SUNSET BLVD. Decoded: Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up

Both the house and its inhabitant share much with Dickens’ character: a wealthy old spinster who spends her days consumed by longing for the man who deceived her and broke her heart, frozen in time, wrapped in her tattered wedding gown, unable to even remove the remnants of the decaying wedding feast and cake. Norma Desmond, once a great star of the silver screen, clings desperately to the faded glory of the past, surrounding herself with memorabilia and waiting for a moment of great triumph that will never come. She is a caricature and grotesque figure, but also tragic and symbolic, hiding the drama of many actresses like her for whom the advent of sound in cinema meant the end of their dreams and careers. One of those actresses was Gloria Swanson, the star of Sunset Blvd., and paradoxically, this role became her greatest acting success. There is something symbolic—and infinitely sad—about this.

“We didn’t need dialogue, we had faces,” Norma says about the generation of silent film stars, those whom Joe, with a certain contempt, calls “wax figures.” Women with striking faces, huge, deep eyes, sensual lips, actresses able to convey vast emotions with a single gesture. Yet, they were also tainted by theatrical exaggeration, over-expression, and were part of the creation of living pictures. They were painterly muses, unable to cope with the demands of contemporary cinema. But how does one cope when suddenly, without warning, the substance of your life is taken away—what you breathe, what makes you yourself? Some managed to reinvent themselves, others did not. Their manifesto and monument is precisely Norma Desmond.

Did Norma have a real-life counterpart? The debate on this topic continues to this day. According to enigmatic comments by director Billy Wilder, she did not, or at least, she was not based on a single individual. Rather, she was a synthesis of several stories, several painful life histories, or just fragments of them. The first story belongs to Mary Pickford, perhaps the greatest legend of the silent film era, a pioneer and participant in groundbreaking cinematic techniques: she was the subject of the first close-up shot in the 1912 film Friends. Like Franz Kafka, she wished for all the film reels featuring her to be destroyed, but, as with Kafka, no one was willing to fulfill this final request.

Mary – or rather Gladys – went through a tough life. She knew the pain of poverty and the constant struggle to make ends meet. Despite her delicate, innocent on-screen image of the eternal child, she was a knowledgeable and competent businesswoman. She won an Oscar for her first sound role (Coquette, 1929) and retired on her own terms. So, what of Mary’s life is reflected in the character of Norma, a role she actually turned down (along with Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo)?

First and foremost – her profound loneliness. Professionally accomplished, wealthy, and famous as “America’s sweetheart,” she was privately deeply unhappy. In a short time, she lost her mother and then her siblings. She parted ways with Douglas Fairbanks, her great love. She couldn’t connect with her adopted children, who suffered from her inflated perfectionism. She struggled with alcoholism. As a result, she withdrew completely from life, choosing a hermit-like existence and allowing only a few close acquaintances to get close to her. She paid a high price for fame and success.

Another key piece in the construction of Norma’s character was contributed by two stars: Clara Bow and Mae Murray. The first of them fared quite well with the decline of silent cinema, while the second did not at all. Clara, at the height of her fame, received 45,000 fan letters a month. In 1931, she married actor Rex Bell, and two years later, she ended her career – and that was when her dramatic health problems began. Like Norma Desmond, Clara could not stand her husband leaving the house without her, but at the same time, she couldn’t bring herself to accompany him.

Upon hearing that her husband was running for the House of Representatives, she attempted suicide. In 1949, due to chronic insomnia and auditory hallucinations, she was admitted to a mental institution where she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She eventually left the hospital but refused to return to her family, instead living alone in a bungalow, which she hardly ever left until her death in 1965.

The story of Mae Murray is even sadder. The advent of the sound era was not kind to her; she lacked the audacity and determination to make the transition. In the 1940s, she regularly visited the Diamond Horseshoe nightclub, where stars from the past were often showcased for promotional purposes. She couldn’t age with grace, rejecting her age and piling heavy layers of makeup on her face, parading around in short, ill-fitting, low-cut dresses that did not suit her mature figure. People whispered about her with a patronizing pity… She was married four times and divorced four times, and spent the last years of her life in a nursing home, impoverished and completely disoriented.

According to journalist Dave Kehr of The New York Times, both Sunset Blvd. and Singin’ in the Rain mock another star from the past, namely Norma Talmadge. Kehr’s article is full of indignation at the injustice that unjustly befell Talmadge: Singin’ in the Rain was said to ridicule her accent, and Sunset Boulevard… her solitary lifestyle, romance with a much younger man, and eccentric behavior. Paradoxically, it is the disgusted journalist himself who does the most harm to his subject. None of the film characters seem to bear any resemblance to Talmadge’s personality, who never enjoyed the spotlight. The film industry began to bore her during the silent film era, and she withdrew from the industry with great relief. When she had a romance with the 21-year-old Gilbert Roland, she was 32 years old, so it’s hard to talk about middle age here. As for the eccentric behavior? In the later years of her life, Talmadge suffered from advanced arthritis, reportedly became addicted to painkillers, and eventually married her doctor.

The reporter, deeply affected, would have been better off focusing on Lupe Velez instead of Norma Talmadge. The Mexican actress managed to cope with the sound revolution, although, like Pola Negri, she had a distinctive, heavy foreign accent. However, privately, she was a scandalous figure with an explosive temperament. She never hid her emotions, created a lot of commotion around herself, was loud, demanded attention, and loved to admire herself in the mirror. Her romances were passionate and full of intense emotions. Her love affair with Gary Cooper became famous, as she chased him several times with a knife in hand, and after a tumultuous breakup, she attempted to shoot him as he boarded a train.

Regular physical altercations occurred between her and her husband, Olympic champion Johnny Weissmuller. She was jealous of her men, and when it came to women, especially other actresses, she could not tolerate them and enjoyed maliciously parodying her rivals at industry events. In 1944, she became pregnant by her lover at the time, Harald Ramond. It is said that her partner suggested abortion, which, as a devout Catholic, was unthinkable for Lupe. Instead, she committed suicide, leaving a dramatic farewell letter addressed to Harald.

Finally, the name of the character in Sunset Blvd. is a combination of the names of Mabel Normand and director William Desmond Taylor, two people who became synonymous with scandal in Hollywood during the 1920s. Her cocaine addiction, which came to light during the investigation of Taylor’s (still unsolved) murder, severely damaged the reputation of the popular actress at the time.

Thus, from the fragments of biographies and bits of life stories, Norma Desmond was born.

The atmosphere surrounding the former star’s mansion has something gothic about it. The diligent Max, the butler who anticipates his mistress’s every wish, evokes the image of Klove, Dracula’s servant, or Fritz/Ygor from the Frankenstein film series. Max’s devotion is absolute and fanatical. It stems from a love bordering on obsession, as Max has completely abandoned his own identity, agreeing to play a humiliating role just to stay close to the star, whom he worships both as an actress and as a woman. It is he who creates the illusion around her, in which Norma gradually sinks.

At the moment we meet her – both we, and Joe, the struggling screenwriter facing financial troubles – Norma, in Max’s eyes, is a living symbol, while in the eyes of everyone else, she is a mere caricature of herself. Miss Havisham stopped all the clocks at 8:40, the moment when her fiancé abandoned her; Norma, on the other hand, reluctantly leaves the house, afraid that the world will catch up to her and remind her of the passage of time. Everything has changed, and Norma’s mind constantly struggles to reconcile two contradictions: the awareness that twenty years have passed since her days of glory and the cherished vision of herself as beautiful, still young, desirable, and talented. This is an exhausting battle of illusion versus reality, delusion versus fact; so exhausting that it eventually leads to a complete mental breakdown.

Norma’s existence is built on contradictions. She surrounds herself with her own photos and posters, constantly re-watching films in which she starred, lost equally in admiration and hatred. She is her biggest fan and her greatest enemy. She envies the success of the greatest of the great: herself. In the mirror, she sees another face, and although she obsessively tries to preserve her youth and beauty, her own reflection haunts her, painfully contrasting with the mementos she has accumulated, all of which she gathered willingly. The dark glasses are a convenient shield, creating the illusion of hiding from others—and from herself.

She also isolates herself from people, allowing only companions from the past: Buster Keaton, H.B. Warner, and Anna Q. Nilsson—frozen and dusty just like her. She patiently plays her hand with them as the egocentric queen of her domestic stage. She needs adoration as much as air, and like air, she craves the act. Although her emotions are genuine, she consciously stirs and amplifies them, drawing out every dramatic note, turning every line she speaks into a monologue, and transforming every conversation into an expressive heroine’s dialogue. This is how she fills the emptiness, constantly imagining that invisible cameras are watching her. This is her state of continuous readiness—when her long-awaited, cherished project, Salome, her grand return after the years, is finally ready to go, she will be prepared, instantly stepping into the role.

This illusion, nurtured and maintained by Max, who fabricates fan letters so that Norma doesn’t feel forgotten, is both exhausting and dangerous, because anything that reminds the great star of reality could shatter it. Until the final breakdown and complete withdrawal into the world of fantasy, Norma operates on the edge. She knows that change is touching her—but she refuses to simply accept it. Her emotional, cyclothymic, and narcissistic nature—so characteristic of artists—experiences every little detail with the force of a hurricane and reacts just as strongly. Melancholy, suicide attempts, and loud emotional blackmail are equally games and cries for attention, as well as manifestations of the bitter truth that lurks just beneath the surface.

Norma is so completely devoted to playing the role of Norma that she cannot break free from the vicious circle. Contradictions and contrasts are at her very core. She carries with her the vanity of a middle-aged woman, easily wounded, which she bolsters with money and gifts for Joe—and he, ultimately, though reluctantly, has taken on the role of a kept man. Yet, somewhere inside, there is a little girl, small and mischievous, writing in an unclear, unrefined, childish hand, who loves play-acting and dressing up, wants to be pampered and adored. In the brief period between the suicide attempt on New Year’s and the shooting by the pool, she is truly happy—ironically, perhaps for the first time in such a way. It’s almost as if the fake affection turned out to be more valuable to the person who lives constantly on stage, in the glow of imagined spotlights. A little out of convenience, and a little out of human compassion, by tolerating this charade, Joe sealed Norma’s fate. Her balance was already extremely fragile, and it only took one precise blow to finally plunge her mind into madness.

Ultimately, Norma’s tragedy does not stem from her detachment from reality, but quite the opposite – from her inability to completely cut herself off from it. The wall surrounding her was not strong enough to keep out jealousy and insecurity. Norma was poisoned by the fear of losing Joe, and she was broken by the truths he shouted at her in simple words. Broken, because she senses – or rather has long since sensed – that they are justified. Yet only when spoken aloud do they take shape and come alive. They can no longer be denied unless one completely shuts down their awareness.

Shock and trauma are, for Norma’s fragile mind, an earthquake after which she entirely collapses mentally and loses touch with her surroundings, staring into her delusional visions. And so, the greatest tragedy lies in the fact that this is simultaneously the moment of her greatest happiness and triumph – she moves under the relentless gaze of the cameras, descending the stairs, a princess in her own world, surrounded by admiration and ready for her close-up. She is accompanied by silence and solemnity. No one dares to disturb this moment. No one is so tactless or cruel as to laugh – not even Hedda Hopper, clutching her notebook, the journalist who has destroyed many a reputation with her pen; even she wears a faint, sympathetic expression. Norma floats, carried by her fantasy, and we all stand still in awe, though with painfully clenched hearts.