In many ways, Sunset Boulevard defies a unilateral interpretation. Several themes have occurred to me over the past few weeks, as my castmates and I have rehearsed for our own production of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical (yes, there’s a musical version. I didn’t know either, not till just before I auditioned). Its main character is easily the largest presence in the whole show, yet the story is in part a reflection on the invisibility of older women in Hollywood. It reenacts the Golden Age of Hollywood while simultaneously showing the toll such a system takes on creators, showing what happens when creativity isn’t actually valued.
But this semester, I’ve also been taking a class on memory studies (see also: this), so what has stuck out to me the most is how the show handles nostalgia. The most obvious lesson from Sunset Boulevard is that living in the past is futile and self-destructive, as it is for Norma—but especially in the musical, things are more complicated than that. The multiple narrative frames present in the show draw attention to the constructedness of historical fiction and period dramas in general.
Though this adaptation of Sunset Boulevard is very much a standard Broadway musical, it both draws attention to its own medium and strategically deploys other forms of media as framing devices. Like he does in Billy Wilder’s original movie, Joe Gillis narrates portions of the story. In fact, the whole show is constructed as one large extended flashback; it begins with Joe floating in the swimming pool (or being judged hardcore by the entire ensemble, in our case), and then he speaks directly to the audience, stating that he’s about to tell them the “real facts” of this story before launching into a number aptly titled “Let Me Take You Back Six Months.” Joe addresses the audience on many other occasions in this story, even during the middle of a couple songs (“Salome” and “New Ways to Dream”). The thing about breaking the fourth wall is that it draws the audience’s attention to the other three walls—the ones that remain intact.
Appropriately enough, film plays an enormous role in this story, both as plot device and staging mechanism. The original libretto calls for film or projectors in several places. A couple of these occasions are narrative stopgaps, namely (1) the scene in Act 2 in which Norma, Joe, and Max drive to Paramount Studios, and (2) Betty’s hurried, stormy-weather journey to Norma’s house near the end of the show. The most prominent use of film, though, is in the scene in which Norma and Joe watch one of Norma’s old films, The Ordeal of Joan of Arc (a scene to which I’ll return later). This scene is set up such that the projector is pointed towards the audience and the screen is therefore “somewhere above the audience’s heads.” This is not just another way of breaking the fourth wall, but rather it flips the script on the audience so that Norma and Joe appear to be watching them with equal attention.
Historical fiction is also a recurring motif throughout the plot. Two Biblical stories take center stage at alternate times. Norma has written a vastly overstuffed self-insert screenplay dramatizing the story of Salome and John the Baptist. At the same time, Cecil B. DeMille is shooting Samson and Delilah. In fact, he’s in the middle of filming it when Norma visits him at Paramount Studios and sings “As If We Never Said Goodbye.”
There’s also that scene featuring The Ordeal of Joan of Arc. While the religious overtones common to all these stories are certainly worth noting, what seems more relevant is that as they are presented in the show, each story has gone through a process of… well, storification, for lack of a better word. It’s not history Norma longs for so profoundly—it’s the fiction of history. And in a sense, Norma is able to recapture that history precisely because it was preserved on film.
Marianne Hirsch discusses photography as it relates to history and nostalgia in her book The Generation of Postmemory: “[photographs] enable us, in the present, not only to see and to touch that past, but also to try to reanimate it by undoing the finality of the photographic ‘take.’ The retrospective irony of every photograph consists precisely in the simultaneity of this effect and the consciousness of its impossibility.” This collapsing of past and present recurs throughout the show. Norma describes Salome, dead and gone and memorialized as she is, as “the woman who was all women.” On a metatextual level, Joe exemplifies this even better than Norma, since the show is (as mentioned above) his flashback and he travels so easily between his present and his past. The audience is thus invited to view this show as a film, a relic of the past made present as they view it.
In contrast to Norma, who even after all these years buys in completely to the glitzy image of Hollywood, Betty Schaefer represents an alternative approach to thinking about history and fiction. She is the only one to bring current events into the show at all, for one thing. When she and Joe are talking about ground rules for screenplays in “Girl Meets Boy, Part Two,” she says that “no one ever mentions Communists"; the Hollywood Ten had been blacklisted about two years prior to the story, which begins in late 1949.
She next says, “no one takes a black friend to a restaurant." That line in particular calls out the racial dynamics of both the era’s movies and the studios that produced them. (I will say, though, that this is the peril inherent in analyzing only the libretto of a musical or the script of a play: such an approach doesn’t take into account casting, which can add entirely new dimensions to a source text.) Unlike with Norma, an enduring holdout from a previous generation, Hollywood runs in Betty’s family—as she tells Joe, “I was born two blocks from here. My father was head electrician at the studio until he died, and Mother still works in wardrobe… Grandma did stunt work for Pearl White.” Betty embodies history just as much as Norma does, but for her it takes the form of an actual progression through time.
Perhaps most crucially, though, Betty seems to understand better than anybody just how fake Hollywood is. She loves it precisely for its constructed nature—“all cardboard, all hollow, all phony, all done with mirrors.” Norma obviously doesn’t recognize this constructedness on a fundamental level, but despite all his protestations to the contrary, Joe isn’t entirely unaffected either. He is, after all, drawn into Norma’s orbit. No wonder Betty is the only one of these three characters who escapes the story relatively unscathed.
Again, we as the audience aren’t completely outside this constructed image of the past. For one thing, consuming such an image is, in theory, why someone would choose to see this production in the first place. I will freely admit that the initial impetus behind my decision to audition was something like “ooh, vintage!” Billy Wilder’s film wasn’t historical fiction when it first came out, but Andrew Lloyd Webber adapted it several decades after the fact. Cecil B. DeMille, who appears as himself in Wilder’s film, is no longer a contemporary figure but a historical ghost. Did ALW himself intend to make a grand sweeping statement about how historical fiction is a highly constructed version of the historical record, one that we as a society tend to view through rose-tinted glasses? Perhaps not. But since so many layers and frames exist in the show, history and fiction and film alike, it’s hard not to be aware that this show is still very much a constructed artifact—and that, by extension, all such historical narratives are similarly constructed.
