Sunset Boulevard (1950)

We didn't need dialogue. We had faces! (she says).

As the fifties put Sadie Thompson resoundingly in her place, the original Sadie reappeared as the decade's definitive manifestation of the monstrous, transgressive woman. As Norma Desmond, Gloria Swanson made an indelible mark in sound film as the last word in silent-film excess. Sunset Boulevard foregrounds the issue of cinema's representation of women, calling attention to the history of that representation as it evokes the history of the medium. The transition to sound film is most frequently alluded to as the alleged cause of Norma Desmond's maddening estrangement/exclusion from cinema. The true cause is the nature of the industry, specifically the forms of sexual exploitation that lie at the heart of the dream machine. Although both men and women are destroyed in the film by their desire to be embraced by the industry, Sunset Boulevard shows that the criteria by which people are discarded differ according to gender, position in the work force, and history.

Sunset Boulevard can also be seen as another version of the Echo and Narcissus myth restated in cinematic terms. But here Echo and Narcissus trade places: the disembodied voice is now the ghostly echo of a dead man, while the image holds out an unattainable, yet infinite, promise to a female Narcissus. As before, Echo cannot break Narcissus's absorption in her own image and, as Echo dies, Narcissus is engulfed in madness. But when the woman occupies the position of Narcissus (not an unfamiliar position historically) there is a subtle shift in power. Sound is now dominant. Echo becomes a cynical hack with a story to tell—and this time, it's his story. While it is certainly not surprising that a film written by two of Hollywood's best dialogue men, Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, would privilege the spoken word by making its anti-hero a screenwriter, what I would like to look at is the way Sunset Boulevard establishes a hierarchy not only of sound over image but of sound over sound, an audio hierarchy noticeably gendered with the voice-over narration male and the synchronized voice a woman's.

The film opens in the gutter, the title written in white on asphalt. A chatty

Gloria Swanson in  Sunset Boulevard

male voice-over draws our attention to a body in the pool—Joe Gillis (William Holden), recently deceased screenwriter. Over the extended flashback that comprises the body of the film, he tells us how, on the run from creditors, he met the aging silent film star Norma Desmond. She mistakes him for a mortician. Finding that he is a down-on-his-luck screenwriter, Desmond hires him to rewrite the script of her "comeback" film. ("I hate that word," she snaps, "It's return .") Thinking he's found a gravy train, Joe moves in. After suitable displays of reluctance, he accepts progressively larger gifts and eventually becomes Norma's lover while she awaits word from Cecil B. De Mille on her return to the screen. "The whole business culminates, inevitably, in a head-on collision between illusion and reality and between the old Hollywood and the new; and in staring madness and violent death" (Agee 1958, pp. 412–13).

As with any myth, Sunset Boulevard has a strong sense of perfection about it, one that exceeds mere narrative closure or classical transparency. The film was hailed as an instant classic by contemporary critics. In his review in Sight and Sound , James Agee called it "one of those rare movies which are so full of exactness, cleverness, mastery, pleasure, and arguable and unarguable choice and judgment, that they can be talked about, almost shot for shot and line for line for hours on end" (ibid., p. 413). Part of what makes the film seem so self-contained is the way it builds itself by balancing contradictions. Joe and Norma present us with the new Hollywood and the old, younger man/

older woman, the snappy dialogue writer and the star who can say anything with her eyes. He begins the story, she ends it. If he seems unfeeling, she is a monster of feeling. As narrator, he is in a position of control, and yet before he begins to speak, he has already lost everything.

Norma Desmond herself balances a wide span of contradictions. She has been described as "a human vampire," a "gargoyle of vanity and manipulation," and a "spider woman" embodying "the perverse, decaying side of film noir sexuality."^[4] (As well as being called an "egotistical relic," "hopeless egomaniac," and "psychopathic star.")^[5] Norma is "half mad, suicidal, with the obsessed narcissistic arrogance of the once adored and long forgotten," Agee says; and yet she and her past "are given splendor, recklessness, [and] an aura of awe" compared to the more mundane people of present-day Hollywood (Agee 1958, pp. 412–14). When thinking of Sunset Boulevard "one always thinks first and mostly" of Norma Desmond,^[6] of the "barbarous grandeur and intensity" of her excess (Agee 1958, p. 414).

Sunset Boulevard for many people is Norma Desmond, but as with Ovid's myth, the stories of Echo and Narcissus are intertwined and interdependent. This Narcissus is defined by her relationship with Echo, just as, in a reversal for classical cinema, the image is defined by sound. In Sunset Boulevard , the woman's relation to sound is historicized and made to stand for woman's vulnerable position in cinema overall. I shall focus on three aspects of the film that highlight the historical position of woman in sound film: Norma's attitude toward sound and the image, her true standing in relation to the cinema industry, and the implications of Joe's voice-over narration.

Norma Desmond is a woman who has been discarded by the cinema industry, displaced, she implies, by the coming of sound. Norma is the film's spokeswoman for silent films. She equates sound with death. Of course, death invades every aspect of Sunset Boulevard , from the title to the decaying mansion, the eerie midnight funeral for the dead chimpanzee, and Norma Desmond's planned comeback role as Salome. (John the Baptist "rejects her," she tells Joe with relish, "so she demands his head on a golden tray, kissing his cold dead lips.") And, of course, death supplies the climax of Norma and Joe's love affair. But death is also central to the film's sound/image debate.^[7] Norma insists films are lost: "They're dead! They're finished!" The reason for their demise is sound: "There was a time when [Hollywood] had the eyes of the whole world. But that wasn't good enough for them, oh no. So they opened their big mouths and out came talk talk talk." On learning that Joe is a writer, Norma moves toward him, hissing: "Writing words, words, more words. You've made a rope of words to strangle this business, but there's a microphone right there to catch the last gurgles and Technicolor to photograph the red swollen tongue."

Norma depends on the power of the image and the star system, at its peak in her heyday, to protect her from the death induced by sound. What Norma

posits as the source of her power is distinctly visual—her eyes and the ability to see. When we first see Norma, she is partially hidden behind bamboo blinds, wearing dark glasses that make her eyes glow strangely. Throughout the film, these dark glasses return, simultaneously shielding and announcing the power of her gaze. Joe remarks on the sound track, "I could sense her eyes on me from behind those dark glasses." When he questions her judgment about making her dead chimpanzee's coffin "bright, flaming red—let's make it gay!" she whips off the glasses and fixes him with a piercing stare.

Norma identifies her eyes as the equivalent of her stardom. When Joe, who has agreed to be her "ghostwriter," suggests her screenplay needs more dialogue, she retorts, "What for? I can say anything I want with my eyes." Later, when Joe has moved into the mansion on Sunset Boulevard, he and Norma watch private screenings of Norma's old silent films. "Still wonderful, isn't it? And no dialogue. We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!" She jumps up suddenly, raging at "those idiot producers" who have ceased to employ her. "Those imbeciles! Haven't they got eyes? Have they forgotten what a star looks like?!"

The promise of stardom, as Norma perceives it, is invulnerability and immortality. As she slips into psychosis before shooting her gigolo lover, she hisses, "I'm a star! I'm the greatest star of them all." He walks out, leaving her staring fixedly in front of her, whispering to herself, "No one ever leaves a star. That's what makes one a star!" Having killed Joe and gone completely mad, Norma leans against a stone pillar, whispering, "Stars are ageless, aren't they?"

But neither the star system nor the silent image does better by Norma, even at their most magical. Early in the film, Joe takes a moment out from rewriting Norma's "hodgepodge of silly melodramatic plots" to look at her living room. The camera tracks past row after row of photographs of Norma/Swanson from the twenties, the image twice dissolving, like time, as Joe muses, "How could she breathe in that house crowded with Norma Desmonds, more Norma Desmonds, and still more Norma Desmonds?" The images are magic, but they are stills, stilled, frozen, life in death just like "that grim Sunset castle," "the whole place . . . stricken with a kind of creeping paralysis." Even moving images such as the luminous excerpt from Queen Kelly that Joe and Norma watch as an example of her former glory are presented within the film as unreal and ghostly. The silent film image is inserted into a broader text that holds the power to define and comment on it.

Norma is the embodiment of what Doane identifies as woman's "overinvestment" in the image. In The Desire to Desire , she describes a shot of Mia Farrow in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) gazing at the screen "in spectatorial ecstasy, enraptured by the image, her face glowing (both figuratively and literally through its reflection of light from the movie screen). . . . What the shot signifies, in part, is the peculiar susceptibility to the image . . . at-

tributed to the woman in our culture. Her pleasure in viewing is somehow more intense," her spectatorship "yet another clearly delineated mark of her excess" (Doane 1987, p. 1). This description applies equally well to Norma watching Queen Kelly , "forgetting she was [Joe's] employer—just becoming a fan, excited about that actress up there on the screen." But here, "the actress up there on the screen" is Norma herself. Being "outside" the silent image makes Norma feel estranged from "her celluloid self." The reason she watches her own films so avidly is because she is searching for a way back in.

Norma believes that she will have power if she can become the image, but as Janey Place demonstrates, even when Norma does succeed by "visually dominat[ing]" the frame in Sunset Boulevard ,

she is presented as caught by the same false value system. The huge house in which she controls camera movement and is constantly centre frame is also a hideous trap which requires from her the maintenance of the myth of her stardom: the contradiction between the reality and the myth pull her apart and finally drive her mad.
(Kaplan 1978a, p. 43)

What Norma cannot admit is that the cinematic image excludes her in its function as part of a commercial system. As Brandon French points out, the Hollywood film industry is founded on the selling of "glamour" (a euphemism for sexually attractive young people, often women). This is a system young silent film goddesses like Norma Desmond / Gloria Swanson made possible and for which they no longer qualify. Norma's "value to the movie industry is almost entirely a function of her youth; consequently she has never grown up and is obsessed with her appearance" (French 1978, p. 6). When Norma believes her screenplay is about to be produced, she submits herself to a "merciless series" of beauty treatments, "in her effort to turn fifty years into a camera-proof twenty-five" (Agee 1958, p. 412). It isn't sound that truly excludes Norma, but age—and it is the camera that has become the real enemy. Corroborating Norma's legitimate anxiety about her looks is the story the aspiring screenwriter Betty Shaeffer tells Joe about having had her nose "fixed" so that she could be a film actress. By topping Norma in terms of self-sacrifice, Betty establishes the intensity of Norma's desire as a culturally shared willingness to endure almost anything in order to be chosen for cinematic exploitation. Betty's story redefines what up until now may have passed as personal excess on Norma's part by reinserting Norma's desire into history.^[8]

The silent images are at least kind to Norma Desmond; Sunset Boulevard 's images betray her cruelly. Visually, Norma is associated with wild animals. She wears leopard-skin turbans and trim, and her Isotta-Fraschini is upholstered in leopard skin. When she matter-of-factly informs Joe that all of his

debts have been paid and he will now be living with her, coils of fabric are draped around her neck. As Salome descending the grand staircase, a snake bracelet entwines her upper arm. Throughout the film Norma hisses and jibes at Joe, her hands working the air like a snake charmer's or a witch's, grasping and clutching, revolting and hynoptic at the same time.

Every shot of Norma accentuates her grotesque image. She throws her head back and stares, her lips painted a harsh dark shade, set off against her overpowdered skin. Her hair falls into a shapeless mess of curls that she pushes and tears at with her clawlike hands. In Sunset Boulevard , Norma Desmond is Medusa. Her power is in her eyes, the snakes in her hair.

In presenting Norma Desmond as monster, image and sound are completely in sync. Norma seldom speaks—she whispers or declaims. Sometimes she uses a wheedling, sickly, singsong voice that calls to mind Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Even when she pleads for sympathy, the image works against her. While under her tortuous beauty regimen, Norma won't let Joe see her even when she begs for attention. "All I ask is for you to be a little patient, a little kind." Her face taped to hold back the crow's-feet, white gloves on her hands, a chin support absurdly wrapped around her face, the grotesqueness of her image undercuts the sincerity of her plea. When Joe finally becomes her lover following her suicide attempt on New Year's Eve, Swanson plays most of the scene with her face covered, her bandaged forearms often all that is visible of her in the shot. It is as if Norma can only be approached (like Medusa) if her eyes are closed. When Joe takes her arms down from her eyes and says, "Happy New Year, Norma," the mad stare returns as she clutches him to her with her clawlike hands.^[9]

Although her voice and image seem to be used against her, Norma is not entirely at the mercy of words. Ironically, Norma has all the best lines (though only when she is speaking an "impossible" position, arguing against the sound that makes her words possible). Most of the time, though, her relationship to speech is as filled with pitfalls as the problematic relationship of her image and voice. As in Sorry, Wrong Number , when Norma tries to control the narrative by using the telephone, it backfires. She is reduced vocally and verbally to a malicious gossip, whispering insinuating tales to the clean-cut All-American Betty. Joe walks in, unseen by Norma, and overhears her. He rips the phone out of her hand and reasserts his right to control the narrative by telling Betty to come over and see the truth for herself. Norma's antagonism toward voices and dialogue is partially justified by the diegesis—as we can see, when she uses them they're no use at all.

The most salient factor about the sound/image hierarchy of Sunset Boulevard is the subordination of Norma Desmond's voice, image, speech, and story to the male voice-over. Joe's voice-over narration begins the narrative, defines the characters, relentlessly sets the tone. J. P. Telotte sees the voice-over narration of Sunset Boulevard in terms of "the self's impelling desire for

a voice even in death, for a say in and about the truth of the world, despite a prevalent, even deadly power for silence or for submission to a popular discourse and its given truth."^[10] Although Telotte posits a universal urge to speak, he does not acknowledge the gender implications when the voice, as it is here, is male. In the above quotation, the "self" is male and the "deadly power for silence [and] submission to a popular discourse" is Norma Desmond. Even though we've seen that silents/silence and submission to the popular discourse of stardom has in no way empowered Norma Desmond, she is held responsible for death and the false consciousness of Hollywood, while Joe becomes the voice of "truth." As I shall argue later, Joe and Norma share more values than this reading would suggest: both possess the urge to speak, and both are victimized by the industry they equally desire.

Initially, the voice-over makes Norma's story part of Joe's (just as Medusa's story is supplanted by Perseus's). Norma becomes the monster who has brought Joe to the fatal context of his narration. She is the one who has displaced him from his story—his life. It is only with the assistance of the cinematic—and at the level of the cinematic (as voice-over)—that Joe can finally establish the upper hand as narrator that he lacks within the diegesis. Joe's narration provides the frame that surrounds Norma Desmond, seeking to contain her story within his.

But the male voice-over in Sunset Boulevard is not the "voice of God," just as Joe is not the Reverend Davidson. Silverman differentiates between the totally disembodied male voice-over (where the narrator is never visually identified) and "the embodied or diegetically anchored male voiceover" (Silverman 1988, p. 52). According to this reading, the latter is typical of films of the late 1940s and 1950s (particularly in film noir, but also in noir-inflected films such as Pride of the Marines ), which frequently present a narrator who is limited both as filmic enunciator and as a man (ibid.). Silverman argues that when the narrator is visualized, he becomes physically limited (unlike the limitless voice of God) and thus vulnerable to death. (Her examples, from films such as D.O.A. [1949], Double Indemnity [1949], and Laura [1944], are all of men who are dead, dying, or fatally impaired). The closer the narrator is to being "inside" the diegesis, the less likely he is to be in a position of control (ibid., pp. 53–54). Being inside the film's visual and narrative system as a character, Joe becomes subject to death and to Norma (for Telotte, same difference).

The embodied male narrator thus occupies what is in effect a feminine space. Silverman suggests that "diegetic interiority is equated with discursive impotence and lack of control, thereby rendering that situation culturally unacceptable for the 'normal' male subject" (ibid., p. 54). Throughout Sunset Boulevard , Joe is troubled by occupying a feminine space. The reason he flees his apartment in the first place is to keep his car from being repossessed. Begging his agent for a loan to repay his creditors, he says, "If I lose my car it's

like having my legs cut off." Joe is frequently passive, often yielding his ground and taking orders. When Norma invites him to read her script, he begins to make an excuse until she lowers her voice and lays down the law—"I said sit down." He backs away obediently, as his voice on the sound track returns to qualify his surrender as strategy. When Norma has bought Joe a new wardrobe in preparation for their private New Year's Eve party, she pooh-poohs the shirt studs the men's store has provided and says she wants to see him in pearls. He jokes, "Well, I'm not going to wear earrings." His eventual acceptance of the position of gigolo is presented in the film as the ultimate humiliation because (we can assume) prostitution is usually defined as woman's work.

Much of the time Joe is also in a feminine position vocally. When his speech is synchronized with his image, he is subject to Norma's offscreen voice. If her synchronized voice is ultimately ineffectual, her offscreen voice possesses as much power as her gaze. When Joe first turns in to the driveway of Norma Desmond's mansion on Sunset Boulevard, he strolls around the grounds of the house. Suddenly a voice interrupts. "You there! Why are you so late! Why have you kept me waiting so long?" Joe struggles to make out who is speaking, but all he can see is a strange figure hidden behind blinds, looking down on him. When he hurries to leave her house, having incurred wrath by suggesting she "used to be big," his escape is cut off by her brusque, "Just a minute, you." Later, Joe vigorously objects to her butler's having moved Joe's belongings into the room over the garage. As Max continues playing the organ, unperturbed, Joe demands, "Who said you could?" Norma's offscreen "I did" cuts off his impotent tantrum. It is only when Joe is leaving her that her offscreen commands are disobeyed (although the final gunshots may be the ultimate demonstration of offscreen sound's power over the image).

The sound hierarchy in Sunset Boulevard places synchronized speech at the weakest, most "feminine" pole, with offscreen and embodied voice-overs in ascending order of narrative authority. If a truly disembodied voice-over exists in Sunset Boulevard , it is during the first few minutes of the film, when we do not yet know that the narrator is dead. In these first few moments, the narration is privileged as the site of objective truth: "Before you hear it all distorted and blown out of proportion, before those Hollywood columnists get their hands on it, maybe you'd like to hear the facts, the whole truth. If so, you've come to the right party."

Although audiences surely recognize William Holden floating in the pool, the narrator does not acknowledge the relationship, referring to the corpse as "he" until the flashback begins: "Let's go back about six months and find the day when it all started. Things were tough at the moment. I hadn't worked in a studio for a long time."

Joe's "introduction" marks the first time voice, image, and "person" (first rather than third) are synchronized and this moment also draws the first paral-

lel between Joe and Norma. Both have been rejected by the industry, neither one of them has "worked in a studio for a long time," and both are desperate to get back in. They have each tied their identities to their careers, Joe as a writer, Norma as a star. Joe talks about that ambition: "All us writers, itching with ambition, panicked to get your names up there—'Screenplay by,' 'Original Story by.'"

Joe is as vulnerable as Norma to the whims of studio heads. His epic "about Oakies in the dust bowl" is rewritten as a wartime saga on a battleship; his producer friend at Paramount wants to remake his baseball story as a Betty Hutton musical ("It Happened in the Bullpen: The Story of a Woman").

It is clear at the narrative level that Joe is up for sale like everyone else. Even Betty Shaeffer started as an actress and now aspires to be a writer—both roles equally susceptible to scorn and rejection. Sunset Boulevard consciously situates Norma Desmond and Joe Gillis's crises within the history of Hollywood production, and in doing so presents a critique of that system. Names of actual actors and producers, from the old Hollywood and the new, are frequently invoked (Valentino, Garbo, Rod LaRoque, Alan Ladd, "Ty" Power, Betty Hutton). Part of this is for verisimilitude, as are the uses of location photography outside Schwab's drugstore and the Paramount gate. But the list of names also underlines that men as well as women are discarded by the industry, as actors and, as we've seen, as writers. Everyone in Hollywood is not only vulnerable to exploitation for his or her labor but subject to sexual exploitation as well. Sunset Boulevard , after all, indulges in its bit of "beefcake" when it presents William Holden dripping wet.^[11]

Cecil B. De Mille is probably the most famous "real" person mentioned in the film and the contradictions that surround his appearance "as himself" are indicative of the film's conflicting attitudes toward Hollywood. Norma sends the polished version of her screenplay to her old friend De Mille. ("We made a lot of pictures together," she tells Joe.) When word comes down to the soundstage where De Mille is shooting that Norma Desmond is on her way in, an assistant suggests they "give her the brush." De Mille sadly retorts, "Thirty million fans have given her the brush. Isn't that enough?" The assistant mentions that Norma was a legendary terror to work with, but De Mille generously puts her behavior in context. "You didn't know her when she was a lovely little girl of seventeen with more courage and wit and heart than ever came together in one youngster. . . . A dozen press agents working overtime can do terrible things to the human spirit." By calling attention to the star-making apparatus, this speech recasts Norma, not as a monster, but as a character who has been formed by the industry in which she worked.

French points out that the film goes to some lengths to preserve De Mille as a kindly father figure. He calls Norma "little fellow" and she calls him "chief" or "Mr. De Mille"—terms of endearment borrowed from Swanson and De Mille's actual relationship. (Many of De Mille's big successes in the

silent period were, of course, Swanson pictures: Don't Change Your Husband (1919), Male and Female (1919), Why Change Your Wife? (1920), and The Affairs of Anatol (1921); see Swanson 1980, pp. 480–89.) However, as French argues (1978, pp. 6–7), it is possible to see De Mille as representative of the casual cruelty of Hollywood. When Norma visits the set and is left alone in the director's chair, an offscreen voice softly calls to her—"Hey! Miss Desmond!" A gaffer who has recognized her from the old days turns one of the big spotlights on her. Norma is literally back in the limelight, and for a moment we find out what it means to be a star, the heart-stopping magic, as if time had never passed. People all over the set recognize her and crowd around. "Hey, it's Norma Desmond!" "Norma Desmond!" The only fly in the ointment is when an errant microphone brushes Norma's hat; she bats it away. And appropriately, it is through a microphone that Norma's moment is taken away. De Mille eyes the crowd. An assistant hands him a microphone. We hear his artificially amplified voice, cold and mechanical, order the lighting man to "turn that light back where it belongs." Darkness returns and the fans wander away. It is De Mille, and through him the powerful men of Hollywood, the producers, directors, and studio heads, who have the power to determine where the light "belongs."^[12]

Norma shares Joe's "impelling desire for a voice," the urge to define the world (and herself) as she sees it. Both assume roles to express themselves. Joe speaks the hardboiled cynicism of a former newspaperman. Norma envisions herself through the plots others have given her—as seductress, as a woman who needs a man, as Salome, Salome whose glitter Norma wears in her hair as she descends the stairs. Norma's "crime" parallels Salome's, preferring to "keep" a dead man rather than be rejected. Norma, like Salome, refuses to subordinate her story to a man's. Janey Place sees this egotism as Norma's ultimate transgression—her interest in herself, her sexuality, her career (Kaplan 1978a, pp. 46–47). In film noir terms, both Norma and Salome are femmes fatales.

But Norma's identification with Salome also draws attention to the cinema industry , past and present. Salome not only evokes silent film and Nazimova's definitive 1923 version of the Wilde play, it invites a direct comparison with the film De Mille is directing, Samson and Delilah . This, too, is included for verisimilitude; it was De Mille's next release, starring Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr. However, the continuing economic viability of De Mille's overblown biblical melodramas makes Norma's "hodgepodge of silly melodramatic plots" instantly more plausible. If De Mille can still churn 'em out, why can't she? Of course, Wilder and Brackett probably thought the De Mille–style epic was ridiculous compared to their sophisticated swipes at popular culture. (Only Wilder's Ace in the Hole [1951] matches Sunset Boulevard 's bite on the subject of American taste.) But that's show biz, that's what gets the bucks circa 1950. Implicitly, though, Sunset Boulevard presents the argument for

Wilder/Brackett's kind of films over De Mille's because unlike De Mille who turns the light away, Wilder and Brackett can make room for the Norma Desmonds Hollywood has left behind. After all, who else would understand Norma Desmond's mad, monstrous, "barbarous grandeur"?

Although everything in the film seems to work against sympathy for Norma Desmond—the image, the sound track, the narrative and the narrator—feeling for her survives and not simply because of the charisma of the actress. Agee found the film "cold," saying, "if it falls short of greatness—and in my opinion it does—I suspect that coldness, again is mainly responsible." He accused Brackett and Wilder of failing "to make much of the powerful tragic possibilities . . . inherent in their story," and of not exploring "the deep anguish and pathos" which Norma's decline would seem to warrant (Agee 1958, pp. 412, 415). If there is sympathy for Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard , one place to locate it is in the voice-over narration.

Joe, caught in a feminine/masculine space, is a site of ambivalence, something reflected in his narration. He is cynical about women, age, youth, Hollywood—in other words, all the things he loves and wants deeply. For instance, Joe follows up his meditation on the desire to write with the crack, "Audiences don't know somebody sits down and writes a picture—they think the actors make it up as they go along." Deep feelings are hidden in Sunset Boulevard and not surprisingly; when they spill over, as Norma's frequently do, they are frightening and ridiculous, the stuff of camp.^[13] About his own ambitions, Gillis is curt. Over his own corpse, floating in the pool in the first scene, he says, "The poor dope. He always wanted a pool."

On the other hand, Joe shows a keen understanding of Norma's emotional state. Reading her manuscript as she watches him, "coiled like a watch-spring," he muses, "I could sense her eyes on me . . . defying me not to like what I read, or maybe begging me in her own proud way to like it—it meant so much to her." When Norma orders Joe to restore a scene he's cut from her script, he remarks, "I didn't argue with her. You don't yell at a sleepwalker. He may fall and break his neck." Looking at her bedroom later in the film, he considers it "the perfect setting for a silent movie queen. Poor devil. Still waving proudly to a parade which had long since passed her by." And when reporters swarm around the mansion the morning after Joe has been killed, "with as much hoop-de-doo as we get in Los Angeles when they open a supermarket," Joe adds bitterly, "Here was an item everybody could have some fun with—the heartless so-and-so's."

The absence of Joe's narration can also mask powerful emotion—especially in the film's central scene, when Joe gives himself to Norma after her suicide attempt. The emotions that trigger his rush back to Norma and whatever he may feel when he kisses her are left not only uncommented upon, but visually unrepresented—Joe's back is turned to us when he approaches Norma's bed and receives her embrace. The softness of his voice when he takes her arms away from her face and says, "Happy New Year, Norma" can

be read equally as tenderness or resignation. Either way, at this moment Joe voluntarily forfeits his superior position as narrator to join Norma in her fantasy.

Joe would not be the first man to relinquish the world for Norma. The only other character in the film who loves Norma and can appreciate her "barbarous grandeur" is Max von Mayerling (Erich von Stroheim), her first husband and first director. On the one hand, Max is Norma's first victim, sacrificing his career to become her butler and see her through a succession of lovers, husbands, and periods of suicidal despair. However, at the same time he controls Norma's life and illusions; it is Max who sends the fan letters, massages "madame's" ego, and keeps the creaking machinery of stardom (the house, the car, the organ) well-oiled. Max can be linked with the other powerful men who cast Norma in their fantasies. "I discovered her," he tells Joe. "I made her a star. And I cannot let her be destroyed." He directly aligns himself with De Mille when he recounts his early fame. "There were three young directors who showed promise in those days—D. W. Griffith, Cecil B. De Mille, and Max von Mayerling." And it is Max who "directs" her last scene. But I think it is more accurate to describe Max and Norma as being equally in thrall to the fantasy of Hollywood. To escape Hollywood, a prison made up of his and Max's and Norma's own desires, Joe must assail what they love most in order to escape.

Nevertheless, Joe's sympathy for Norma continues after death. In the film's final scene, it isn't his own murder that concerns Joe, but rather "What would they do to Norma?" Hedda Hopper takes up the narration for a moment, describing Norma's condition to her editor over the telephone: "A curtain of silence seems to have fallen around her." Like Echo, Gillis watches from somewhere incorporeal, speaking his final words as Narcissus is fatally entranced.

Life, which can be strangely merciful, had taken pity on Norma Desmond. The dream she had clung to so desperately had enfolded her.

But it is Norma who has the last word in the film, even if it is filtered through madness. As Norma slowly descends the stairs, "the princess" on the steps of the palace, everyone seems to be frozen. She stops and breaks the spell. "I can't go on with the scene, I'm too happy. Mr. De Mille, do you mind if I say a few words?" Blurring fantasy and reality, breaking the fantasy/film to speak directly to the real/fictional crew, Echo silenced, Narcissus speaks:

You see, this is my life. It always will be. There's nothing else, just us, and the cameras, and all those wonderful people out there in the dark.

Striking a pose, she tilts her head back and stares directly into the camera: "All right, Mr. De Mille. I'm ready for my close up." Gliding directly into

the camera as the light grows too bright and the image blurs, Norma moves into a truly transgressive space, trespassing beyond where the lens can see, trying to merge herself with the woman on the screen and all those "wonderful people out there in the dark."

Neither Joe nor Norma actually possesses authorial control. Though Norma is more firmly contained within the diegesis than Joe, she vividly asserts the value of herself, even if doing so necessitates ignoring the truth about the industry that both gave her her dreams and took them away. Sunset Boulevard delineates the effect of the film industry's "business as usual" on its employees, especially the women who let themselves be defined by the industry's images, its stories and its commercial needs.

In Sunset Boulevard we've seen that men's and women's voices can occupy the "feminine" position of synchronization "inside" the diegesis, just as women and men can each assume the temporary authority of the offscreen voice. Is it possible for a woman to speak from "outside" the diegesis, as the enunciator, claiming the cinematic apparatus as hers , her tool of expression, her language? Is there any way a woman can assume for herself, not only the voice-over, embued with authority by Hollywood convention, but the authorial voice?

Gregory Peck and Mary Badham in  To Kill a Mockingbird