The faded silent film star Norma Desmond’s first appearance sees her behind blinds like a shroud, sunglasses like coins laid over the eyes of a corpse, her mansion filled with Gothic arches—like those of a cathedral, of a catacombs—and the rot of former glory ever-present, from the ghostly tennis court to the stagnant pool to the monstrous presence of the decomposing palazzo itself.
It’s no coincidence that the chance encounter between her and the starving writer protagonist Joe Gillis happens to be over the delivery of a coffin; much like her posthumous existence, the last rites for the deceased in question (a favorite chimp) are grotesque, strange in their utmost ceremony, sanctity. The real funeral remains for the silent film era, for her fame: “They took the idols and smashed them.”
Like icons in a church Norma surrounds herself with her own pictures, the films she screens all her own, and throughout the film remains obsessed with mirrors, drowning in their reflections like Ophelia in the pond: in the momentary glance she catches of herself as she begs Joe not to leave towards the end of the movie, or in front of her vanity while the reporters question her motive for killing the impoverished writer. As she proudly remarks, “We didn’t need dialogue—we had faces.”
And, indeed, her face contorts to ecstatic anguish while her eyes, wide, command the cold wrath of a Medusa, the self-immolating agony of an artist bereft of her audience acting out a constant melodrama, parading herself through the slow rot of her silent, anachronistic existence in this brave new world of sound. Those “last gurgles” caught by the microphones she so loathed were, at the last, uttered by her against a world deafened to her madness, locked up in an Usher-like mansion in the Hollywood Hills. It was a mausoleum long before Joe was shot in it.
With the gaudiness of the chimp’s baby satin coffin, the leopard-skin-lined interior and gold-plated phone of Norma’s car, the excess of the self-written Salomé script she’s intent on acting in (both in the length, and in the fact that it’s stuffed with little else but scenes featuring Norma herself), the putrefying grandeur of the mansion and the empty ornateness of the New Year’s party with Joe and Norma as the only guests—Norma’s life remains little else but a violent kitschkreig, a walk-in closet stuffed with golden skeletons that ultimately parallel the grandiosity of her own internal decay. Even her friends, other old silent film stars, are likened to “waxworks” by Joe—mere props in the expired film of Norma’s life. The obscenity of her wealth (as she fruitlessly showers Joe in finery and expensive fabrics in order to win his affection) merely furthers the deterioration.
Norma’s servant and former director Max von Mayerling helps to perpetuate Norma’s self-inflicted mythology; like the remaining priest of some obscure cult he worships his goddess with unbearable devotion, as if the mere act of belief, like a reverse Pygmalion, could restore marble to the flesh: “I made her a star. And I cannot let her be destroyed.” And in the end, Max completes her fantasy, “directing” Norma in what is to be her final “picture” as news reporters, journalists and cameramen descend like vultures upon the corpse of Norma Desmond’s career—hers is, fittingly, the part of Salomé, with her John the Baptist shot down in the swimming pool.
With a great sense of lyrical tragedy, the last shot sees the former silent film star approaching the reporter’s camera, as the camera shooting the film we’re watching slowly fades to black. For Norma Desmond, now, there remains no distinction between reality and fantasy; like the protagonist of a Poe story, we have entered into the totality of madness.

1. The fact that there’s an Aubrey Beardsley-type painting of Norma in particular is very telling, since Beardsley’s most famous piece is that of Salome with the head of John the Baptist—Norma casts herself as the dancer in the script that she writes in the film; but Joe is no holy man.

2. Fitting, insofar as it’s reminiscent to the fawn covering of a maenad—considering Norma’s Bacchic delusion, hysteria, and eventual slaying of Joe in the end.

3. Having discovered her when she was just sixteen; having been her first husband; having given up his illustrious directing career; having come back as her servant and having fed into her delusions of grandeur, etc.

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"The dream she had clung to so desperately had enfolded her.”

Hysteric Glamour: The Decadence of Decay in Sunset Boulevard
by Donovan Reyes

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