Sunset Boulevard: Wilder’s Timelessness

Thus, Hollywood found itself the center of noir: a setting more apt for brutalized dreams and dark motives than even New York City.

It never ceases to amaze me how profoundly modern Billy Wilder's films feel. Having watched The Apartment, Some Like it Hot, Sunset Boulevard, Witness for the Prosecution, and Ace in the Hole within the last year, Wilder seems almost prophetic in his ability to center stories around topics that feel incendiary even in 2021: unfettered greed and capitalistic manipulation of press in Ace in the Hole; corporate misogyny in The Apartment. 

And then there's Sunset Boulevard. Manipulative behavior, gaslighting, and abusive relationships have rightly been the subject of spotlight and critique during the #MeToo movement. Wilder's film was portraying this darkness (and the cult of personality which provides safe cover to such evil) in 1950. The dynamics are so often flipped in reality, with men abusing positions of privilege and power; but they are no less malevolent for being embodied by Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond.

And, my God, the malevolence. Rewatching Sunset Boulevard, I couldn't escape the feeling that this was as much a monster film as Universal's earlier movies. Make no mistake, Norma Desmond is cast in a Count Dracula mold. Her mansion, a decrepit castle, is filled with candelabra and spiderwebs. Her hands are as disfigured into claws as Murnau's Nosferatu. The two outcomes offered to her victims are a literal death (Joe Gillis) or a life drained of all liveliness (à la von Stroheim's Max).

The atmosphere is impeccably monstrous, the blocking and craft are perpetually flawless. But this time, the story just didn't ring quite as deeply. Despite the perseverance of its themes, its characters were too amplified to feel real. Still fantastic, but it will never be to me what The Apartment is.