By contrast, 21st century popular culture extols the virtue of maximised visibility. When fans stop gawking, her loneliness forces her to invent phantasmic replacements, so that her psychic survival finally depends on her insanity. ![]() That’s the real tragedy the film explores – not the noxious effects of ageing or wealth, but the surrender of selfhood that comes from living as a spectacle. Yet there she is, Gillis observes, “still waving proudly to a parade which had long since passed her by”. She’s the vampiric femme fatale feasting on the adulation of others and crowing that “no one ever leaves a star”. In fairness, though, whatever is vile in Norma is what the gaze of the crowd made of her. ![]() Had Gwyneth Paltrow’s brand gurus been on the job in 1950, they’d have called Norma’s extravagances “self-care”. It’s a prescient caricature, from the perspective of the right, of the modern-day theatrics that thrive in grievance culture. Meanwhile, whenever she senses Gillis’s attention waning, she sounds off about her frayed nerves, wielding guilt as a tool to gag his misgivings. Oscar Wilde once observed that “all bad poetry springs from genuine feeling”, and Norma’s faith in her screenplay is, well, genuine. Immune to irony and armed with snobbish entitlement, she preps for her starring role with fanatical earnestness. It’s the pictures that got small’ … Norma surrounded by reporters Photograph: Ronald GrantĬonversely, for conservatives, Norma is the trauma-broadcasting, victim-centred hysteric. President Trump telegraphed as much last February when he touted Gone with the Wind and Sunset Boulevard in a nativist harangue against the multicultural modernity that the popularity of Parasite represents. It’s the pictures that got small,” capturing the toxic mix of arrogance, nostalgia, and resentment that feeds into the Maga battle cry. When Gillis describes her as a has-been (“you were big”), she snaps back, “I am big. “Without me there wouldn’t be any Paramount studios,” she imperiously declares, discounting the swarm of worker bees buzzing around the lot. Her sycophantic enabler – erstwhile director, ex-husband, and now butler, Max von Mayerling – showers her with forged fan letters, as though anticipating the echo chamber that would manifest under the banner of Fox News. The fantasy of her self-made triumph is abetted by an information silo that she doesn’t even know she’s trapped in. Cocooned in privilege, she fancies herself a meritocratic success story. For liberals, she epitomises super-rich self-delusion. ![]() ![]() In a tribalised era, Norma Desmond has for both partisan factions the complexion of the enemy. Sunset Boulevard also mirrors our political rifts. Twenty-first century Hollywood, meanwhile, continues to weather fierce blowback for putting female actors not named Meryl Streep out to pasture around the age of 40. We learn that she was infantilised by handlers and pumped full of barbiturates in her early days, then cast aside as she aged out of her nymph-like beauty. In some ways, Norma is, like Judy Garland or Marilyn Monroe, a tattered but resilient icon of womanhood who fell victim to the studio system. Sunset Boulevard seems strangely tailormade to skewer our contemporary culture.
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