Death surrounds Sunset Boulevard, draping itself across every frame like one of Norma Desmond’s (Swanson) ornate veils. It’s a film that begins in the gutter, with a shot of the title street’s name painted on a curb, and even as Hollywood glamour rears its head, it really never leaves it. The story is told in flashback by a dead man, murdered screenwriter-turned-gigolo Joe Gillis (William Holden), first seen as a body floating facedown in a swimming pool. The engine of the plot is an aging silent star, initially met preparing a somber funeral for her pet chimp.
Sunset Boulevard places audiences in a haunted house called Hollywood. The deepest and most obvious metaphors running through Sunset Boulevard, the ones Mayer got so mad about back in 1950, are about Hollywood discards, people culled from an industry they love no matter how feverishly they fight back, and the deadly consequences that ensue when a bygone era butts up against the current guard. It’s the movie industry literally shooting itself in the back.
What’s striking is how that clash of eras, personalities, and worldviews are not only still present, but arguably more savage than ever. No one is immune from the cordoning off of individual content fiefdoms in modern Hollywood, a world where legendary stars and hungry upstarts alike can still be chewed up and spit back out into rundown bungalows and decaying mansions like Joe and Norma.
Joe, stumbling upon Norma’s expansive home while fleeing from some goons trying to repo his car, immediately recognizes the house as a place of darkness, just as he clearly sees Hollywood for what it is: A factory where the hardest workers are those most readily tossed aside. Norma, though, is so steeped in the glamour of her glory days that she can’t comprehend the rundown state of her mansion’s grounds, or the dried-up stream of fan mail now entirely manufactured by her butler Max (Erich von Stroheim). She is a ghost who’s drifted out of time, haunting the present with echoes of a past long gone. The contrast between these figures, dialed up as sharply as the light and shadows of cinematographer John F. Seitz’s compositions, is the engine for the film’s tension. But the audience knows how it ends. It’s inevitable. And that’s partially because neither the cynical Joe nor delusional Norma is really wrong about Hollywood.
Thus, the response from Mayer, who not only oversaw MGM when it was the biggest and most successful studio in Hollywood, but who cultivated the “star system” which controlled every aspect of a potential star’s life and work, tying them not just to a company but to a preconceived idea of who and what they should be. Judy Garland’s meteoric rise, and the drug abuse and psychological trauma that were its consequences? Mayer’s handiwork, just as ruthlessly calculated as the overwhelming, Best Picture-winning might of films like The Great Ziegfeld and Mutiny On The Bounty.
It’s no wonder, then, that he was so infuriated by a film that lays the raw reality of Hollywood bare not by directly critiquing it, but by presenting two very different Hollywood lives and concluding that they’ve both been fed into the same blood-powered money machine. Norma’s tragedy is distinct from Joe’s, but they collide because that is the legacy of Mayer’s Hollywood, a world in which stars and struggling writers alike are simply cogs, turned by ruthless moguls. Though the movies made by the industry look different now, the plights of those that make them haven’t changed much. The most famous line in Sunset Boulevard comes just moments after Norma and Joe meet, when Joe dares to say that the movie star used to be big. Norma’s response, “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small,” is a part of her elaborate delusion, but with a timeless truth embedded within: In our world, artworks become products.
The pictures got small because box office returns, awards statuettes, and competing titans moving stars and sets around like Monopoly buildings never went away. As wannabe old-school moguls like Warner Bros.’ David Zaslav discard years of work for tax write-offs and streaming services design movies to be passive, “second screen” viewing experiences, and the pictures are smaller than ever. The blockbusters are bigger—in a financial sense—but the grand impact of cinema as a whole continues to lessen even as ardent cinephiles fight back. Elaborate sets built by craftsmen have given way to empty warehouses and digital screens. Private equity-driven studios are all too happy to feed the work of hundreds into the shredder if it means getting a kickback. Audiences, taught that films are just things that play in the background, take photos of the screen in the theater (or just wait until they can stream it). In many ways, movies have been reduced to content, clout, and cash.
The anxieties of Sunset Boulevard are still the anxieties of modern Hollywood, with send-ups like The Studio (the most savage Hollywood takedown of its era which, naturally, came not as a film but as a streaming series) revealing the corporate quagmires and warring egos in the way of getting something resembling art onto a screen. But there are still those—Norma Desmond’s “wonderful people out there in the dark”—watching, waiting, and hoping. The tragedy of Sunset Boulevard when it infuriated Louis B. Mayer was Hollywood shooting itself in the back. The tragedy of Sunset Boulevard now is that, deep down, we all hope that Norma Desmond was right, and that one day the pictures will be big again.
