‘Sunset Boulevard’ at 75: Hollywood Looks in the Mirror

«Sunset Boulevard just has the greatest mood; you’re immersed in it like a dream. It catches a Hollywood story that connects the golden age of Hollywood with the present day. But it’s a truthful movie, and so it carries through to today. It has a lot of sadness in it, and beauty. And mystery. And dreams. Beauty, beauty, beauty and more dreams.” 


— David Lynch

Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.” Norma Desmond’s final line, delivered as she descends the staircase, is one of those moments cinema turned into myth. Not only because it caps an exceptional film, but because it distills in a single gesture the end of an era, the madness deployed to fend off time, and the tragedy of a woman who—after being everything on the big screen—can no longer live outside it.

Sunset Boulevard premiered 75 years ago and still inspires wildly different readings about what it means and what kind of film it is. Is it a satire of Hollywood’s cruelty? A film noir narrated by a dead man? A gothic melodrama about age, oblivion, and madness? Or a disillusioned love letter to a type of cinema that no longer exists? Like many great films, Sunset Boulevard slips through every category. Today it feels sharp and alive, untouched by time—or, better said, time has only confirmed how current its vision remains.

Norma Desmond isn’t just a character: she’s an archetype, a cultural icon who refuses to leave the collective imagination. Gloria Swanson—herself a silent-era star—gave Norma her face, her body, and fragments of her own history to create this devastating portrait of an actress who refuses to accept time’s erosion and the abandonment of an industry that no longer needs her. But what makes Norma more than an ego-driven caricature is the tragic dimension underneath the theatrics. Beneath her grand gestures lies a broken woman wounded by a system that celebrates its stars only until they’re no longer useful.

Sunset Boulevard doesn’t mock Norma. It shows her in all her apparent monstrosity, yes, but with a disarming compassion. Her isolation in a half-decaying mansion, her stubborn denial of reality, and her attempt to seduce a young screenwriter into helping her return to the spotlight reveal more about her fear of being forgotten than any narcissism. Norma can be ridiculous—alone yet posing as if surrounded by flashbulbs—but she is also incredibly moving. She is tragic in the classical sense.

On its surface, Sunset Boulevard is a story of ambition and decay. But scratch even lightly and it becomes one of Hollywood’s fiercest self-critiques. Billy Wilder, who knew the industry inside out, constructed the film as a kind of autopsy of the studio system—beginning with a corpse floating in a pool. That corpse, screenwriter Joe Gillis, not only launches the plot but narrates it from beyond the grave.

Its portrait of producers, writers, and forgotten stars is unforgiving. In the retelling, Gillis (William Holden) is no romantic hero but a frustrated writer who lets himself be kept by an older woman because he has no other options: he’s drowning in debt and no one wants his scripts. Like Norma, he is being discarded by an industry obsessed with the new. His cynicism is as corrosive as that of the studio heads who pretend to still care about Norma. He exploits her delusions to fight his own battle against oblivion.

One of the reasons Sunset Boulevard remains so powerful is its extraordinary blend of tones and genres. It opens as pure noir—voice-over, flashback, a dead narrator—shifts into a caustic Hollywood drama, then slowly descends into the shadows of tragic melodrama and even gothic horror. In its own way, it is a horror film.

Norma’s mansion—the real Sunset Boulevard address that gives the film its title—isn’t just a setting; it’s a character. Dark, anachronistic, filled with statues, debris, and memories, it’s the perfect stage for someone living halfway between past and present. Wilder shoots the house almost expressionistically, like a twisted castle in a horror story, complete with a butler–ex-husband played by the eccentric Erich von Stroheim, whose very presence intensifies the film’s cinephile layers.

Swanson and von Stroheim aren’t the only legends haunting the film. The bridge game with Buster Keaton, H. B. Warner, and Anna Q. Nilsson—forgotten silent-era greats playing versions of themselves—becomes a brutal summary of the film’s thesis: Hollywood doesn’t know what to do with its ghosts. It disposes of them. Cecil B. DeMille’s appearance as himself—the director with whom Norma longs to work again—cements the film’s most devastating line: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.”

This blend of registers—so characteristic of Wilder, the director of Double Indemnity—is part of what makes Sunset Boulevard unique. There is acidic irony, sparkling dialogue, and biting satire, but also room for melancholy and genuine emotion. Wilder doesn’t fear excess, but he never slips into mockery. Even when Norma spirals into her final delirium, when life and cinema fuse into one hallucination, the film gives her an unexpected, haunting dignity. Wilder doesn’t judge his characters; he walks them to the edge of the abyss with lucidity and compassion—something only great filmmakers can do.

At the time, Sunset Boulevard was both a critical hit and a box office success, but it caused turmoil within the industry. It received eleven Oscar nominations and won three (screenplay, art direction, and score), yet was condemned by certain Hollywood circles. MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer famously declared that Wilder—an Austrian immigrant—should be “kicked out of Hollywood” for “biting the hand that feeds him.” Wilder’s reply was even more unforgettable: “Why don’t you go fuck yourself?”

The film’s reputation only grew. Today it ranks among the greatest films of the 20th century, endlessly restored, referenced, parodied, and mythologized. Andrew Lloyd Webber adapted it as a musical in the ’90s, and its aesthetic echoes run through the work of David Lynch (Mulholland Drive is practically a plunge into the same abyss), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Veronika Voss), and especially Pedro Almodóvar, who once called it “an epic in emotional terms.”

Seventy-five years after its premiere, Sunset Boulevard feels not just relevant but prophetic. It reads like a story written for today’s world of instant, disposable fame—a landscape of countless Norma Desmonds multiplying everywhere: influencers past their moment, short-lived celebrities already forgotten, public figures who cannot stop performing even when the lights are off. Not DeMille’s lights—just the ring light on their phones.