Stuck on 'Sunset Boulevard'? Unsure what it's all about? This blog post will give you everything you need to know about the plot, context, and genre.
‘Sunset Boulevard’ opens in traditional film noir style at the scene of a murder: someone has died in the pool of a glamorous “old-time star” somewhere in LA, and the audience must now learn how this inevitable tragedy takes place.
The narrator is Joe Gillis, the protagonist of the film who speaks from beyond the grave in the moments between his death and when “those Hollywood columnists get their hands on it”, ready to make it “distorted and blown out of proportion”. He takes the viewer back six months prior to his Alto Nido apartment. There, Joe is trapped in increasing desperation, writing scripts that “didn’t sell” no matter how “original” he tried to make them.
Confronted by two men trying to repossess his car, Joe goeson a little adventure. First, he tries, unsuccessfully, to sell a script to the burnt out “bigshot” producer, Sheldrake, “with a set of ulcers” to match his executive status. Joe then proceeds to Schwab’s Pharmacy, a real-life location where those living around Sunset Boulevard really would gather socially. After a call to his friend Artie Green, who can only afford to lend him $20, Joe tries to appeal to his agent. Callously, the agent tells him from the golf course that Joe’s financial troubles are the gift in disguise that will enable him to write his next best work.
Out of options, Joe is heading home when he spots the men trying to repossess his car. A chase ensues, and Joe ends up escaping by heading into the driveway of one of those big old houses that “crazy movie people built in the crazy ‘20s”. It is the home of Norma Desmond, former silent film star. When he meets her, Norma seems like an eccentric ageing lady, and Joe happily takes advantage of the opportunity to make “$500 a week” supposedly fixing the script she is convinced will have her back starring on the silver screen. However, Norma has her own tricks: over the next 40 minutes, she weaves a web that slowly destroys Joe’s agency and self-esteem, leaving him totally dependent on her for financial sustenance.
Joe has some attempts at rebellion: he leaves on New Year’s Eve for another party with people “[his] own age”, and begins a romance with Betty Schaefer, an aspiring writer who reminds him of “all [those] writers when [they] first hit Hollywood, itching with ambition”. However Norma engages in increasingly disturbing emotional manipulation to draw Joe back. After years of “press agents working overtime” on her, Norma is no longer able to separate an audience’s adoration for her stage self from true affection towards her as a person. Her fragile self-perception leaves her a slave to superficiality and wildly insecure about any chance of people leaving her. By first threatening to hurt herself, and then calling Betty to expose Joe’s situation, Norma brings about the film’s climax.
Betty arrives that night at Norma’s “white elephant” of a house to retrieve Joe. She is horrified by Joe’s gigolo status but offers to forget everything if Joe loves her and leaves now. Devoid of any remaining confidence and hoping to save Betty from his lack of a “respectable” lifestyle, Joe tells her to leave, saying he prefers his “long-term contract with no options”. Tearfully, she does so. Disgusted with himself and without anything left to lose, Joe finally confronts Norma. Again, she engages in tearful threats in an attempt to keep him, but Joe continues to pack his bags. Realising she risks losing him entirely, Norma’s fragile mental state cracks, and as he leaves she shoots Joe, who falls into the pool.
We are now back where we started, up to date on how our narrator died. In the final minutes of the film, Wilder shows the response of the media to the death. To close, the audience is left with Norma’s complete rupture from reality. Believing the film crews are at her house to film her on set, she descends the stairs of her home, pronouncing how happy she is to be back and claiming, iconically: “I’m ready for my close-up!”
Released in 1950, ‘Sunset Boulevard’ is a product of post-war America. After the end of the second world war, America rose to international prominence and entered arguably its greatest era of peace and prosperity to date at that time. Many more families had cars, and the GI Bill had meant that more Americans than ever were now college-educated. The comfortable middle class was rapidly expanding. The American Dream seemed almost assured across the country, and nowhere more so than in America’s very own ‘dream-factory’. Hollywood’s Golden Age was in full swing, and the American film industry was booming.
At the same time, Hollywood was going through some serious changes. The ‘talkies’ had only just come in, destroying the silent film industry because of how much better they were at engaging audiences. The effect this had on Hollywood is viscerally displayed in the film through the casting choices, many of which involve artists who truly lived the lives of the characters they play. Some artists transitioned well to sound. Cecil B. De Mille, the successful director who plays himself in ‘Sunset Boulevard’, navigated a career both before and after sound. However, other directors, such as Erich von Stroheim, who unhappily took the role of Max von Mayerling out of financial necessity, were not so lucky. Many actors were also put out of work. Buster Keaton, a huge former star, plays a virtually non-speaking role as one of Norma’s ‘waxworks’. Even Gloria Swanson herself, the actress who plays Norma, was out of work a long time before being offered ‘Sunset Boulevard’. This ‘self-referentiality’ helped Wilder magnify the struggles of artists navigating the changing world of cinema.
It was not just the artists who were going through changes, however. The studios had long-maintained a monopoly over production and distribution of films. This had only just ended with a 1948 Supreme Court decision that deemed these practices monopolistic. In 1950, when ‘Sunset Boulevard’ was made, Paramount was still reeling from this blow. The decision had been handed down in part due to fears that these practices meant studios were churning out popular but creatively-dead pulp with little artistic merit in order to extract profits from audiences. These fears are clearly echoed in the film by Joe’s dry cynicism and interactions with Sheldrake. Aside from DeMille’s production of Samson and Delilah when Norma goes to visit him on set, there is little in the film to indicate that Hollywood is a bustling space of creative production. However, characters such as Betty, with her excitement for Joe’s reworked script, offer some hope for a creatively energetic new generation.
Billy Wilder was born to a Jewish family in 1906 in a part of Austria that is now included in Poland. Initially trained in journalism, his films still reflect a rigorous investigative style. In the 1930s, he was forced to flee to France to escape the rise of Nazism, and he eventually landed in America. In Hollywood, he quickly rose to prominence as a skilful scriptwriter, taking the reins as a director in 1942. Over the next eight years, he produced a series of successful films, including the genre-defining film-noir ‘Double Indemnity’.
Coming from Europe, Wilder could cast an outsider’s eye on American society and its film industry. While he was enthralled by its glamour and excitement, he was equally curious about the destructive effect on those left in its wake. ‘Sunset Boulevard’ is his exploration of what happens when the Hollywood dream goes wrong. Wilder shows the disillusionment people face when they chase external outcomes, such as fame (Norma) and money (Joe). At the same time, his film is not entirely cynical. People such as Betty and some of the extras, “writers without a job, composers without a publisher”, are shown to be happy despite the struggles they face. Perhaps, Wilder suggests, you can enjoy the process of work in Hollywood as long as you are not solely there to chase superficial goals.
‘Film noir’ describes a genre of films produced mostly in 1950s America that involve characters whose poor decisions usually lead them to tragic ends. Film noir is a gritty, cynical genre that typically involve scrime and police investigation. They are almost all set and shot in Los Angeles, primarily for budget reasons, though this later became a hallmark of the genre. The protagonist (Joe) is often a man who meets (and frequently, though not in the case of ‘Sunset Boulevard’, falls in love with) a ‘femme fatale’ (Norma). The femme fatale is a woman who in some way sets the protagonist up for his later death, imprisonment, or other doom.
The femme fatale’s position is often juxtaposed against that of another woman who represents the good, socially and morally acceptable life our protagonist could have chosen. This woman often works for a living, sustains herself, and is courageous. Betty fits this trope exactly. However, as in any classic noir film, while the protagonist may be drawn to this second woman, he will never actually choose her, instead falling into the clutches of the femme fatale, quite aware of the disastrous consequences.
Many noir films have been criticised for their cynical view of women, since it is primarily the women who cause, often deliberately, all the disaster in the film. Additionally, the ‘good’ woman is often presented as docile and rigorously adherent to traditional standards of beauty. On the other hand, film noir was arguably advanced on the gender front at its time for two reasons: firstly, that it gave the women this power over men at all, and secondly that the ‘good’ woman often worked for a living and was self-sufficient. She could help the protagonist, but she did not need him.
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