A Film Canon

The greatest film ever made about Hollywood, Sunset Blvd. fuses fact and fiction so perfectly as to replace both with a spectral, hallucinatory intensity that imbues every character with their imminent death - from screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden), who narrates from beyond the grave, to aging silent icon Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), who takes him in after his car breaks down, and hires him to script her comeback, to her manservant (Erich von Stroheim) and collection of 'waxworks' (including Buster Keaton), all of whom allow her to maintain the fantasy that Cecil B. DeMille will be prepared to direct it. This, in turn, imbues cinema itself with the same ghostliness, as evinced in Wilder's organisation of the narrative around two poles - Desmond's mansion, suffused with a plethora of baroque, gothic objects (including an old pipe organ that groans with the breeze, a stuffed bestiary, and a series of elaborate spaces in which to contemplate her cinematic and theatrical heyday), and DeMille's studio, which partakes of exactly the same decadent splendour, but with more prescience of the void that lies just beneath it, beautifully encapsulated in Desmond's uncanny encounter with its mechanics and, more specifically, with a spotlight and microphone whose functionality poignantly undermines her sense of entitlement, reducing her to a mere set piece that has passed its use-by date. However, the most ingenious evocation of cinematic transitoriness comes from the contrast between Swanson's acting, which is deliberately infused with the hyperbolic, melodramatic, almost psychotic quality of her silent performanes, and Holden's narration, whose wry, bittersweet beauty represents an apex of sound cinema, and screenwriting; the meeting of a silent body and a disembodied voice, producing a romance that can only end with the violence inherent in cinema's extraordinary ability to reconfigure the collective sensorium.