Character Analysis
You Can Call Her Queen Bee… and Let Her Rule that Fantasy
Norma Desmond is the irregularly beating heart of Sunset Boulevard. She may not be the protagonist—that's Joe—but she is what makes this flick tick.
She's the Queen Bee, the power that controls events and brings about Joe's doomed fate. When Gillis first meets Norma, her eccentricity is already bordering on straight-up nuts. She's holding a funeral for her pet monkey and she thinks Joe is the undertaker. This misunderstanding eventually segues into a rant about the current movie business, when Norma discovers that Joe's a screenwriter. She used to be a silent star and she thinks that the age of talkies is somehow inferior to this perceived Golden Age:
NORMA: They're dead. They're finished. There was a time when this business had the eyes of the whole wide world. But that wasn't good enough. Oh, no! They wanted the ears of the world, too. So they opened their big mouths, and out came talk, talk, talk...
She may have a point here—someone's always bugging about how the next step in technology is totally going to ruin movies—but we can't help but notice that it's all about her.
Faded Glory
As Joe gets to know Norma better, so do we. We learn that she lives in the past and in the future—since she's planning a glorious "return" to the screen (she doesn't like the word "comeback")—but never in the present. Her life consists entirely of trying to recapture her glory days, when she was a silent-screen star, and she only watches her own movies, feasting on her own image. Her house is littered with her own pictures, and she claims she receives a ton of fan mail.
Shmoopers, at this point, it's just plain creepy. What fans could this woman possibly have left?
As it turns out, exactly one: Her servant Max—who was actually her first husband and the director who discovered her—forges these letters into order to prevent her from being "destroyed" (though you could argue Max is just making the delusion worse). Norma's suicide attempts indicate that she knows she's not really as beloved as she used to be, and that her feeling of lovelessness is perhaps the real problem at the root of her craziness.
Gradually, she uses Joe to replace her dead pet monkey, making him into a receptive audience for her celebrity. And Norma does still have some star-like qualities, even if her mugging for her audience goes way too far beyond mere smizing. Joe thinks her eyes are expressive and impressive, and her verve and self-confidence are extremely palpable. Through gifts and a suicide attempt, Norma gradually guilts him into being her gigolo, but his impulses toward living his own life prove impossible to control. From this example, it's pretty clear that Norma was once quite something.
But not anymore. Norma thinks she's getting the awful screenplay that she's been writing made into a movie by Cecil B. DeMille. When she visits DeMille over this misunderstanding (caused by a DeMille assistant who only wanted to rent Norma's hot, vintage car for a movie), some of her old star-power still manages to mesmerize the people on the set. Which, of course, only adds to Norma's delusion.
Naturally, things fall apart, and when Norma tries to tell Betty Schaefer the truth abut her and Joe, Joe breaks things off with Betty—before trying to leave Norma, too. In the process, he tells her the truth about the DeMille movie. And Norma, of course, murders him.
Too Much Reality
Unable to deal mentally with the murder, Norma dives headfirst into her delusion. Oh, it's on now.
She really believes that she's making her Salomé screenplay with DeMille (a script about the Biblical femme fatale, Salomé, who helps contrive the murder of John the Baptist—a fitting role for Norma). In her madness—if not in real life—Norma gets what she wants, as she mistakes the news cameras at the murder scene for DeMille's cameras. To the last, Max von Mayerling helps pad her delusions, assuming the role of DeMille behind the news cameras. She feels fulfilled—although in a totally ironic way. Joe says that life has been "strangely merciful to Norma" in that it let her believe her own illusions. She seems utterly insane and yet overjoyed as she utters the movie's famous last lines to the crowd of reporters and photographers and gossip columnists, whom she mistakes for a film crew:
NORMA: I can't go on with the scene. I'm too happy. Do you mind, Mr. DeMille, if I say a few words? Thank you. I just want to tell you how happy I am to be back in the studio making a picture again. You don't know how much I've missed all of you. And I promise you I'll never desert you again because after Salome we'll make another picture and another picture. You see, this is my life! It always will be! Nothing else! Just us, the cameras, and those wonderful people out there in the dark!... All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up.
T.S. Eliot once said, "Mankind cannot bear very much reality." This would be a fitting epitaph for Norma's tombstone.
Apparently, there's some truth to the Desmond Delusion. As it turns out, Norma Desmond was kinda-sorta based on certain real silent film stars, like the reclusive Mary Pickford, Clara Bow, and Mae Murray. But it would be wrong to mistake her for any one person, when she's really at once a composite and an original creation.
How's this for a twist? Wilder and Brackett based Desmond's name on that of a famous unsolved Hollywood murder from 1922, that of a director, William Desmond Taylor, who was a close friend of silent-screen actress Mabel Normand (who was not guilty of Taylor's murder, for the record, but who is mentioned as a real and distinct person in Sunset Boulevard, making it clear that she's not the same as Norma). The William Desmond murder mystery bears a not-unnoticeable resemblance Joe Gillis's murder. We guess inspiration comes from all kinds of surprising places.
True to Life
But the most disconcerting parallel is probably between Norma Desmond and the actress who portrayed her—Gloria Swanson. Like Desmond, Swanson really did have trouble transitioning to success in talking pictures—though she didn't go nuts like Norma Desmond, and actually continued working for TV and radio. Also, she had the courage to portray a character who clearly shared features of her life story in a crazy and satirical way—something Norma Desmond definitely wouldn't have done. She would have been too self-conscious. So you've got to give Swanson some serious props.
Swanson even starred in movies directed by Eric von Stroheim and Cecil B. DeMille, just like Norma Desmond (Stroheim plays Max von Mayerling and Cecil B. DeMille plays himself). At one point, Norma and Joe watch one of Norma's old movies, which is really a Swanson film that Stroheim directed (Queen Kelly, from 1929).
The elements of truth in Desmond's character made Sunset Boulevard into a weird experience for the audiences of 1950. They must have felt like they were watching a bizarre, disturbing mixture of fact and grotesque fantasy. Even "The Waxworks" with whom Norma plays bridge were real-life silent-era stars, including the famous Buster Keaton. Wilder and his fellow filmmakers clearly had some fun with this one.
Norma Desmond's Timeline