Is Norma Desmond, the mad, washed-up actress of Sunset Blvd., a villain? This is something I wrote in response to someone who thought that not only is Norma the villain of the film, but that the film has a tone of general loathing for her. While the film obviously portrays her as a grotesque, I think the portrayal is both complex and sympathetic, relying on nuances of viewer-identification, and rooted in interesting ideas about Hollywood.
First, let me say something about the nature of first-person narratives. The protagonist and narrator of Sunset Blvd. is clearly Gillis, the young writer who is manipulated and eventually killed by Norma, and as such, the narrative is largely from his first-person perspective. However, in my mind, when a story is presented from a particular character’s perspective (either as a narrator or as a protagonist), that doesn’t mean that the audience is meant to stand in the character’s shoes; it merely means that the audience is standing alongside the character. The character is coloring events in a certain way, but the creator of the story has a lot of leeway in making us see things in a different way. And I’m not talking about really obvious unreliable narration. I’m just talking about things like the camera looking at Gillis’ cigarette case from the point of view of another character (Betty). That shot obviously requires the audience to momentarily adopt the other character’s point of view. Such a switch is predicated upon the creator’s knowledge that the audience does not completely identify with a single character, that the “identification” is, as I said, a standing-alongside in which the audience maintains its autonomy from the narrator. As another example, when Gillis first meets Norma and she rants about the downfall of silent cinema, she is shot in soft focus, the candles behind her blurred and smeared as if they were elements of her mad world. According to Gillis’ narration, he thinks of Norma as merely a rich old nut at this point, but the camera slightly alters this viewpoint by showing us a glimpse of the grandeur of her madness. As yet another example, Gillis’ petty anger toward his agent at the golf course is shot in a completely objective way, from medium distance and not favoring either character’s actions or reaction. The following scene gives us a very subjective voiceover somewhat justifying Gillis’ anger, but this comes as an addendum to the objective view that we were already given.
The fact that the narrator is known to be dead from the beginning encourages the audience to recognize this leeway. However, within this leeway, Gillis’ perspective is the dominant one, at least in the first act (which I assume is everything before the suicide attempt): the camerawork follows a consistent pattern of showing us some other character doing something, followed by Gillis’ reaction, and each scene is bookended by Gillis’ voice-over. But it’s equally obvious in Gillis’ narration that Gillis has some pity for Norma. When she first shows him her script, he says “it meant so much to her” and refers to her as “a bundle of raw nerves”. Later, he describes her as “afraid of the world”. These are hardly words of hatred. And the funeral for her chimp (which he first mocks by saying that the chimp must be “the grandson of King Kong” to deserve such solemnity) he describes as the “laying to rest of an only child,” and it makes him ask if Norma’s “life is as empty as that?” Even at the end, after Gillis has been shot, he expresses sympathy for her, referring to the newspeople swarming her as “heartless so-and-so’s” who will kill her with their headlines. I don’t see how one can infer pure hatred from such narration.
In any case, the film goes beyond this voice-over sympathy. When Max reveals that he writes Norma’s letters, there is no emphasis on the absurdity of maintaining Norma’s illusion: the context of the revelation is Norma’s despondency over her lost glory. Later, during the New Year’s dance scene, when Norma reveals her infatuation with Gillis—her “sad, embarrassing revelation,” as Gillis calls it—the mood is melancholy, and the camera focuses on her face, or at least her reactions, rather than on Gillis’. Her look is wistful, and Swanson brilliantly shows the latent despair and hope in her eyes. This scene is clearly intended to make us sympathize with Norma. The suicide attempt two scenes later only builds this sympathy. And following that, most of the focus in the second act is on Norma; Gillis, rather than getting constant reaction shots, merely lingers next to Norma looking pensive. In particular, during Norma’s beautifying treatments and her Chaplin impersonation (and her meeting with DeMille, which I’ll get back to), the focus is entirely on her and is entirely sympathetic. Gillis is completely excluded, even if we assume this pitying view of Norma to be his.
It’s only in the final act, after Max reveals that he was Norma’s first husband and thus reveals the extent of her narcissism, that the tone of the film becomes ntipathetic towards Norma. At this point the narrative shifts back toward Gillis, focusing on his attempts to escape from Norma. Things that previously made us sympathize with her now transform into sources of antipathy: for example, she now threatens suicide explicitly as a means of control. Indeed, this whole act leads up to Gillis giving Betty a tour of Norma’s mansion that completely decimates its mystique (and by extension, Norma’s entire world). Things such as the movie screen, which was previously shot in highly dramatic lighting and with no architectural context, are filmed in this scene as completely banal; the movie screen is shot from an angle dictated by Gillis movements, just like any other meaningless object in Norma’s house. And this scene itself leads to Gillis’ confrontation with a particularly haggard-looking Norma Desmond, shot at a low angle to accentuate her sagging chin, her face covered in “beautifying” oil. Norma begs Gillis to stay, while the camera sits by passively, and then, of course, Norma shoots Gillis in the back when he tries to leave. All of which makes Norma seem pretty pathetic.
I’m guessing that this last act is what might make one think the film hates Norma Desmond. But, given what has come before, and what comes in the denouement, I don’t think we should interpret the film so harshly. By the time that Norma’s worst behavior is revealed, we have already built up enough sympathy for her that we can’t be expected to suddenly despise her. Instead, the revelations of the magnitude of her narcissism and of the completely illusory nature of her life serves to reinforce our sympathy for Gillis. This complexifies the situation, amplifying the tragedy: we are aware of Norma’s faults, and we hope that Gillis can escape her grasp, but we also pity her. The audience can feel sad that Gillis dies, but can’t help pitying Norma at the same time—in the end, as Gillis says in his final voice-over, even life pities Norma.
And life pities Norma precisely because her life is made possible by Hollywood. In the scene when Norma visits DeMille, I’m pretty sure that DeMille is not meant to be a point of identification for the audience, since we are never given any reason to identify with him; rather, he is the voice of wisdom, as one who has survived within Hollywood. And he lays down the thesis of the whole film, which is that “press agents working over time can do terrible things to the human spirit.” (Note that this line immediately follows the one about Norma only becoming hard to work with towards the end of her career. DeMille is not saying that Norma is an old bitch, and so nobody wants to work with her; he’s saying that she was groomed to assume her role as a megalomaniac.) One might say that the film despises Norma for being old, and that it sympathizes with the young. This possible reading is based on the obviously positive portrayal of Gillis’ relationship with Betty, contrasted with his relationship with Norma, and by the liveliness of the youthful New Year’s party, contrasted with the lifelessness at Norma’s mansion. But I see the central contrast between young Betty and old Norma not as young versus old, but as real versus unreal. The life of the star is construed as an illusory construct of the Hollywood dream factory, while Betty’s path as a writer is a life outside the illusion (although abetting it). When Betty and Gillis walk through the studio sets, the contrast between their reality and the non-reality of the movies is emphasized. When Gillis goes from Norma’s party to Betty’s boyfriend’s party, the two are contrasted by how alive the attendees at the latter party are, how concerned with everyday difficulties and how involved with other people they are. Norma is isolated from this world because the nature of stardom has pushed her away from it.
existentialism is a film 