Tools of Characterization
Characterization in Sunset Boulevard
Actions
Norma's deluded and unbalanced. That much we know for sure.
How can we tell? Because she murders Joe, for one. There are also her suicide attempts, her monkey's burial, and her final madness at the end of the movie, during which she thinks that she's actually filming a movie when she's really just being filmed by news crews who are there to cover Joe's murder. We start to get the sense pretty quickly that "Hey—this lady's nuts!"
Then there's Betty. When Betty keeps bringing up her ideas for changes to Joe's script, or when she bursts into Sheldrake's office to complain about the script, she demonstrates that she's an ambitious, young, go-getter. She's hungry for success, but full of life and creativity.
By contrast, if we look at Joe's actions—hiding his car in a lot across the street so the finance guys won't find it, for instance—he comes off as, well, the opposite of a go-getter. He's not really impacting the world; rather, events and other people's actions are impacting him. (He's surprisingly passive for a main character.) This becomes particularly clear when Norma manipulates him into becoming dependent on her, and then finally kills him.
Clothing
Over the course of the movie, Joe goes from dressing like the struggling screenwriter that he is to wearing the choice outfits Norma buys from him. Why? Because he's not just her paid boyfriend, but her pet. He has an embarrassing interaction at a clothing store:
SALESMAN: Here are some camel hairs, but I'd like you just to feel this one. It's Vicuna. Of course, it's a little more expensive.
JOE: A camel's hair will do.
SALESMAN (with an insulting inflection): As long as the lady is paying for it, why not take the Vicuna?
Joe feels humiliated since the salesman clearly and accurately believes that Joe is Norma's kept-man. So, in this case, Joe's fancy clothes are a symbol of wealth—but not his wealth. They mean that he's dependent on Norma and, in effect, owned by her (she dresses very stylishly, as well, of course). His helplessness and humiliation become obvious at the end, when he uses his clothes as an example in trying to convince Betty to go back to Artie and leave without him:
BETTY: Get your things together. Let's get out of here.
JOE: All my things? All the eighteen suits, all the custom-made shoes and the eighteen dozen shirts, and the cuff-links and the platinum key-chains, and the cigarette cases?
Family Life
We don't really see anyone in Sunset Boulevard interacting with their family—which, in itself, says something. The movie is basically devoid of children, which makes sense. We can't really picture Norma Desmond interacting with a bunch of kids or anything. It would make her seem totally different. We mainly see childless relationships, like Norma's relationship with her ex-husband Max, who maintains her delusions in exchange for being her devoted servant:
MAX: It was I who asked to come back, humiliating as it may seem. I could have gone on with my career, only I found everything unendurable after she divorced me. You see, I was her first husband.
So, most of the relationships we see in Sunset Boulevard are straight-up dysfunctional. Norma and Max, Norma and Joe (who works as her gigolo)—these are all warped pairings. Betty and Artie are engaged, but she's clearly more interested in Joe, which, if it had actually happened, might've been the only decent, healthy, and high-functioning relationship in the movie.
Location
The decay of Norma's house—that "grim sunset castle"—mirrors her own inner, mental decay. When Joe first sees it, he compares it to Miss Havisham from Dickens's Great Expectations:
JOE: A neglected house gets an unhappy look. This one had it in spades. It was like that old woman in Great Expectations—that Miss Havisham in her rotting wedding dress and her torn veil, taking it out on the world because she'd been given the go-by.
Like Miss Havisham—and like her house—Norma Desmond's also been given the "go-by." But unlike Havisham, who was ditched by her fiancé, Norma was ditched by the public, by her fans. (Her servant, Max, writes her fake fan letters to keep her convinced of her own celebrity.) She nurses the notion that her celebrity is eternal, which (somewhat paradoxically) makes her and her house decay and fall apart.
In a broader way, Hollywood itself determines important things about the characters. If Betty were in medieval England, she would probably be more concerned with the fate of the wheat crop than with creating a successful screenplay. Her ambitious, go-getter personality is partly determined by her location. The same thing goes for Joe—his dissatisfaction and cynicism stem from the fact that Hollywood has beaten him up.
Names
Betty Schaefer and Joe Gillis have fairly typical American names, but Norma Desmond's name actually has hidden movie-history significance: It's apparently a compound of the silent-era actress Mabel Normand's name and the name of her friend, William Desmond, a director. Desmond was the victim of a still-unsolved murder—though not one that Mabel Normand committed (making her a very different character from Norma Desmond, just to be clear). In fact, Normand is mentioned by name in Sunset Boulevard, further distinguishing her identity from that of Desmond.
The name "Max von Mayerling" sounds just like the name of the actor playing him—Erich von Stroheim. It helps heighten the movie's somewhat uncomfortable similarity to real life, since von Stroheim was a director who directed many of Gloria Swanson's early movies. Unlike Mayerling, though, Stroheim didn't actually marry Gloria Swanson and then become her servant or anything.
Occupation
Almost every character we meet in Sunset Boulevard is connected to the movie business:
- Joe's a screenwriter
- Norma Desmond's a former actress
- Max von Mayerling is a former director
- Artie Greene is an assistant director
- Betty is a script-reader and aspiring screenwriter
And then there's the producer, Sheldrake, and the agent, Morino—not to mention Cecil B. DeMille, who, of course, was a famous director in real life.
Unfortunately, working in Hollywood doesn't exactly seem to have an enlightening and joyous effect on these characters. For some characters, working in the movie biz looks more like a hardscrabble existence than a life of leisurely glamor. At one point, Joe explains his waning enthusiasm for good writing to Betty:
BETTY: Perhaps the reason I hated Bases Loaded is that I knew your name. I'd always heard you had some talent.
JOE: That was last year. This year I'm trying to earn a living.
Then there are characters—particularly Norma—who rose above the hardscrabble business and attained celebrity. But instead of cashing in her chips and accepting the existence of time and fortune, Norma clings to her faded celebrity until it totally destroys her. Her obsession with her own past career as an actress frequently reaches a pitch of near-insanity. When Joe critiques a scene in the movie she's trying to write, she demonstrates her mania:
JOE: Honestly, it's a little old hat. They don't want that any more.
NORMA: They don't? Then why do they still write me fan letters every day. Why do they beg me for my photographs? Because they want to see me, me, me! Norma Desmond.
Physical Appearances
Since Norma Desmond is obsessed with her own celebrity, she's also obsessed with her appearance. When she deludes herself into thinking she's landed a movie deal with Cecil B. DeMille, an "army of beauty experts" arrives at the house to make sure she's looking good enough to act. While, at this point in her life, this narcissism has become totally destructive, Joe hints that it once had some justification. Norma Desmond's star power wasn't just a myth:
JOE: She sure could say a lot of things with those pale eyes of hers. They'd been her trademark. They'd made her the Number One Vamp of another era. I remember a rather florid description in an old fan magazine which said: "Her eyes are like two moonlit waterholes, where strange animals come to drink."
According to the movie, Hollywood forces people to change their physical appearances in order to find work, since it encourages the worship of youthful perfection. Betty's case provides a good example:
BETTY: I come from a picture family. Naturally they took it for granted I was to become a great star. So I had ten years of dramatic lessons, diction, dancing. Then the studio made a test. Well, they didn't like my nose—it slanted this way a little. I went to a doctor and had it fixed. They made more tests, and they were crazy about my nose—only they didn't like my acting.
Props
Norma's house is stuffed full of, well, stuff. For instance, she has a ton of pictures of herself scattered around and she luxuriates in her self-image. It's a not-so-subtle signal that this is a neurotically and pitiably vain person. Also, she plies Joe with gifts—like the solid gold cigarette case—which both retain his dependency on her and assert her control over him. So she's controlling, too. Additionally, Norma's car—the Isotta Fraschini—is a luxurious holdover from an earlier time period, kind of like she is.
Sex and Love
Even though we don't actually see any sex scenes—this movie was made in 1950, after all—a sexual relationship is at the center of Sunset Boulevard, although it is a profoundly unhappy one (at least, it's unhappy for Joe). Norma Desmond effectively pays Joe Gillis to be her kept-man, her gigolo, and he gives in only because it gives him the security and material needs that he's been desperately looking for. He's able to survive—though he's very cynical and seems to be very aware of what he's doing. However, when he starts to fall in love with Betty Schaefer, it helps further expose the hollowness of the life he's been leading with Norma.
Norma believes that she really loves Joe, and tries to commit suicide when he attempts to leave her (and then she murders him when he does the same thing again). But does she really love Joe? Would you really kill someone if you genuinely loved them? In reality, Norma desires the love and admiration of the multitudes though she seems incapable of giving it in an authentic way. Nevertheless, she manages to convince herself with a certain degree of passion:
JOE: Has it ever occurred to you that I may have a life of my own? That there may be some girl I'm crazy about?
NORMA: Who? Some car hop, or a dress extra?
JOE: Why not? What I'm trying to say is that I'm all wrong for you. You want a Valentino—somebody with polo ponies, a big shot—
NORMA (Getting up slowly): What you're trying to say is that you don't want me to love you. Is that it?
Social Status
Social status is a product of celebrity in Sunset Boulevard: If you're a has-been like Norma Desmond, you apparently have less than you once did, although you still retain a fair amount thanks to your riches. But her craving for celebrity—and the cosmic status that it represents in her mind—is all but unquenchable.
On the other hand, a down-and-out screenwriter like Joe Gillis has zilch: no status and no fame. No one is willing to help him either, neither his agent nor a producer friend, until he runs into Norma. We hear Joe narrate his own sense of hitting rock-bottom—Hollywood has left him beaten, bruised, and completely lacking in status:
JOE: As I drove back towards town, I took inventory of my prospects. They now added up to exactly zero. Apparently, I just didn't have what it takes, and the time had come to wrap up the whole Hollywood deal and go home. Maybe if I hocked all my junk there'd be enough for a bus ticket back to Ohio, back to that thirty-five-dollar-a-week job behind the copy desk of the Dayton Evening Post, if it was still open. Back to the smirking delight of the whole office. All right, you wise guys—why don't you go out and take a crack at Hollywood? Maybe you think you could? Oh-ho!
Speech and Dialogue
Billy Wilder, who co-wrote Sunset Boulevard, was known for his snappy dialogue. It helps bring out the cynicism of Joe Gillis, whose tart one-liners pepper the movie. After Norma Desmond delivers one of her most famous lines, Joe responds with a sarcastic rejoinder:
JOE: You're Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.
NORMA: I am big. It's the pictures that got small.
JOE: I knew there was something wrong with them.
Whereas Joe is cynical and knowing, Norma is deluded and grandiose, and speaks like it, too. The following exchange of dialogue helps put both their personalities in perspective: Norma laments the current state of movies and Joe jokes about the funeral she's organizing for her pet monkey:
JOE: Don't get sore at me. I'm not an executive. I'm just a writer.
NORMA: You are! Writing words, words! You've made a rope of words and strangled this business! But there is a microphone right there to catch the last gurgles, and Technicolor to photograph the red, swollen tongue!
JOE: Ssh! You'll wake up that monkey.
Thoughts and Opinions
Norma and Joe are the two polar philosophical opposites in the movie: The former lives totally in illusion; the latter is well-aware of the difficulties of real life. Joe falls under Norma's domination for most of the movie, becoming her sexual employee, before breaking away at the end. Although he's observed Norma's personal delusion in his voiceover earlier, he finally tries to talk some sense into her at the end. Unfortunately, it doesn't take, but Joe speaks with wisdom and expresses the best part of his own character:
JOE: Norma, grow up. You're a woman of fifty. There's nothing tragic about being fifty—not unless you try to be twenty-five.
This is totally true, yet none of this registers with Norma, who murders Joe for trying to leave her and then distills her own philosophy into a rhetorical question:
NORMA: Stars are ageless, aren't they?
Norma believes that she is, or ought to be, immortal—and her madness and anxiety come from the fact that she, well, isn't. Yet Joe, as his quote indicates, has no such illusions, and he's well-aware that the passage of time and the natural process of aging are wholly inevitable.