Who is norma desmond

Although she had made the transition from silent film to talkies, her early sound pictures were not big hits. She knew she was, as she said, a 'fading star the public had worshipped long enough'. By the mid-forties, Billy Wilder had been thinking about making a critique of Hollywood for several years. Initially the story, codenamed 'A Can of Beans' - which he worked on with writing partner and producer Charles Brackett - was a comedy about an ageing silent star who wreaks revenge on her enemies.

As they progressed, the emphasis of the story changed - helped, in part, by the involvement of one of their regular bridge partners, D. Marshman Jr, a reporter for Time-Life. The team completed the narrative by the end of , after which they started work on the screenplay. It was then that Wilder remembered Swanson. He rang to ask if she would come in for a screen-test. I was revolted,' she said later. I was rude to him. I said what the hell do you have to test me for?

You want to see if I'm still alive, do you? Or do you doubt that I can act? Wilder was mesmerised by Swanson's screen presence and it was decided to rewrite the story so that Norma Desmond would be the central character.

She knew how to act with gestures, something difficult to teach. Two weeks before filming was due to begin Montgomery Clift pulled out and the lead male role went to William Holden, who was under contract to Paramount. He was Joe Gillis. She gave an extremely daring performance and walked a very fine line as she knew it could have been ridiculous.

But of all the people who truly believed in the project it was her. I thought it was an incredibly daring script, like nothing I had ever seen before. Some found the material too radical. Although Wilder wanted to open the film with a scene in the Los Angeles County morgue in which 36 corpses talk to one another about how they died - the movie is narrated by the dead Joe Gillis - the director was forced to scrap the sequence after poor results with test audiences.

After one early screening for the movie industry, in the summer of , Louis B. Mayer said, 'How dare this young man, Wilder, bite the hand that feeds him?

Many others, however, recognised the film's stark message, its warning of the dangers inherent in modern celebrity. During the same evening when Wilder clashed with Mayer, actress Barbara Stanwyck came up to Swanson in tears, knelt down before her and kissed the hem of her dress - a silent gesture which spoke of her admiration for the bravery of her performance and the truth of the film. I was struck by the isolation and loneliness of being a motion-picture actress.

After making a couple more films, I stopped, moved to New York and had two children. I had much more fun outside the gates of Paramount than inside.

Without the crucial support of the audience, the claim to authority disintegrates. An actress to the last, she delivers one of the greatest closing monologues in movie history, uttered directly into the camera. It always will be. Just us. And those cameras. And all those wonderful people out there in the dark. The audience ultimately takes as much as it gives. The American Interest. 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.

Conversely, for conservatives, Norma is the trauma-broadcasting, victim-centred hysteric. Immune to irony and armed with snobbish entitlement, she preps for her starring role with fanatical earnestness. In fairness, though, whatever is vile in Norma is what the gaze of the crowd made of her.

When fans stop gawking, her loneliness forces her to invent phantasmic replacements, so that her psychic survival finally depends on her insanity. Sunset Boulevard indicts fame. By contrast, 21st century popular culture extols the virtue of maximised visibility.

Meanwhile, the largest organisations advocating for LGBTQ acceptance have made media visibility and identity representation the fulcrums of social progress. And no doubt visibility politics does strip back prejudice. But Sunset Boulevard forces us to contemplate the cost of needing to be seen — namely, the unquenchable thirst for external validation that festers beneath a culture of exhibitionism.

The final decades of the 20th century showcased the depredations of celebrity. From the infantilied, rhinoplastied, and blanched persona of Michael Jackson to the crucified rebel-from-royalty that was Princess Diana, fame built and toppled global icons.

Social media enabled anyone and everyone to be digitally seen. Influencers proliferated.