Happy almost New Year, everyone! In these times of personal transformation, Jorge dives into one of the greatest screenplays ever written.
The all time classic Sunset Boulevard contains a multitude of scenes, and moments, and quotables to pick from and analyze in the page. But since we're close to a new year, let’s take a look at precisely that time in the film, when Joe Gillis decides to finally let go of his old baggage and step fresh into new things. Even if that old baggage is a possessive fading movie starlet...
Sunset Boulevard
Written by: Charles Brackett & Billy Wilder & D.M. Marshman, Jr.
[You can read the full script here. I will be talking about these pages and this scene.]
Throughout Sunset Boulevard, Joe Gillis has slowly entangled himself in the webs of seduction, deception, and shiny clothes of Norma Desmond. He enjoys the perks that come with giving her the attention that she desperately craves. But they also come with a price, which he starts to realize as she starts to gradually and quietly take over every aspect of his life.
By the time the New Year arrives, Gillis feels more trapped than ever in her world, with little opportunity to escape. The script perfectly describes his sense of entrapment.
“He obviously feels a little uneasy in this outfit.” His clothing (and per association, his body) has been taken over by what Norma wants him to be. As he descends the staircase into what Gillis thinks will be a party with other guests, the opulence of the house (and of its owner) screams back at him: “laurel garlands,” “dozens of candles in all the sconces,” “buckets of champagne and caviar”.
The first interaction she has with him is putting a gardenia on his lapel, and then commenting on his outfit; an outfit that she chose for him, and that it’s still not good enough for her (“I don’t like those studs they’ve sent”). She will have him to his liking.
Then they dance together in the big room. The floors are slippery; she had them waxed. Although the suffocation and discomfort of these particular two people dancing together while a full orchestra plays and a servant watches from afar is clear in the pages, it’s in the film where this particular moment really rises. The shot frames them almost as an island in the middle of the ocean, where nowhere to go.
But then she reveals: “There are no other guests. […] This is for you and me”. And he declares her love.
They continue their dance, but Gillis is not enjoying it anymore. Norma lights up a cigarette, an object that the writers (there was three of them for the script, one of them director Billy Wilder himself) quite ingeniously use as a metaphor for his captivity: “I felt trapped, like the cigarette in the prongs of that contraption on her finger.”
It’s flee-or-stay-forever moment for Gillis. An argument ensues, in which he tries to get her to stop buying things for him, to stop taking him places, that he also has a life of his own. The idea that he might be able to carry on without her is too much for her, and she strikes him. Then she leaves, offended and emotional.
This is the moment that changes everything, when her control and yearning for anyone to love her again took a physical form and stroke him in the face. Gillis goes to another party, and when he returns to the mansion, he is determined to leave forever. However, he finds that Norma has slashed her wrists and returns to her lap again.
New Year’s Eve was a chance for Joe Gillis to get rid of the things that tied him down, that stopped him from moving forward, and that controlled his life without his consent. Sure, those things all a woman with a detached sense of reality, but we all have our own Norma Desmonds. Take this new year as an opportunity to leave her behind, and to not look back, like Gillis fatally did.
Happy 2018 and watch out for the pool!