Word and Image in “Sunset Boulevard” (1950) – Part 2

0:19 Erin: Or@patreon.com subtextpodcast. Welcome to part two of our discussion of Sunset Boulevard. Last time we talked about Plato and Aristotle and the image and the word, we talked about all kinds of deeply philosophical things. So now I think we're ready to jump into the actual movie, get away from our books and into an image. But a moving, speaking image. Very confusing. You know, last time I hinted at the fact that Joe, being a writer and Joe struggling with narrative is connected symbolically in the film, or seems to be connected symbolically in the film with his car. And the fact that he has car troubles or that his. His car is in danger of being repossessed is indicative both of his failing career, his inability to make it in Hollywood. And, of course, that's connected to the fact that he seems to be unable to come up with original, interesting scripts that will sell. So it's as though his ability to create narrative is in danger of being repossessed and his whole story as a screenwriter is in danger of being recalled as he's threatened with returning to Dayton, Ohio. Terrifying prospect. Going back to being a newspaper man.

1:42 Wes: It's always the Midwest, you know.

1:44 Erin: Yeah. That's when you go.

1:46 Wes: When you fail. Yeah.

1:48 Erin: Yeah.

1:48 Wes: All the nice people. Yeah. Anyway.

1:50 Erin: Right.

1:51 Wes: Living ordinary lives.

1:53 Erin: So he, you know, then he blows out a tire and has to hide his car, park his car so that he's no longer moving in the garage of Norma, which is symbolic to me of the fact that he enters her world for the rest of his life, really, and is taken in by her way of viewing things, which is not to progress, not to go out and drive, because, in fact, she doesn't really take her car out ever. But to sit around and live in the past in one time period, that does not move forward. So just about the image disconnected from narrative.

2:28 Wes: Yeah. So I was kind of reminded of, like, a fairy tale or something where, I don't know, Hansel and Gretel end up at the witch's house or something. It's almost like he's. He's a lost little boy being taken in by a witch who's gonna eat him or something. There's a fairy tale quality, obviously, in showing up and having her dead monkey there. And he's originally mistaken for the monkey undertaker. And then later on, he witnesses the chimpanzee's funeral. The fact that the mansion is so dilapidated in the beginning. So you get this interesting. Right. And that image by itself is a great image of narcissism because it's its grandiosity of, on the one hand, of what has been or what could be. But then the immediate reality is deprivation because the real self gets deprived or ignored or undeveloped in comparison to some grandiose ideal. But, yeah, it also gives it this feeling, I think, which you mentioned, of being a place where time has kind of just stopped. Like he's sort of been sucked into a bit of a wormhole or what is it? A time sink. I don't know what you call him, but, yeah, you get a very firm sense of him entering into this different world.

3:48 Erin: Yeah. And I think that Norma's stasis seems to be images of water, I think, kind of predominate for her, oddly enough, because her pool is empty at the beginning of the film. She does fill it for Jo later, and she does promise him things like, oh, I can open my house in Malibu for you, and then you'll have the whole ocean. But images of water seem to fit with her, and they seem connected to her dreams. I think the fulcrum for this is her bed, which is like that insane looking. Almost like a gondola.

4:21 Wes: Yeah.

4:22 Erin: Which Jo describes at some point as being like a crazy rowboat or something.

4:26 Wes: Yeah. And apparently it belonged to an actual dancer.

4:30 Erin: Oh, really?

4:31 Wes: Yeah.

4:32 Erin: Wow. It maybe makes sense that Jo's car, as a symbol of progression, is something that she doesn't like. She disparages this car as being newfangled and made of chrome and spit or something like that, you know, so it makes sense maybe that she's associated with like a ship or a rowboat or a gondola, something that's an outmoded form of transportation and that can. You can just float. You can just stay in one temporal space and not move. And in fact, you know, the bed is. Of course, it's not actually floating. It's just shaped like a ship. So it's actually just in stasis. And Jo compares her to a sleepwalker. So she's connected to this idea of dreams. Of course, Hollywood itself is, you know, a dream factory. I mean, I think even when they're watching Queen Kelly, when she's looking at her younger self, I think she's praying in a church or something on the screen. And an intertitle says, you know, presumably the interior monologue of her character on the screen cast out this wicked dream which has seized my heart.

5:35 Wes: I am so.

5:36 Erin: It's as if this young Norma is trying to give a message, you know, to older Norma to put her faith in something else other than the dream. But Norma is sleeping and can't wake up or something like that. And what I find interesting about this is that if we take, you know, the pool as being part of this symbolic structure, you know, the pool is something that Jo wants too, right? The pool, the swimming pool seems to be a symbol of Hollywood success. So it's something that they share. And I think it's part of Joe's attraction to Norma. I mean, it's difficult to say where precisely he is attracted to Norma. For the most part, he seems to just be completely disparaging of her and kind of making fun of her without her really knowing. But I think that it's in this dream space, which is the space of delusion and stasis and silent film, but also the place of Hollywood success and the American dream, maybe the Hollywood dream factory, making it big, achieving your dreams that Jo is attracted to. So maybe what he's attracted to, Enorma, is the fact that she has been big, is the fact that she has been successful. She's achieved something that Jo never will.

6:47 Wes: You know, after he's been reading her script for a while and he says he feels sick to his stomach because of all the tripe that he's been reading and the, quote, silly hodgepodge of melodramatic plots. However, by then I'd started concocting a little plot of my own. This is his voiceover. So he thinks that he's going to take advantage of her by getting her to pay him for his. This rewrite of her lousy script. Of course, he's the one who's going to end up getting manipulated, in a sense. But you see at this moment the concept of a plot versus a melodrama. These two things are put at odds with each other once again. And he thinks his plotting is gonna overcome her melodrama, but it's precisely the opposite. It's towards the middle of the movie where she tries to kill herself, right? And he ends up in her room and she's able to evoke pity from him. And then they kiss, right? And that's at the very middle of the movie. So that's the point where they become an item and where he's kind of been fully defeated by her up to that point. The bulk of the second act, the first part of the second act, is this buildup of him depending on her, like I mentioned before, his car being towed. So he has to use her car, which is this old, fancy car, which becomes a very important point, part of the plot because the studio wants to use that car for A film, but not her. They want to. There's the car, and then there's the getting clothing for him, moving in, him finding out there's no locks on the doors and that Max is the one sending the letters to her, and then culminating in the kind of weird, pathetic New Year's party with no guests except for him. So in any case, her melodrama fully defeats his plotting by the middle of the movie.

8:40 Erin: Yeah, I like that a lot. You know, I thought a lot about what it means to be jaded and, you know. Cause Joe is such a jaded character. So, you know, obviously, if we're gonna take this symbolism of the car. Joe is struggling with narrative. Joe is relying too heavily on cliches. Right. He pitches the script to Sheldrake, a name that comes up again and again in Billy Wilder movies. He pitches the script to Sheldrake, which is about a baseball player who had sold himself to the mob and then wants to go straight, but the mob won't let him and he needs to throw the World Series. Very, very common, familiar plot to anyone who's seen movies or watched baseball or watched baseball movies. So he's having trouble getting out of the realm of cliche. And I think, you know, what is being jaded but kind of viewing the world through these cliches. In a way, you think that you know all the angles, but at the same time, it kind of. It hobbles you. That very presupposition that you can predict what's going to happen because you're familiar with cliche can actually, I think, make you vulnerable to things that Norma represents. Melodrama, live emotion, you know, there are ways of that life can undercut the cliche and present something different. I think maybe the surprise of the monkey at the beginning is part of that, is part of the fact that he should be set back on his heels a little bit by this revelation. And instead he thinks that he can just manipulate her and that he can see what's coming around the bend. I mean, on the one hand, monkeys are a trope in Gothic stories. A minor trope, but a trope. The appearance of monkeys, on the other hand, this is a very strange thing and not what he was expecting, so he should be put on his guard instead. He's not. But I think it's interesting how the film is. Makes you pay attention to these cliches. The, you know, the repo man says to one of them, says to Joe, you know, this company's played ball with you long enough, or something like that.

10:35 Wes: Right.

10:35 Erin: Which is, of course, connected to the fact that Joe is pitching this baseball movie. And that's kind of a baseball cliche. And then, you know, he sees through Joe's story when Joe tells him, oh, the car isn't here. Oh, my friend took it down to Palm Springs. And he reads cliche into that. Like, Palm Springs, it's is a health resort town. So the repo man makes some comment like, oh, yeah, I bet he took it down there for his health. You know, he could see that Joe is lying to him. Joe thinks that he's one step ahead of everybody. He's one cliche ahead of the rest of the rest of the world. But he's not, right after that, when he goes to Paramount, right when he takes his car out from where he's been hiding it at Rudy's, he says something like, I had an original story kicking around Paramount, but my agent told me was dead as a doornail. So once you listen for them, which as soon as he, as the repo man said the thing about playing ball, suddenly my ears perked up for listening for cliches. They pop up again and again. And noir partially, I think, operates on cliche. It's a cliche of noir that cliches abound. The film noir descriptive formula in a voiceover, you know, narrative voiceover, is, you know, she was the kind of woman who. Blah, blah, blah, right? Insert cliche here. As Jo says about the house. This is a kind of house old movie people used to build. And he connects it to Ms. Havisham, which is in itself a cliche of an older woman who's bemoaning her past. Right? So it's about kind of like having a narrative in our heads about people. But then what film noir does when it's good is that it undercuts that. It transgresses the expected narrative. It transgresses the cliche. And that's how it generates surprise, I think. And so it makes sense that Joe, who's struggling with coming up with an original story, is, as you're pointing out, repeatedly outsmarted by the story that he's in, even as he thinks he's one step ahead. Because in the part that you mentioned where he says that, oh, you know, I had a plot for them too, he doesn't realize that this whole time while he's formulating this plot, Max has gone and gotten his clothes from his. And all his stuff from his apartment. So, like, they're one step ahead of him. He thinks he's taking advantage of her. And this whole time she's laid this plot to have him move in with her.

12:52 Wes: So, yeah, it's interesting because his cynicism and Norma's psychosis, they both have similar roots. Right. Which is. Well, for him, it's failing as an artist or failing as a screenwriter. And his solution is to be cynical and to give up, essentially. Either giving up by just selling out or giving up by just giving up and going home. I guess he's had some success, too, so. Yeah, so he's already had some success. Minor success, yeah. She's had major success and will not give up. Or maybe you could say she has in a sense and hasn't in a sense. But she's holding on to this dream, no matter how crazy it is, and writing a new script and expecting to make another film with DeMille. But neither seems like the best solution to the struggles of being an artist, either self delusion or cynicism. I mean, the self delusion is kind of. It's a sort of idealism that she's engaged in. Right. So that's a direct contrast to his cynicism, but it's very different than, say, like, Betty's idealism.

14:00 Erin: Yeah, let's talk about Betty a bit, because she's a foil both to Jo and to Norma. I think what's interesting is that they take pains to point out that she comes from a picture family. So she has a pedigree, which maybe makes her something like Norma and less like Joe. Joe is more of a newcomer, more of an upstart.

14:20 Wes: Right.

14:20 Erin: He doesn't really belong in Hollywood. Something about this pedigree, I think, proves that Betty does have what it takes somehow. But of course, it's also her adaptability. She wanted to be a star. She even got a nose job. And then her acting wasn't any good, so she switched to being a reader and she wants to be a writer. And she has a great deal of ambition. And she's connected narratively, I think, with images of cars. Like what the script they're working on. Jo says that was running through his mind like a dozen locomotives. And then really curiously, when he smells her and tells her what she smells like, he basically says, she has a new car smell.

15:03 Wes: Disney say, you smell real special or something. What's the word?

15:06 Erin: Yeah, it's so, so dumb that she smells like freshly laundered linen or something. And then like a brand new automobile.

15:13 Wes: I got it exactly right, he says. Well, first he says, I will now kiss that nose of yours. Which is interesting. She Says if you please. They're doing.

15:21 Erin: They're a little jokey dialogue.

15:24 Wes: Yeah. But dangerous flirtation, given that she's a fiance.

15:28 Erin: Poor Artie.

15:28 Wes: And they said, may I say that you smell real special.

15:35 Erin: Sorry. Okay. Billy Wilder.

15:38 Wes: Not a compliment I've ever thought of giving someone. Must be my new shampoo. That's no shampoo. It's more like freshly laundered linen handkerchiefs. Like a brand new automobile. How old are you? Anyway? She's a new car.

15:54 Erin: She might need to get checked out. Her pheromones are malfunctioning. If she has new car smell.

16:02 Wes: His cynicism I find quite off putting.

16:04 Erin: Yeah.

16:05 Wes: And just looking at.

16:07 Erin: I really don't like it.

16:08 Wes: Critics have said, yeah, this is one. The film was lauded, of course, as one of the great films. And I think it received an immediately positive critical reaction. But if you find. Where you do find criticisms, I think this is one of them, which is that his level of sarcasm, I think, is what one. Cheap sarcasm, one critic may have called it. But anyway, I think they're just. They're reacting to his level of sarcasm and cynicism, which is hard to like. And especially the moment where he rejects Betty. Right. But for some reason has her come to the house to do that and then gets himself shot by continuing to rile up someone who just shown him that she has a gun and giving no concern for his own safety.

16:56 Erin: How do you feel, though, about. I mean, at this viewing, this did stick out to me. It's the most I've ever disliked Joe Gillis. But it's also really, really hard to feel any sympathy for Norma. I feel a little bit more for her. And actually, I think this time because he struck me as being so obnoxious, I ended up feeling more sympathy for her. In contrast, because he. He makes fun of her so often, but, I mean, she's a nut.

17:21 Wes: It's hard not to feel sympathy for her at the very end, though, right? When she.

17:26 Erin: Of course, or even when she goes to the studio. I mean, those.

17:30 Wes: Yeah, that's.

17:31 Erin: Those moments are so touching. When I love when DeMille says, oh, you know, he's about to break the news to her that they just wanted her car. And he says, oh, you know, I hope you still have a sense of humor. And you just look at her face and she's like crying because she's just been approached by all these people that she thought had forgotten her. And it's like, of course she has no sense of humor. If she ever did, she's lost it, you know, like there is nothing about her that isn't overly sensitive and so easily crushed. And so. And that. And that's hard to deal with because there's no sense of self awareness there. Just a touch of it would make her a little more likeable. I mean, I'm glad they don't go there. I'm glad that she stays who she is. And I do think this is one of the great film performances of all time. I think she dares to be so unlikable, and I think that's really important for her character. Maybe Holden's choices too, are admirable and that he doesn't make any effort to be more likable either. So that there isn't a way in which he's trying to come off better than her by contrast. But it does put one in a curious position watching the film going, who am I supposed to be rooting for?

18:39 Wes: Yeah, exactly.

18:41 Erin: The rats in the swimming pool. Max. Certainly not Betty, who's obnoxious. And I should know because I played Betty in regional theater in the musical version of Sunset Boulevard. Oh, really? Yes.

18:53 Wes: Oh, wow. That's very cool. I'm surprised I haven't heard your impression of Norma Desmond yet, Max.

19:00 Erin: No, I'll do it. I'll do it for you. Off, off the record.

19:05 Wes: Words, words, words. I'll show you when you're a little dog too. No, sorry, different film.

19:14 Erin: I love my favorite scene of her in the whole movie is when she's drunk at the New Year's Eve party when she's had too much champagne and she's like, you know, it's actually really, really funny. She's frequently so funny. And I also think her Chaplin impression is really good. Yeah, she's really.

19:31 Wes: So this is one of the few moments, and this is. Ebert points this out, where she does come across as having a sense of humor and does. Yeah, you do get more of a sense of her as a real down to earth human being at that point or. That's very humanizing. Yeah, she does a great Chaplin imitation. And she's funny, genuinely funny.

19:51 Erin: Well, I don't know if we're supposed to be laughing at her with the bathing beauty little. I mean, it's funny. That is a really funny scene. And of course, Gloria Swanson is being funny. I don't know if we're supposed to take seriously the fact that Norma is like performing, being a bathing beauty with a parasol for Jo's entertainment in a deadly serious way. But the Chaplin thing is cute. It's funny. And it's funny that her references for comedy are Chaplin, slapstick, silent comedy.

20:20 Wes: And she steps outside of her need to be a beautiful woman.

20:26 Erin: Yeah, yeah, right.

20:27 Wes: She's playing a man and she's playing a tramp, and she's got a little mustache on and.

20:31 Erin: Yeah, right. That's true. That's true. Hadn't thought of that. I always loved, you know, how much I love Judy Garland, but especially any movie where she plays the Tramp, she would do something like that. And I always wanted to dress up, like, as a tramp for Halloween. And I couldn't find clothes that were, like, disgusting enough. And finally someone said to me, you know, people, like most girls try to make themselves look pretty on Halloween. Like, you should try

20:56 Wes: slutty Tramp. Right. It's always a slutty.

20:58 Erin: Yeah, exactly.

20:58 Wes: Slutty nurse, slutty vampire, slutty tramp.

21:01 Erin: Exactly.

21:01 Wes: What does a slutty tramp look like?

21:04 Erin: Well, I always thought the tramp thing is actually cute.

21:07 Wes: Tight. Yeah.

21:09 Erin: No, but there's a great tradition, I think, of women dressing up as the Tramp in a way that I always thought was adorable. So I didn't think there was anything, you know, conflicted about it. You know, there's something cute about her Chaplin impression, which is endearing. And so I think it works in a strange sort of way. It's not unfeminine, but it isn't sexy. That, I think, is the interesting distinction there, that she's not being a sex object in that moment.

21:32 Wes: Yeah. I don't think there's any point in the movie at which you could say she's sexy.

21:36 Erin: No, but she's trying to be.

21:38 Wes: She. Yeah.

21:40 Erin: Sort of. Or glamorous. Glamorous. But I'm thinking about maybe sexy is the wrong word or sex object is the wrong word. I'm thinking about the sort of the depictions of her on film when she was younger. The shots of her that we do get. She seems like an idealized. In the, say, the Madonna horror dichotomy. She's in a church. She's wearing a veil. So this seems like. And she's lit by candles. So this seems to be of the Madonna variety. But I think that her attraction to Jo, that relationship is about her believing that she is still sexually desirable. So there's an element of this in the relationship with him, which must also be the way in which she's relating to audiences, which is. As a sex symbol of some outmoded sort. But, yeah, a sex symbol nonetheless.

22:26 Wes: There's something so ravenous about her, so frighteningly ravenous. That kind of trumps all that. So all the stuff with her hands and the. It's right, the crazy look and the. The bare teeth, it is. It is almost like the threat of being cannibalized by a maternal figure who is not letting you establish a boundary. So it is. This is why I brought up the witch as well. It's like the mother who won't let you separate. And to me, she comes across much more as a kind of scary mother figure than anything. Or a witch like figure.

23:04 Erin: That's right. That's right. You know, she's a vampire too. You know, there are lots of Mrs. Robinson connections, of course.

23:11 Wes: Right, yeah. And that's. Yeah, I thought of that as well, because Mrs. Robinson is also someone who wanted to be. Who had artistic. You know, we find out, right, that she had artistic aspirations and that's part of why she wants to kind of corrupt Benjamin. It's a bit of a different dynamic here, but.

23:27 Erin: Yeah, yeah. You reminded me of several moments in the film where she does treat Jo uncomfortably like a son. Like when she tells him not to chew gum in the car or even when he gets out of the pool and she insists on drying him off, which under the right circumstances, that would probably be normal, but with her, it seems like a motherly thing to do. I like that word you use, ravenous, which I think is spot on. Sexiness maybe is, as one Walter Matthau would say, maybe about an urbanity born of disinterest or something like that. That's about maybe, you know, sexiness in a strange sort of way is about not really expressing desire. Maybe. I mean, I've never thought about this before. Maybe I should have, but I never have thought about this too closely. But maybe something about being sexy is about having people come to you and not about being. Not about forcing yourself on people. That seems pretty obvious, you know, come to think of it. But. Right. Like, so that is kind of what you're talking about, that she's too grasping that she would have to be a little bit more withholding and let Jo come to her. I keep thinking over and over again of, you know, Sally o', Malley, the SNL skit where Molly Shannon plays the like. Like, woman who does aerobics. And she keeps saying over and over again, I'm 50 years old.

24:42 Wes: 5.

24:43 Erin: Oh, I kick and kick. 50, 50 years old just like. Is so ridiculous. So when they're like, she's 50. Oh, my God, 50 years old. It's like, isn't JLo like 55. Anyway, it's funny. She's so old.

25:01 Wes: Right.

25:01 Erin: Meanwhile, William Holden looks like he's the same age as she.

25:04 Wes: It's.

25:05 Erin: She looks great.

25:05 Wes: Well, yeah. They were gonna make her up, huh?

25:08 Erin: Yeah. Didn't they make her up to make her look old, just like Ann Bancroft?

25:11 Wes: No, that she refused to be made up to be made to look older. So they were going to, you know, because I think she's supposed to be 60 or something in the film.

25:19 Erin: No, 50.

25:20 Wes: Well, she is. She's. She is 50.

25:21 Erin: I mean, she's 51 in real life, but they say 50 in the film.

25:25 Wes: Oh, they do. Oh, right. He says as a 58. Right. When he's berating her about, you know, there's nothing wrong with being a 50.

25:31 Erin: Yeah.

25:32 Wes: How old one?

25:32 Erin: Yeah, he knows everything about being a woman.

25:36 Wes: Right, but. Okay, so I forgot. But yeah, no, I read that they were going to try and make her up to look older because she does look probably quite a few years younger than her age. She said no.

25:49 Erin: Well, she has to think about her career.

25:51 Wes: You could expect. Yeah, but, yeah, and I think that was the right. That was the right choice. I think it's just a bit too on the nose, too obvious, too. She's someone who is, you know, she's 51 or whatever, and. But she's well kept for her age, and she looks good for her age. And that is perfectly appropriate to the part, I think.

26:11 Erin: Yeah. I thought that they compromised on this idea of aging her up, and maybe not by cluing Swanson into this, but by giving her a super glamorous. A glamorous look that would just make her naturally look a little bit older because it's a little. It's slightly harsher just in terms of her makeup and her.

26:28 Wes: She's putting her face into harsh expressions all the time. And I think that's.

26:33 Erin: That does.

26:33 Wes: It's almost a grimace all the time.

26:35 Erin: Yeah, that's right.

26:36 Wes: Or were you saying something different? You were.

26:38 Erin: I think also they were trying to make her up to just be. To not put age makeup on her, but just to do. When you put on, like, hyper, glamorous amounts of makeup that can age you just with harsher lines or something. It could just make you look a little bit older than you are. I think the youngest she looks is when her. Which is really remarkable is when her face is, like, under the microscope when they're doing all those beauty treatments. And you could see her pretty much without makeup. You could see she barely has a line on her face, you know?

27:05 Wes: Yeah, I know it's crazy.

27:07 Erin: She was a health nut in real life and would, like, just put herself through all these crazy regimens to keep up her looks, which obviously worked. Seems like a huge waste of time to me, but whatever.

27:18 Wes: Yeah. And I think it's important because the movie isn't really about her being over the hill as a. Right. Like, it's not about her age exactly. It's more about the passing of the silent film era and her failure to adapt to the new and her holding on to the past. Am I right about that?

27:36 Erin: I think that is right. I think it's also true that, you know, DeMille mentions, you know, she can't be that old. She can't be. You know, don't say that she's a dinosaur or whatever, you know, because I'm old enough to be her father. And DeMille, of course, still a director, still doing, you know, stupid biblical epics. I mean, this was the set of Samson and Delilah, and he's given the script for Salome. You know, Hollywood is a cliche factory.

28:00 Wes: And that really was. That really was the set for that film. He really was. Yeah. Yeah.

28:06 Erin: Not a bad film, Hedy. Omar. It's ridiculous, but it's a fun movie. You know, I think that being a silent film star, let's put it this way, it was not unlike being a gymnast in the 1970s. They were particularly young, egregiously young. 16, 17 was like the prime age for, you know, Lillian Gish made the Wales of August with bette Davis in 1987, and they were supposed to be sisters of roughly the same age because Bette Davis had had strokes and had by that time, was so sick. She looked much, much older than Lillian Gish was. And I don't think she was much younger. I mean, I think a lot of these women, had they survived the transition, would have been slightly on the older end, but within the range of the ages. Of the women that came in for the talkies, you look at someone like Irene Dunn, one of my favorite actresses who only had a career in sound, oddly enough, because she was on the Broadway stage in musicals. Mostly came over, started in movies in 1930 or leathernecking, was the first one in, I think 29. So she was just completely out of the sound era. She was born in 1898. You know, she was 39 when she made the Awful Truth with Cary Grant. Constantly had to fudge her age to stay to get the roles that she got, probably until she retired in 1950 or 52, something like that. But very often these women were roughly the same age, but the silent girls were so young. They were truly girls. So I just think that that's a factor here that we're talking about a slightly adjusted age range in terms of. Of what the silence were really looking for. They were looking for teenage girls to be opposite Chaplin, you know, so it's almost like a teen romance kind of look to those relationships.

29:56 Wes: I think this is why Max. Part of why Max feels so guilty and why he's her servant now, even after he's her ex husband and servant and was her director. Because in a way he was a. I think at the point where he's her director, he's kind of a father figure. She's being raised up right. She's still in her formative years and film isn't just a profession for her. It's this deep formative influence. Not only is it a deep. A deep formative influence that gets very much embedded in her identity. She had this tremendous success at it and this fame at a very early age, which, as we know, can be very confusing and cause lots of problems. Right. Child stars and all that. So Max, I think, has the feeling that he's damaged her and now his penance is that he has to take care of her for the rest of her life.

30:52 Erin: Yeah, I like that. I like this idea that she's. I mean, we've already been hinting at this that she's symbolically aligned with silent pictures. But it's almost as if she is a symbol for all of them, silent movie culture itself. Right. She was there at its very beginnings and it was there, if you like, at the beginning of her.

31:09 Wes: Right.

31:10 Erin: So there's a sort of mutual origin story and mutual arc. And in a way, her asking DeMille to make a picture with her is like her asking Hollywood in 1949, 1950, to make a silent movie. There's an impossibility there that's sort of like at the core of what it is that she's about as a symbol, as a performer.

31:30 Wes: So whose close up is better? I guess it's not really a. The shot of him in the pool is not exactly a close up, but we do get a good look at his open mouthed face. And apparently they did that shot with a mirror. They tried to put the camera in the pool and it didn't work out. I mean, speaking of another parallel to the Graduate, this pool scene, but.

31:52 Erin: Right, right, yeah, pool and stasis, that's

31:58 Wes: the origin. Not just, you know, we Get a shot not just of him, but the police and photographers sort of surrounding him. It's great. It's a great shot. But that shot is kind of iconic. And then the one at the end of the movie as she, you know, she's ready for her close up. And then she approaches the camera.

32:17 Erin: Yeah. She becomes one with the celluloid. Fades into the screen, and we get the direct call out. I think these things are. Are really closely related because she references those wonderful people out there in the dark. And, I mean, what a thing that must have been to be in the audience, seeing that for the first time, you know, in a movie theater in 1950.

32:38 Wes: Probably the most terrifying thing they've ever.

32:40 Erin: Really terrifying. Really chilling. Right. You know, but there are a lot of very subtle. I mean, you know, the connection between those two shots, the cameraman and the. You know, we've talked about Norma being ravenous, but the ravenousness of the public and the fact that they demand the. The new is an element of this that we haven't touched on. One of the really subtle touches that I like is during Norma's return to the studio when the old gaffer Haw guy trains his spotlight on her and says, let's get a good look at you.

33:10 Wes: Yeah.

33:10 Erin: You know, in that moment, he's sort of representative of an entire culture of ravenous film fans who forget you the moment you're off the screen. But also, if they remember you the moment, they want to see you now as a. You know, as a. The appeal you now have is maybe like a circus freak. Let's see how you've aged. Let's. Let's check you out. He's up high. So you might think at first that they're saying Hawkeye, you know, because he's precision. But no, it's hog eye, right? Which there's something really telling about that name and the ravenousness of the audience, of the curious public. And so having the. The photographers and the people coming to capitalize suddenly on this story, now that it's sensational, now that it's news again, suddenly we care about Norma Desmond. And they're all there with their cameras. And the fact that Hedda Hopper, you know, famous gossip columnist playing herself, is up in Norma's bedroom, and they're all just watching her break down without helping her or doing anything to, I don't know, improve the situation in some way. I don't know what they could do, but they could do more than what they're doing. Instead of interrogating her. When she's obviously having a psychotic break. The fact that this is a business, this is an industry that is geared towards making money, and so they have to appeal to a public. And what right a public has, what ownership they have over stars, over films, what right they should have to dictate the stories that get made? And whether or not those stories are just popcorn movies or artistic undertakings or something like that, I think is a big part of this.

34:43 Wes: Yeah, Very good. She's the mirror image of our own ravenousness, and we have to face that at the end of the movie. I like that. All right. That was fun. Thank you.

34:53 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to lettersoubtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook, SubtextPodcast, and on Twitter at Enjoy Subtext.