When seven-time Academy Award winner Billy Wilder wrote and directed Sunset Boulevard, his intention was to mock the vanity of Fifties Hollywood. He had no idea that 75 years later his message about the dangers of narcissism would transcend the movie business and come to define our solipsistic 21st century.
The film stars Gloria Swanson as a washed-up, filthy-rich silent film actress named Norma Desmond, who refuses to accept that she no longer exists front and centre in the popular imagination. William Holden plays the much younger, much poorer failing screenwriter, Joe Gillis, who mistakenly turns into the driveway of Desmond’s Hollywood mansion while on the run from the repo man. There he is presented with rent-free room and board in return for editing a screenplay. But this side gig quickly transforms into a 24/7 job as a kept man whose role is less gigolo than round-the-clock admirer.
The film ends with Gillis lying dead in the pool, while the cops escort a deranged Desmond out of her house to be tried for his murder. The homicidal diva, however, is under the impression that the media’s cameras are only there to broadcast her fame, a misapprehension summed up by one of the most famous last lines of Hollywood history: “All right, Mr DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.”
In many ways, Desmond is the perfect 21st-century heroine. Her obsession with her own image anticipates the delusions of our selfie-addicted social media era. When Gillis first turns up at Desmond’s mansion, he finds the ageing diva surrounded by paintings and photographs of herself at the prime of her popularity. She spends her evenings watching her silent celluloid image on the movie screen that lurks behind a full-length oil portrait in the living room, or else gazing piteously at herself in the mirror. At one point, Desmond tells her reluctant boy toy: “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces.”
Sunset Boulevard was a hit, gathering 11 Academy Award nominations. It would eventually break Broadway’s all-time record for box-office receipts. And yet its theme was something of an anomaly in post-war Hollywood, as the film was neither overtly political nor particularly patriotic. It wasn’t about war, communists, or criminals; it was neither a romance nor a Western. Instead, the film was an early example of what future scholars would call post-modernism. Put simply, Sunset Boulevard was a movie about the movies.
In making the film, Wilder was taking a risk. He had long been a favourite of Hollywood studio heads, as his films Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend had been hugely successful financially. But in Sunset Boulevard, he dared to turn Hollywood’s lens upon itself in order to expose the toxic self-absorption of the industry. As a result, and despite all critical acclaim, Sunset Boulevard was hated by the studio elites. “You bastard,” MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer was said to have yelled at Wilder. “You have disgraced the industry that made you and fed you!”
The film is shot in black and white, the women sport snoods, the score presents a mishmash of tango and bebop — but its most dated element may be that it portrays unbridled self-adoration as a bad thing. Today, of course, vanity is considered quite the opposite. Narcissistic mania has become the summum bonum for Gen Alphas on TikTok, Gen Zs on Instagram, Right-wingers on X, Lefties on Bluesky, paranoids on Telegram, and all the old folks on Facebook — each and every one of them determined to mesmerise the mediasphere if only for a few seconds. The reason Sunset Boulevard remains so relevant and beloved today — with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical remake breaking box-office records this summer on Broadway — is that it anticipated our epidemic of self-absorption.
“The reason Sunset Boulevard remains so relevant and beloved today is because it anticipated our epidemic of self-absorption.”
Nowhere is this clearer than in the casting. Wilder and his co-writer, Charles Brackett, riddled their screenplay with inside-Hollywood jokes about has-been actors. Instead of using actors to portray washed-up stars, he used the washed-up stars themselves. In one scene, the bridge-playing, over-the-hill silent movie star Buster Keaton plays an over-the-hill silent movie star playing bridge. Across from him at the table sits an aged Anna Q. Nilsson — the “ideal American girl” of 1919, who appeared in 200 silent films — and Harry B. Warner, who had reached the height of his fame a quarter-century earlier, playing Jesus Christ in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 epic, The King of Kings. When Desmond bulls her way back into her old stomping grounds at Paramount Pictures, it is Cecil B. DeMille who appears, playing himself at the studio he co-founded.
Edith Head, who designed the costumes, later described her assignment as “the most challenging of my career”. Perhaps this was because, for the first time, Head had to create costumes that suggested costuming. She fitted Swanson in outdated fur muffs and cuffs, brocades, ermine, and over-the-top costume jewellery. “Because Norma Desmond was an actress who had become lost in her own imagination,” she recalled, “I tried to make her look like she was always impersonating someone.” In Sunset Boulevard, impersonating a personality is the path to greatness — a truth today’s legions of Instagram influencers know only too well.
Desmond herself costumes Gillis for the part of her leading man, dressing him in bespoke tuxedos and vicuña overcoats, drawing him into the orbit of her vanity. But despite his newfound finery, the screenwriter is a dead man walking. And that is because, for all its Hollywood glitz, Sunset Boulevard is a morality play with echoes of an earlier age.
Wilder was particularly attuned to the moral dangers of narcissism, as his family had fled a European continent drenched in images of Adolf Hitler. He knew the hazards of personality cults, which echoed his native Jewish distrust of false idols. Yet in Hollywood, Wilder had made a living out of idol worship. His spiritual dilemma hearkened back to John Bunyan’s 17th-century allegorical novel, The Pilgrim’s Progress, in which characters named Christian and Faithful are drawn to a marketplace called Vanity Fair, which in many ways resembles Fifties Hollywood. Here, money and materialism override “lives, blood, bodies, souls”, so that the worth of an individual can only be measured through his or her commodification. While Faithful manages to escape, his companion Christian is burned at the stake.
A similar fate awaits Gillis, as when the writer finally packs his bags and tries to save his soul by getting the hell out, Norma shoots him three times in the back. As the press crowds her living room, Desmond tips over the edge. Unable to comprehend that she is about to become a lurid headline, she can only interpret the attention as an increase of her power. “This is my life,” Norma says. “Just us. And the cameras.”
Of course it is. Sunset Boulevard was the first film to depict the moral failures of a world that cares for nothing but image. Today, Hollywood’s narcissism has spread beyond the backlots of Burbank; thanks to social media, anyone can now play the diva. What was once the deadly sin of vanity has become aspirational, which is why a note other than tragic sadness pervades William Holden’s final lines. “It’s dawn now,” he says, his voice rising from beyond the grave, lilting with sardonic triumph. “They must have photographed me a thousand times.”
