Close-up on Sunset Boulevard by Staggs Sam

Author:Staggs, Sam
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2003-02-03T16:00:00+00:00

chapter 18

“Funny How Gentle People Get with You Once You’re Dead”

We last saw William Holden floating not in Norma Desmond’s pool but rather in a pool of vitriol spewed out by his wife, Ardis, on Oscar night. In the years after Holden played Joe Gillis, destiny wrote a surprise ending that not even Billy Wilder would have thought of: William Holden’s was the most Sunset Boulevard life of all. The years, like Paramount, cast him as Joe Gillis.

In the context of the film, Holden’s Gillis hates being Norma Desmond’s gigolo. He suffers guilty pangs. In terms of Hollywood morality, censorship division, the gigolo must die in the end, like other screen undesirables: bad girls, loose women, homosexuals, criminals, and an array of nonconformists. The one false note of Sunset Boulevard occurs when Betty Schaeffer comes to rescue Joe from Norma’s clutches and he refuses to leave. Why?

Gillis considers himself too evil for good Betty Schaeffer—who doesn’t give a damn that he’s been screwing the old dame if only he will come away with her. She says, “Joe, I haven’t heard any of this. I never got those telephone calls. I’ve never been in this house. Now get your things together and let’s get out of here.” But Joe, like long-suffering wives in films of the forties and fifties, must sacrifice his own happiness for that of … who?

Not Norma; he’s leaving her anyway. Not Betty, who will be miserable without him. The only remote nobility in Joe’s misplaced decision is to spare his friend Artie Green the heartbreak of a broken engagement. But it’s obvious to us, and surely to Joe as well, that Betty does not love Artie. He constantly irritates her. And no wonder. He’s the kind of schmuck who plagues most of Wilder’s late films, from about 1960 to the end.

The reasons for Joe’s self-sacrifice are so pure they stink. They’re psychologically bogus. Surely Wilder, Brackett, and D. M. Marshman wrote the scene only to placate the gaggle of Mrs. Grundys at the Production Code office. It’s aesthetically correct only in terms of fundamentalist storytelling: Because Norma Desmond, as overbearing female, coopts the tradional male role, then weaker Joe Gillis, as female surrogate, must pay the price for his carnal sins. In other words, female desire must be punished, and if there’s no female handy, a declawed male will do.

In some peculiar way, however, the story of Joe Gillis is also the story of William Holden. For Holden, too, seems to have believed himself unworthy of being loved. A possible key to his guilt is a statement he once made: “I’m a whore. All actors are whores. We sell our bodies to the highest bidder. I had practice being a whore. When I was a young actor starting out in Hollywood, I used to service actresses who were older than me.”

For a conservative, straight-arrow Midwestener who was William Beedle before he became Bill Holden, that confession is a stick of dynamite. No doubt a thousand other cares pressed him down, as well.

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