Sunset Boulevard

Recently, I was watching Sunset Boulevard (for probably the fifth or sixth time) with my roommate (who had never seen it before). It’s one of my favorite movies, though I don’t know if I agree with IMDB that it’s the greatest noir ever – maybe the greatest movie that is a noir, which is slightly different. Even there, I’m not willing to commit.

Regardless of such split hairs, though – great movie. Very few people will disagree with that.

My own personal definition of a great movie is one that not only holds up over multiple viewings, but improves over time. Much like a favorite novel, revisiting certain films opens up new avenues of thought and new reactions at different points of my life. Plus, of course, there’s just the advantage of having the luxury of hunting for little treasures.

This time through, it was the mirrors. I’d noticed the plethora of reflected images in previous viewings, but this time they felt inescapable. Norma running up the stairs the mirror while Joe prepared to leave the New Year’s party. The little hand mirror Norma seems to constantly have in hand in the car. The unforgettable scene after Betty leaves in which Norma notices the beauty strips still on her face and removes them before going in to find Joe packing.

In a house filled with images of Norma as she was, it’s intriguing that there are also so many opportunities for Norma to see herself as she is. They’re missed opportunities, of course; her delusions don’t allow Norma to register what she’s viewing. For Joe, the mirrors only amplify his sense of confinement. They continually bar his ability to pretend the situation is anything it isn’t.

Joe fascinates me. He’s a reactive hero, but we’re drawn in, largely because of the voiceover (which here, works beautifully, in part because it’s a film so very conscious of being a film). He’s really not a “good guy,” nor a very terrible one, but he’s complex, and in his way, he’s just as chewed up and spit out by Hollywood as Norma. They’re both damaged beyond repair; the difference, and perhaps the tragedy for Joe, is that he realizes it.  He can see that Norma is cracked beyond fixing but, in the penultimate scene where Betty finds out how he’s been living, his actions show that he realizes he is past the point of no return himself.  Even if he had been able to successfully leave Norma, he can’t go back to Ohio.

Joe is defined as both a writer and someone who is utterly without control.  From the first time we properly meet him, he’s attempting to keep his car from being repossessed; in a very real way, he is trying to cultivate and maintain agency throughout the film.  We see it eroded little by little, and there is an element of horror in the way he slowly becomes an accessory.  His first reaction to finding that all his belongings have been moved in while he slept is the sort of helpless protest that usually attends a very different sort of power dynamic.

(I’d love to talk about gender in this film, but that would be a much, much longer entry that would require quite a bit more rewatching to do properly. Maybe someday.)

There’s a reason Sunset Boulevard consistently makes lists of great movies in the history of cinema.  It is suspenseful, chilling, and ultimately takes the idea of noir and reflects it back through a prism of film’s self-criticism.

Check out the opening, though, to see why it gets firmly labeled noir, even if it is more or less detective-free. Love the score too. It would make a good Halloween movie, I think, in its own way. After all, what’s more scary than the erosion of identity? (My liberal arts education may be showing.)

Grade: A Indisputably fantastic, and one of my personal favorites.