Arnon Grunberg

Thanks to Fame, a Wreck

The Dutch author Gerard Reve once said his theme was the inadequacy of human love. A wonderful theme that, albeit a bit self-evident, because that love is inadequate.
The theme of Billy Wilder (1906 – 2002), one could say, was the inadequacy of human corruption.
Corruption, but not necessarily anything major. What it usually comes down to is that you do something you shouldn’t have, in order to achieve something else. The old but always topical question: does the end justify the means?
In Wilder’s Irma la Douce (1963), mild-mannered policeman Nestor Patour (Jack Lemmon) sets out to combat prostitution, without understanding how corruption works in Paris. He gets fired. A few hours later he shows up again as pimp to hooker Irma la Douce (Shirley MacLaine). But then Patour discovers – and this seems typically Wilderian to me – that in fact he loves Irma too much, or thinks he does; in any case he can’t tolerate the thought of all those customers and decides to become her only source of income. To that end he disguises himself once a week as a wealthy British lord, and so becomes pimp and john, all rolled into one. An extremely tiring double life.
Wilder is, of course, a moralist – that seems to me a precondition for the writing of books or the making of films – but not a dogmatic one. He is too much a realist to believe that even a successful film could exorcise a single unwholesome thought from the viewers’ minds.
When Wilder transforms Patour from combater of prostitution to pimp in the course of a few hours he is not making a statement about the true nature of man. About how civilization, as one hears again and again, is only a thin veneer. (Better a thin veneer, one might say, than no veneer at all.)
With a certain mildness, Wilder suggests that new situations call for new ideas. This with a nod to the words of Groucho Marx: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them, well, I’ve got other ones.” No torturing goes on in Wilder’s movies, which is pleasing. He is not interested in the kind of person who obtains pleasure from cutting off someone else’s ear. He is more interested in the person who sells a knife to the amputator of ears, knowing full well that the amputator of ears is not entirely on the up-and-up - but what’s he supposed to do? After all, he has a family to support.
Wilder’s claim is: people aren’t actually all that bad. It’s just that people can be bought. For money, of course, for fame and status, but also for love and tenderness, which are rare and always inadequate. For the promise of a God who watches over us, or a leader who protects us. Going, going, gone to the highest bidder.
In his book Conversations with Wilder, Cameron Crowe asks: “Was Sunset Boulevard (1950) a black comedy?” And Wilder replies: “No, it was just a picture.” That answer, too, seems to me completely Wilderian. For others a movie may be a black comedy, a mild tragedy, a farcical epic or a historical costume drama, but for the maker it is just a picture. The result, often enough, is not exactly what you had in mind, but one learns to live with that.
Wilder decided to do things the hard way and make a movie about Hollywood, knowing full well that movies about Hollywood are usually failures. Sunset Boulevard became a movie that deals with the question: what price must we pay for that dream of a pool of our own? Answer: at times, a fairly steep one.
It is one of Wilder’s least mild films, perhaps even his most vitriolic. One can hardly call it a comedy. With great empathy, but without batting an eye, he leads his characters to their demise.
In this movie, the dead speak to us. Maybe you have to be dead in order to fathom the inadequacy of human corruption and see the trap you have laid for yourself. Perhaps the dead are, by definition, more mild than the living; after all, their lives are over, they can speak from the sidelines, forgivingly, about all that inadequacy.
Originally, the film was supposed to start with a conversation between two corpses in a Los Angeles morgue. The main character, Joe Gillis, already a corpse, is talking to a fat man, also deceased.
During preliminary screenings in Stanton, Illinois and Poughkeepsie, New York, audiences reacted to this original opening in an unintended way. They laughed raucously and never stopped for the rest of the film, even though the story is quite tragic. The studio, by the way, had decided not to organize a test screening in Los Angeles, because the movie cast Hollywood in such an unflattering light.
During one of those screenings, the story has it, Wilder walked out to the foyer and sat down on the steps leading to the lavatories. A few minutes later a woman came by who had walked out as well and, without realizing who the man on the steps was, asked: “Have you ever seen such complete shit?” Wilder replied: “No, never.” Under pressure from the studio, it was decided to change the opening scene.
In the version we have today, we watch as a line of police cars races down a deserted road, sirens blaring, and we hear a voice-over saying: “Yes, this is Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California. It’s about five o’clock in the morning.” The voice-over is the voice of Joe Gillis (William Holden), whose corpse is floating in the swimming pool of the one of the huge villas along Sunset Boulevard.
Nobody important, really, this Joe Gillis; just a screenwriter with a couple of B pictures to his name. A nobody, in fact. For a moment, from Gillis’s perspective, we see the policemen trying to fish the corpse out of the pool. The dead still speak to us, but the audience discovers this only when the movie is almost over. “Poor dope,” Gillis says, “he always wanted a pool.” When you’re dead, perhaps you refer to who you were before in the third person.
Joe Gillis is a writer who has turned his back on the little bit of success he once had. His new screenplay, entitled Bases Loaded, has been rejected by the studio, or rather by a young woman who works for a pittance reading scripts for the studio. Her comments are scathing. The only reason it was written was because the writer was hungry, she says. Hunger can produce good books and screenplays, but not in this case.
Gillis is destitute, he owes months of back rent, his agent has refused to loan him another penny and the finance company is out to repossess his car. The car, in particular, is a problem. Cars are essential in Los Angeles; if forced to choose between their car and their house, there are probably men who would choose for the car.
Two men from the finance company are in hot pursuit; to shake them off, Gillis pulls his car – after it has a blowout – into the driveway of a huge, rather dilapidated villa.
It is a moment that will change his life.
The nice thing about Wilder is that he has no trouble accepting coincidence. He doesn’t pretend that there is logic behind the incoherent events that go together to make up our lives.
In film reviews you occasionally read about overly improbable coincidence, but the finest films and the best books are full of improbable coincidences. It is usually the second-rate directors and insecure writers who are embarrassed by that.
Wilder embraces coincidence with a sardonic smile. In that villa lives an older, eccentric lady, with her butler and a monkey. But the monkey is dead. Lady and butler are waiting for the deliveryman to show up with a coffin for the monkey, and Gillis is mistaken for that deliveryman.
In the hermetic universe of that villa, it takes Gillis a while to make it clear that he is not who they think he is. Used to handing out orders, the lady becomes incensed and orders him to leave the house. But when he gets to the door he turns and recognizes the eccentric lady; she is a famous actress from the days of silent cinema, Norma Desmond.
“You used to be big,” he says.
“I am big,” Norma Desmond says, “it’s the pictures that got small.” That reply says a great deal about the character of Norma Desmond, played by Gloria Swanson, herself a star from the silent movie era.
Norma Desmond’s career hit the rocks during the transition to movies with soundtracks, and she is unable to accept obscurity. And so she has withdrawn to a villa where time stands still, where no modern-day sounds can be heard.
Some stars are unlucky enough to outlive their own fame. Like all love, the audience’s love is unreliable, and when the fans leave you they do so en masse.
Norma Desmond suffers from Realitätsverlust, she inhabits a fiction of her own making, and in Joe Gillis she sees the new blood needed to keep that fiction alive. Not that she is clever or conniving, it’s just that she really believes in her fiction. She is absolutely convinced that she is still a star and that she receives dozens of fan letters each day from people who will never forgive her for having abandoned the silver screen.
She inhabits a fiction that she herself does not recognize as such. Norma Desmond lives only for an audience that abandoned her years ago; a phantom audience, in other words. She is nothing but the graven image that others made of her long ago, and looking at her one sees what a torment that is to bear.
The fan letters Desmond receives every day are written by her butler, Max, played by Erich von Stroheim. Stroheim, like Wilder himself, was a director and an émigré. In Sunset Boulevard he plays the man who discovered young Norma Desmond long ago, a director who marries his discovery and then, in order to go on living, gives up his career and becomes her butler... because other husbands follow. As the butler, however, he plays a special role in her life. This is where love and self-preservation can take us.
Erich von Stroheim’s face is a marvel, a block of granite, seemingly unmoved, emotionless, exactly what you’d expect from a butler, but behind the stone façade are the fissures of sorely-beaten sorrow.
When Stroheim was asked to play this role, he was not oblivious to the pleasure Wilder must have felt in selecting him, of all people. His response: “Tell him for me that that if he were as smart as he likes to be considered he would play the part himself! But even in craziness I prefer to be the first and therefore I would accept his proposition." Erich von Stroheim’s German accent is part and parcel of the madness of the butler who tries to keep his mistress’s imaginary universe intact to the bitter end. Some madness, it seems, arrives sporting a German accent.
Norma Desmond discovers that Gillis is a writer, and proposes that he rewrite a script for her. Room and board, new clothes and money are all thrown in as part of the deal.
Gillis tosses out the bait, Norma Desmond swallows it. Only after a long time, during a New Year’s Eve party, does Gillis find out that Norma Desmond’s feelings for him go beyond those of client and writer. More is expected of him than simply rewriting her dismal script. He decides to flee, and at a friend’s party he renews his acquaintance with Betty Schaefer, the lady who so mercilessly slashed his Bases Loaded. He calls Max to tell him he’s bowing out and that Norma should find someone else to finish her script for her.
It is then that he hears that Norma Desmond has attempted suicide. He goes back to the house, never to escape it again. That, too, I find a typical Wilder touch. It is Gillis’s pity, what we would call his good and humane side, that corrupts him further and for all time. It turns him into something that rides the line between writer and gigolo. On a few occasions, a number of old and likewise forgotten Hollywood stars come to play bridge at Norma’s. Including Buster Keaton, who plays himself.
That is what fame finally makes of people: wrecks. There is comfort to be found in the form of alcohol and card games.
Little wonder then that one producer felt that Wilder, in making this film, had bit the hand that fed him.
What is needed now, of course, is true love – in contrast to the purchased variety. But, and once again this is a true Wilderian touch, that true love is not particularly pure and simple. In Wilder’s films the pure is never the polar opposite of the tarnished. In the tarnished there is always something pure to be found, and in the pure there is a great deal of the tarnished.
Gillis’s best friend, to whose party he escaped, turns out to be engaged to Betty Schaefer. Miss Schaefer has no intention of spending the rest of her life reading scripts for Paramount; she wants to write her own, and she talks Gillis into working with her. For even though she thought Bases Loaded was horrible, she also believes he has talent. Once a man has been a writer, his ambitions go beyond the gigolo’s profession and after much urging Gillis gives in.
In the middle of the night, while Norma Desmond is asleep, Miss Schaefer and Gillis work on their script. The inevitable happens. Something beautiful develops between them. Call it desire and tenderness. Gillis’s best friend and Miss Schaefer’s fiancé, who is working on a movie a few hundred miles away, is soon forgotten. That pure, true love turns out to be all bound up with betrayal, but is nevertheless too good to resist.
Here jealousy enters, and with it death, the deep, all-pervasive fear of abandonment. Norma Desmond, not completely deluded after all, discovers that her lover is out on the town every night. She finds Miss Schaefer’s phone number and calls her to explain exactly how things stand with that wonderful Joe Gillis of hers.
Gillis overhears the phone call, yanks the receiver out of Norma’s hand and summons Betty to come by herself, so she can see it all with her own eyes. She comes, looks and tells Gillis that she will forget everything she’s seen, if he’ll only come along with her.
But Gillis replies: “Come on, where?” Does she expect him to give up all of this? For what? Gillis refuses to leave while Norma Desmond is in the house, so Betty Schaefer leaves alone. Only then, after he has killed the love between Miss Schaefer and himself, is he able to leave Norma Desmond too. That seems to me like a wonderful find. Gillis could continue his work as gigolo only because he had a lover.
Miss Schaefer may be willing to forget what she has seen, but he can’t forget what she has seen; no longer able to be who he was to her before, he can also no longer accept her love. He packs his bags and Norma Desmond goes for her pistol, because the fear of abandonment is huge and violent.
It is the hallmark of a sadomasochistic relationship to think that the only way to ease your own pain is by inflicting pain on the other. Norma Desmond shoots at what must not be allowed to leave her and what is now leaving her anyway; she shoots at reality as it bursts in at last upon her hermetic universe.
And so Joe Gillis ends up in the swimming pool, the one he wanted so badly. This is the price one pays for that glorious American dream.
But the best is yet to come. The police arrive, the reporters, the television cameras. This is a murder, this is a forgotten star, this is news.
Upon hearing the word “cameras”, Norma Desmond awakens with a start, she thinks she is on a film set.
And this time too, Max helps her to keep alive the illusion. “Action!” he shouts. And fights to hold back the tears.
For the final time, Norma Desmond descends the stairs like a diva.
“Life had taken pity on Norma Desmond,” Gillis’s corpse says.
Norma Desmond says: “I’m ready for my close-up.” Famous last words.
Fame turns people into wrecks, but then wrecks that are always ready for a close-up. Still, Norma Desmond is not the one you keep thinking about afterwards: you think about Erich von Stroheim, fighting back the tears as he prolongs Norma Desmond’s illusion for just a few more seconds. In Sunset Boulevard there is a causticity that applies to things far beyond Hollywood. If you want to keep loving someone you have to give up yourself, become a butler. Play along with the game until the bitter end.
If love is fiction, then you need people like Erich von Stroheim to hold open the doors of that fiction, to dust off the fiction with the butler’s white gloves and to say, when the time comes: “Lights. Camera. Action.”