“You may not use Norma Desmond’s final scene, that infamous closeup”, ordered Nathaniel, as he assigned 1950’s glorious noir melodrama Sunset Blvd. for this week’s episode of Hit Me with Your Best Shot. Easily done. From the exact moment that he named it, I knew that there was a 0% chance that I’d go with any other shot than the one I picked – boring of me, I know, especially given the extravagant greatness on the order of director Billy Wilder’s best-looking film (and maybe cinematographer John F. Seitz’s best-looking film – the men collaborated on Double Indemnity, which looks great, but I’m actually thinking about Seitz’s work lensing The Big Clock, one of those movies that you’ve never heard of till you see it, and then you get to wondering why the hell it’s not on everybody’s Top 10 of All Time list).
And even more boring because it’s the most obvious possible scene to pick from – Nathaniel himself cited it as the film’s best, and I know I’m not the first Hit Me… participant to go to this exact spot. But why fight it. Here’s my best shot, and if you haven’t seen Sunset Blvd. you’ll have no idea what I’m going to be talking about, but you also have an exquisite experience in your hopefully near future.
The scene: Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) showing her gigolo, Joe Gillis (William Holden) one of her old movies (played by the incomplete Queen Kelly from 1929, starring Swanson and directed by Eric von Stroheim, who plays Norma’s imperious butler Max). It’s the most symbolically overripe sequence in the movie: Old Swanson watching Young Swanson, playing Old Desmond watching Young Desmond. It is a scene of literally reflected glory – while obviously Seitz didn’t really use a movie screen as the solitary light source in this sequence, the angles of the lights sources all imply that there’s no illumination in this other than the glow of Young Norma Desmond, in beatific close-up. And it is a thin kind of light that only kind of gives us enough to see the two actors sitting in the gloom. The glory of youth, the glory of The Movies – it’s all just enough to emphasise the darkness.
So that’s the symbolic part of it. Then there’s the straightforward narrative part. Here we have Norma, staring at herself with a hungry, predatory look; here we have Norma’s hand, reaching out to claim Joe in the dark, her fingers splayed like the talons of some bird of prey. Or a vulture, more to the point. And here we have Joe, looking down but not quite at her claw, with a look of revulsion that he keeps all to himself, as he pinches a cigarette with just a bit too much tension and anger. Their whole relationship consists of playing at those two basic roles: she’s a carnivore and a rabid voyeur of her own legend; he’s forcing himself to be by her side, hating himself and disgusted by her for every moment of it. This image has summed up Sunset Blvd. to me for close to two decades now, and even more than that, it sums up the entire psychological universe of noir: people are animals, people are liars, people are repellents towards themselves and the world. And all it takes to demonstrate it is one uncomfortable pose and one starving look, emerging from an all but impenetrable murk. They don’t need words, they have faces. And lots of suffocating shadows.