmares that seethe under the bright lights of Hollywood are also really good at making Hollywood money.
We like to think that Sunset's success has a little something to do with its being the brain child of a Hollywood dream team: director-and-writer Billy Wilder and his screenwriting partner Charles Brackett. These two—Wilder in particular—were responsible for some of the most influential and well-loved movies of Hollywood's golden era: Some Like it Hot, The Lost Weekend, you name it. As pros of silver-screenwriting, these two were perfectly positioned to write a seething critique of the very industry that paid their bills.
Why Should I Care?
Warning: If you happen to be a celebrity, this movie might destroy you. Sunset Boulevard pulls no punches when it comes to attacking the whole idea of stardom.
We sense a vague or frequently not-so-vague idea creeping underneath a lot of entertainment news: Celebrities are magical people who are somehow better and more important than everyone else, and the greatest goal in life is to bask in the love and affection of untold numbers of slavish admirers. That's the real American Dream: getting tan by the hot light of a movie camera for hours, strutting your stuff on a red carpet, and hobnobbing with the other La La Land insiders. Sunset Boulevard doesn't just attack this idea: It savagely obliterates it, reduces it to ashes, and salts the earth so that it will never grow again.
In Sunset, Norma Desmond is a has-been celebrity who suffers from this particular delusion in a really extreme way. In paying tribute to herself, she'll say things like, "Stars are ageless" and "Great stars have great pride." Basically, she sounds a lot like Kanye West on an admittedly average day.
As 'Ye once said in an interview with Zane Lowe, "I just told you who I thought I was! A god!" (source)
While Norma doesn't go quite as far as openly proclaiming her own divinity, she basically views herself as the cream of the crop—though she considers herself worthless and contemplates suicide when she doesn't receive the love that she thinks she deserves. Her "lover" (for lack of a better word), Joe Gillis, plays cynical witness to her own destructive delusions. That is, until he gets destroyed by those delusions himself.
In the end, it's impossible to watch this movie without feeling that the desire for popular adulation is just plain sick. Taken to its logical conclusions, we see that it's a perfect blueprint for insanity—particularly in the movie's last scene, where Norma Desmond, in the throes of honest-to-goodness psychosis, gets ready for her "close-up." We can't think of anything more disturbing.