Sunset Boulevard (Wilder 1950)

The success of this film -- and it is a significant one -- is contingent upon three things:

1.) Corpse as narrator. Film noir was just taking shape at this point -- much like Neo-realism, it was a genre grouped as such after the fact, in this case by a bunch of precocious Frenchies scribbling in their Cahiers -- but Wilder and Brackett (the screenwriter) made their hero wry, self-loathing, and, in a stroke a wit, dead.

2.) Tremendous nostalgia. Slothy said that he didn't quite 'get' the film when he first watched it -- or at least felt like there was much that went over his head, which reminds Blondie of the first time she saw Wayne's World at the tender age of 11 and the phrase 'ribbed for her pleasure' had a similar effect. Perhaps this is because Slothy, and many others of this age, are lacking in knowledge not just of classic Hollywood, but silent Hollywood. For audiences in 1950, Swanson -- and all that she stood for -- along with the dozens of references to her own screen life, star image, and the decadence and glamour of the silent days of the 'movie colony' would have resonated as strongly as any episode of 'I Love the '80s' does us animals. Appearances by Buster Keaton, Hedda Hopper, Swanson's long-time director Cecil B. DeMille, the evocation of Swanson's own career (the Chaplain imitation; the Mack Sennett Bathing Beauty; friendship with Valentino, Mabel Normand, Rod LaRoque), I could fill the page). One might say that a film that cannot work without extratextual knowledge cannot work at all, but one can go fuck oneself. Lazily.

What makes this film work is its simultaneous evocation and undermining of nostalgia. It illuminates the seedy, pasty, unseemly underbelly of memory. That, sez Blondie, is what noir is for: making us understand that sunshine is best filmed in black and white, that Los Angeles is hideous, that when Jack Nicholson tries to investigate problems with the water he'll end up staring incest in the face. And that stardom, fandom, and celebrity culture leads to dead chimps and murderous, pitiable middle-aged women.

3.) La Swanson.

I admit I am partial to Glamorous Grandmother Gloria, as I spent much of the last year digging through boxes upon boxes of Swanson in the HRC. But the film would not function without star with intelligence to understand that the role she was playing was not a lampooning of herself, but the image of herself the public wanted to believe she had become. Again, tres noir: the abject fascination with beauty gone to seed, growing old, growing dead.

But let me rephrase: Swanson, a woman of tremendous dignity, had to abandon that dignity for the sake of the role, and although her 'real' life was nothing like that of Norma Desmond (Swanson in fact lived on 5th Avenue, dabbled in investments, enjoyed a dynamic post-Hollywood social life) she lived with others conflating the role and the woman for the rest of her life. She gave herself over entirely to this film - a comeback ('I hate that word! It's a return!' as Norma would say) ensued. But not really. A flop film, a flop play. A line of very successful dresses for stout women, with plus sizes renamed 'glamour sizes.' But the film remains, a monument not only to the tremendous fame and fascination that surrounded her silent career -- when school was closed in all of California so children could come wave to her train as she returned from her European honeymoon -- but her understanding of that fame, and all that it could, and could not, bring.

On the big screen at the Paramount having taken my film history course: A

On the small screen in ignorance: B

Koko: The New Critic in me has a prejudice against stories told from the point of view of dead people (my principal, though by no means only, complaint with American Beauty). Can you explain to me how this narrative gambit makes the movie better rather than worse?

Blondie: I should clarify: the dead narrator (and his particularly bemused attitude towards his death) was a novel twist on the what was shaping into the noir genre at the time; now, it's just one of those devices that makes you realize that you thought a film you thought the epitome of the form when you watched it as a freshman in college and now fills you with shame for your naive self (e.g. American Beauty). Maybe if I had already seen Sunset Boulevard when I first saw American Beauty, its stultifying self-consciousness would have been more apparent.

Koko: I challenge Slothrop to review American Beauty.