Sunset Blvd.

The Thematic Intentions of

Sunset Boulevard

The film Sunset Boulevard directed by Billy Wilder and staring the main characters of Norma Desmond, Joe Gillis, and Max Von Mayerling is ideal example of how important film making techniques help depict a movie’s core theme intentions with vivid clarity. Classic Hollywood is the first thing that comes to mind when one speaks about this film’s style. This signature category combined with the visual style of realism and it’s continuity editing; detailed mise-en-scene and all of its characteristics; and lastly the use of reoccurring motifs with formalistic qualities make the audience grasp the central theme of just how vicious the actual motion industry can be to the individuals that keep its alive. I hope to convey all of this through a detailed explanation involving and about specific scenes included in the film and a direct tie-in of how the precise attributes above play such an important role in expressing that theme.

The first scene that will be analyzed is that of opening credits and just how exactly this begins to set the stage for the main theme. In the very first frame, which also becomes the establishing shot, we come to a high angle shot that is zoomed in close on the words “Sunset Blvd” painted on a street curb as the image is also flooded with dramatic nondiegetic music. This becomes very important because the curb is also the gutter. Here, not even ten seconds into the movie, do we get our first glimpse of what the film is about; the mise-en-scene here involving a symbolic visual correlation to the central theme an this gutter frame is depicted through this entire establishing shot. Along with this we get more connection through the voice over actually describing, in an almost a sarcastic manner which should not be the case at all, about a murder on this high class, high status block. It’s almost as if this is a clear depiction of the true chaos tied in with how this Hollywood life can and will be to the people involved with it. As the film zooms out to a long shot of Sunset, we see the police brigade come and wiz by through a very quick pan shot. The next thing is a cross cut to the actual mansion where more commotion is viewed at an obvious murder scene. Bottom line is that the mise-en-scene involved here does an excellent job setting up the movie’s thematic intentions....

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... truly thinks is going to be another film. The whole scene in its’ entirety depicts that once again the “dream” can be destroyed just as her life has done the same. The final integration of this motif comes in the very last frame as the movie fades out; only this is not a normal fade out. Instead Wilder chooses to blur the fade into an eerie white, which gives us a sense that the dream is now finally over.

In conclusion I hoped to have demonstrated just how the all the specific film making techniques used throughout the film help to define the central theme as it is intertwined with the action. As I have conveyed, realism is just one of the very important aspects that help the production of this film come to the close of its’ solid final cut. I think that this being the ultimate visual style of the picture it is what made this movie so great. It got the point across and it definitely had an influence on the way films were shot after it. In a way, it becomes sort of ironic. A film created in Hollywood that molds a horrid model of how messed up its own surroundings can be, actually end up shaping the industry it finds itself in. That in my opinion is, in itself, supreme filmmaking.