Blind Spots is a new feature here at the Philistine. Everyone, no matter how much culture they consume, has “blind spots”, cultural artifacts that they know they should have experienced by now but just haven’t. Blind Spots will feature me encountering my own lacking areas, one film, book, or album at a time. This week’s entry: Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder’s iconic film about a faded movie star.
Cause of Blindness:
I honestly have no idea how I have never seen Sunset Boulevard up to this point in my life. First off, I love Billy Wilder and always have. He was one of the most versatile directors ever, switching at ease from comedy to drama to film noir. Films like Double Indemnity and Some Like It Hot are stone cold classics, and my favorite of his films, The Apartment, would crack my top ten list on a good day (most of the time it sits comfortably in the low 20′s or high teens). Beyond that, Sunset Boulevard is a film about film-making, and meta-films happen to be a favorite of mine (I put one and mentioned another in my “official” top ten I made awhile back). Lastly – seriously, why the hell hadn’t I ever seen it? It’s Sunset Boulevard!
Worth the Sight?
What strikes me as odd about Sunset Boulevard’s place in film canon is just, well, how odd the film itself is. Not only in its themes, which are creepy in a way not often embraced by Golden Age films not directed by Hitchcock, but in its artistic choices. A large chunk of the film is told through voice over narration, just about the most frowned upon method of conveying information there is. The scores pounds and pounds away, to the point of distraction. The secondary love story feels awkward and shoehorned in.
And yet… the film really works. In spite of its quirks (I can’t quite call them flaws), Sunset Boulevard stands as a singular, powerful film. The story of a young would-be scriptwriter who accidentally gets taken in by an erstwhile movie star, the film adroitly explores obsession, celebrity, and the very act of making movies. Through powerful performances and sharp writing, it makes these themes affecting on an emotional as well as an intellectual level.
The film starts with a dead body in a swimming pool. Then the voice that once belonged to that body chimes in, wanting to tell the real story of what happened to him before the paparazzi distorts the tale. And so the flashback begins, introducing the floating body intact and alive and belonging to Joe Gillis, a down on his luck screenwriter. On the run (literally) from creditors, he blows out a tire and pulls into what seems like an abandoned mansion on the titular road.
That swimming pool is not as innocent as it seems.
This astounding set provides a grounding in mood and place that helps Sunset Boulevard establish a tone of unease from the start. The house is more than a place – it is a metonymy for the stunted souls that inhabit it. I cannot think of a more arresting house in all of film – save perhaps the mighty Xanadu in Citizen Kane. The sense of disarray and crumbling conveyed by this once proud estate gives insight into the life of Norma Desmond, once a star of silent films, now abandoned by the fickle crowds in favor of modern starlets and the titillation of talking pictures.
The set, of course, is subtext – literally in the background. To help the audience fully appreciate the faded star, the movie shows her in all her squalid glory. In a performance that is by turns powerful, striking, erotic, and psychotic, Gloria Swanson dominates the film. She has the most famous lines (“I AM big – it’s the pictures that got small” and “Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close up”) but even without those iconic phrases the character would be unforgettable. In the twenty years since her fortunes plummeted, Desmond has sat and stewed in a dangerous cocktail of alcohol and self pity, her only companion the butler who also happens to be her ex-husband (played, in a deftly ironic touch, by the great silent film actor/director Eric Von Stroheim). When she encounters Gillis, an outside figure who seems to take a modicum of interest in her (though purely for reasons of personal gain) she latches on to him as a means of escape from obscurity. She takes control of his life, down to the minute details, buying him expensive clothing and plying him with gifts to win his attention and help in writing a screenplay that will catapult her back into the nation’s gaze. Her obsession becomes increasingly sinister over the course of the film. It almost seems to prefigure the chilling obsession of Jimmy Stewart’s character in Vertigo – the need to control another’s life to bring meaning to one’s own.
The film is not merely a psychosexual portrait of an aging woman, however. It also serves as a genuine valentine to Hollywood, especially old guard, silent era film making. Buster Keaton and Cecil B. DeMille, among others, make appearances. The film gives an intricately detailed look at the workings of a Hollywood set, and shows the frustrating process of trying to get work accepted by film studios. That the film offers a jagged, barbed take on these things does not diminish its twisted affection for the whole enterprise. Sunset Boulevard acts on one level as a warning about the dangers of fame and celebrity, but it also displays the seductive power of those very phenomena.
Perhaps that is why the voice over, which should come off as clunky, in fact guides the viewer skillfully through the action. There is an ironic detachment to Gillis’ narration; being dead, he has nothing to lose, no scars to cover up. The film needs that detachment, needs to hold the whirlwind of Desmond’s personality at arm’s length. It would be very easy to succumb to her considerable charms, but Wilder wants to approach with caution and irony, so a corpse – which can get stiff, but not aroused – proves the perfect lens for viewing.
