"Night Passages" by Elisabeth Bronfen

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chapter 12

Return of a Hollywood Star

O

ur earthly existence, the wager of film noir, is nocturnal.

This Hollywood genre conceives the world as an intricate maze from which there is no escape. In it rules a law of contingency that irrevocably turns to fate. What initially seems to be a happy coincidence, a lucky chance, or an unforeseen accident ultimately proves to be an inevitable act of providence that could never have ended any other way.

In retrospect, many noir heroes speak of their past in terms of a gamble, claiming that from the start it was all meant to go one way. As the unlucky hero of Robert Siodmak’s Criss Cross (1949) notes, “It was in the cards or it was fate or a jinx, or whatever you want to call it. But right from the start. . . .”

Although at first the noir heroes are convinced they have a choice in determining the outcome of the treacherous situation in which they find themselves, they must ultimately accept the consequences of their shady daydreams. At the end of their journey through the night world imbued with crime they are either inextricably enmeshed in a claustrophobic network of dark machinations or their desire was aimed at self-destruction from the beginning. Time and again, the noir hero finds himself on the verge of

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getting everything he has always dreamed of, only to lose everything again.

Neither luck nor misfortune can be calculated, only accounted for belatedly.

In this Hollywood genre, the night emerges as the privileged site for a discussion of how infatuation and self-delusion can lead to criminal transgression, whereas the world in which the noir hero seeks his luck proves to be riddled with dark passages of corruption. After nightfall, dreams of money, freedom, and love end in death, or at least in the acknowledgment of human fallibility. In a world ruled by nocturnal justice, punishment (which, like dream and sleep, is also a child of Nyx) inevitably catches up with the men and women who, having entered this modern underworld, will not cede their transgressive desire. In film noir no one is innocent. Everyone partakes of the dark transactions ending in deception, madness, or betrayal, even if they are not all classed as murderer or thief. Everyone must pay, although perhaps not with their lives.

Borrowing the technique of chiaroscuro illumination from Baroque painting, film noir envelops its scenes in deep shadows and harsh light to accompany the existential hopelessness it stages. Many films belonging to this genre begin with a credit sequence that shows the bright lights of an urban night, either from a long shot or inside a car driving through the nocturnal cityscape. We are drawn into dark countersites of the ordinary, in which chance, anticipation, and fate will take their course. For technical reasons, nocturnal filming was still an anomaly in the 1940s, so a special color filter was necessary to simulate night light even though the scenes were actually shot in the day. This technique, called day for night (or nuit amĂŠricaine) also addresses visually the contingency and fate that film noir seeks to capture. The shading filter corresponds to the way of seeing privileged by the heroes and heroines of these black film narratives, focused as they are on a psychic night. Once they are involved in a noir way of life, even their day contains traces of the night.

Drawn Venetian blinds and low-hung lamps pervade the interiors of film noir, meaning that even the scenes that take place during the day are often lit for night. To capture characters caught in a net of intrigues of their own making, light is shown penetrating a room through the crack under a door. Or, owing to the blinds in front of the windows, the light from outdoors visually fragments the scene it illuminates, leaving strips of shadow juxtaposed over the interiors. The low-key lighting typical of film noir thus visually corresponds to the nocturnal attitude espoused by these somber narratives. By reducing the

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fill light (a standard treatment of light in 1930s Hollywood, used to fill out and soften the shadows cast by the key light) film noir in the 1940s and 1950s developed a different tone of illumination, representative of the existential hopelessness it sought to put on display. The strong contrast between light and darkness serves to explore a differentiated palette of the color black.

Furthermore, the sets of film noir are often only partially lit, clearly set off from the sunlit world of the ordinary everyday. By way of contrast, this ordinary everyday is included in short sequences, usually at the beginning or the end of the film narrative. Consistent with my discussion of Hegel’s theory of difference in Part I, the cinematic language of film noir is predicated on the idea that pure light and pure darkness are interchangeable in that they are both empty, whereas distinctions become discernible only once light is clouded with shadows or darkness becomes illuminated. The signature chiaroscuro of this Hollywood genre disturbs and disorients even while it allures. To signify the fundamental impenetrability of the shady world it depicts, film noir often places characters on the threshold between a harsh daylight and a darkness that holds a mysterious fascination. Indeed, noir heroes and heroines are often visible only because a scene is permeated with shadows. A spotlight draws them out of the dark, only to let them vanish again into the same darkness. A spectral, disembodied voiceover speaks to us from the dark, narrating the story as a flashback, which brings something out of the past into the light of the present. The chiaroscuro used to project these dark scenes onto a white screen in the darkened movie theater literally underscores how things that have been successfully hidden from sight insist on being recognized, even if they are only partially understood. Above all, film noir’s treatment of light insists on drawing attention to the affective power achieved by celebrating shades of black, turning the border between the visible and the invisible into the privileged theme of this film genre.

A Noir Queen of the Night During the opening credit sequence of Sunset Boulevard (1950), Billy Wilder has his camera travel backward along this boulevard into the dawn.

At first, it moves in close proximity to the asphalt, where signs of abrasion are clearly visible. Then it shifts position, and the camera lens is raised slightly above the ground to create more distance and thus a clearer sense of

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Sunset Boulevard. Establishing shot. Digital frame enlargement.

orientation, while remaining focused on the road that will lead to a scene of crime. Only when a homicide squad, complete with detectives and newspaper men, comes roaring down Sunset Boulevard from behind, does it finally pan up, fully disclosing the scene. “It’s about five o’clock in the morning,” William Holden’s voiceover explains, and “a murder has been reported from one of those great big houses in the 10,000 block.” As we see the cars arriving at the front door of a magnificent old villa, he assures us that the story will make headlines “because an old-time star is involved. One of the biggest.”

His narrative is meant as a correction of the distortion he anticipates in the news media. As the camera begins to pan to the corpse of the young screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) floating in the pool of the mansion, with two shots in his back and one in his stomach, the voiceover of this dead man continues. He explains that he is the right party to offer “the facts, the whole truth.” His flashback, claiming to shed light on this murder case, takes the form of one of those B-pictures with which he had so little success during his lifetime as a movie writer in Hollywood.

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Sunset Boulevard. Dead man speaking. Digital frame enlargement.

The dead man is also the narrator. His spectral voice offers up his one successful screenplay, the script of the movie Sunset Boulevard, in which he himself plays the lead part. Like Wilder’s camera, his noir hero must also move in reverse, back to the beginning of those fatal events that will ultimately lead to the discovery of his corpse in the sallow light of a cheerless Californian morning. From underwater, we see the rigid body of the deceased, facing the camera, with policemen and the press staring at it from behind. The contours of the body blur until the entire scene dissolves into strips of indistinct light and dark; out of this, the long shot of the Los Angeles street emerges. This is where Joe Gillis lived six months earlier.

In Wilder’s noir world, even the day is imbued with deep shadows. Joe’s creativity has long since exhausted itself. He is unable to sell his scripts.

Forced to recognize that he has failed in Hollywood, he leaves his apartment and prepares to return to his hometown in Ohio. As he drives along Sunset Boulevard, flooded in sunlight, he seems to have resigned himself to giving up his fantasy of making it in Hollywood’s dream factory. Yet an

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inexplicable force compels him to hold onto this dream of success, fame, and riches. As so often in film noir, chance and fate coincide. He suddenly espies two agents from the car company that seeks to repossess his car driving along the opposite side of the boulevard. To escape from them, but also because his rear tire has just gone flat, he turns into an unfamiliar driveway.

By driving into the shadow of the garage at the end of this road, he has taken a turn that will have not only financial but also existential consequences. As Joe gets out of his car, we notice that the flat rear tire stands exactly on the hard line that demarcates the shadowy interior of the garage and the bright exterior.

Although Joe himself walks back into the sunlight to inspect the oldfashioned mansion, he has unwittingly crossed a line and stepped into a world from which he will not be able to return. A female voice calls out to him, asking why he is so late. Only then does Joe notice the woman, dressed in black, who has been watching him from the second floor of her mansion through the cracks of a bamboo curtain. Wilder’s queen of the night looks out at this forlorn screenwriter darkly, her eyes shielded from direct sunlight by her thick sunglasses. Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) has been waiting a long time for a man like him. She offers him the job of revising her screenplay about the biblical Salome, with which she hopes to make her comeback in the movie business. In more than one sense, their first conversation in her salon takes place under the sign of Nyx. The film star who, during the silent movie era, had inspired thousands of moviegoers, has been living in oblivion for the last twenty years. She has been dreaming up a scheme in the artificial darkness her desolate mansion provides; one that will allow her to escape her banishment and return to the public eye. Norma’s ambition feeds Joe’s own shady scheme. Her proposal offers him a way out of his financial predicament. Indeed, the grim sunset castle, which she insists that he share with her for as long as it takes him to finish the screenplay, serves as a modern day version of the dark cave of Nyx. The darkness that prevails there provides the scene for both their dreams of success, but also for a deadly game with fate. Taking his seat in one of the old wooden chairs, Joe begins to read Norma’s screenplay while she continues to gaze at him through her sunglasses. To make the mood even more nocturnal, she asks her butler Max (Erich von Stroheim) to draw the curtains, bring in some champagne and caviar, and turn on one of the lamps.

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Sunset Boulevard. Crossing the line. Digital frame enlargement.

In this artificially lit world, both the screenwriter and the aging star are able to screen out the ordinary world. Joe is convinced that he can manipulate Norma, as yet unaware that she will convince him to become her lover and share not only the darkened rooms of her mansion but her psychic nocturnality as well. Against Joe’s cocky self-confident belief that he can leave this sultry world of bygone glamour at any time, Norma pits a scene of seduction in which she calls the shots. There can be no escape from this nocturnal countersite to Hollywood’s dream factory. Norma’s existence is inextricably intertwined with her life as a movie star. She inhabits her world as though it were one big movie set. Although various aspects of her celluloid self can exist side by side in rooms that are filled with photographs attesting her past fame, there is no room for anything that might disturb this self-fashioning. The script she hopes to produce in this grim sunset castle with the help of the modern-day Eros she has ensnared is meant to call forth a new world of celebrity for her. Yet the comeback she yearns for merely serves as a continuation of a stardom that never really died. In her resilient self-fashioning as a movie star, Norma Desmond has stubbornly

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survived the demise of her celebrity. To come into her own again in a movie industry, from which the transition into sound has banished her, she requires the voice, or at least the dialogue, of someone else.

In the evenings, Max sometimes pushes aside the enormous painting in the living room to expose Norma’s private movie screen, so that Joe too can enjoy the young Norma Desmond, on whose alluring shape the ambition of the aging film star fervently feeds. To underscore the spectrality of both—the youthful beauty on screen and the entranced spectator in the audience—Wilder stages both aspects of Gloria Swanson as a set of doubles. Norma offers enthusiastic comments on the silent gestures of her former self, emerging from the beam of light the film projector casts. “We didn’t need dialogue, we had faces,” she asserts to her bemused screenwriter.

Ironically, of course, Gloria Swanson’s effect as a star in Sunset Boulevard owes just as much to the singularity of her voice. Reminiscent of the early sound films, it brings to mind precisely that period in Hollywood’s own history that her screen character targets as the moment of her undoing.

However, this private movie theater ultimately draws attention to what any unequivocal equation between the life of a star on screen and her life in the rooms of her villa is predicated on. Darkness is the precondition for a spectral resuscitation in which Norma Desmond, with the help of the projection of light onto a white screen, can incessantly emerge as a film image for us, even while resembling one (namely her prior self ) for her privileged spectator Joe. Wilder illustrates his point by using her passionate attack against those producers who chose to forget the dramatic qualities of her face that had made her one of the greatest silent movie stars. Any film star exists only as a figure of light staged in contrast to the darkness that determines her.

At first, while she looks at her celluloid self and invokes her return to the screen, Norma stands with her back to the projector and is illuminated from behind. Then she provocatively turns toward her screenwriter, and in so doing faces the projector as well. Although the back of her head and her body dissolve into the darkness of the room, we now see the profile of her face with utmost clarity. The projected beam of light draws out a white line protruding from the rest of her face even while doubling its contours. From the start, Joe compares Norma to a sleepwalker whom it is better not to wake from the dream of her celluloid self, lest she fall and break her neck.

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Sunset Boulevard. Spectral resuscitation of a star. Digital frame enlargement.

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And yet he also feeds this illusion because it serves his own purpose. The sooner he finishes the Salome script, the sooner he can make off with the money promised to him. He doesn’t realize that, in the hope of raising the money on which his success in Hollywood depends, he has unwittingly entered into a contract that amounts to his own death sentence. By taking on the job of ghostwriter, he has given up his life as an independent author.

Now he will lend his words to someone else’s voice. As though stepping into the shoes of his biblical predecessor, he takes on the role of the protagonist in the Salome melodrama played out in this grim sunset castle under the direction of Max, Norma’s former husband and director of all her successful silent movies.

Norma requires Joe’s head so that she can once again perform the glamour star’s dance of the veils in public. As in the New Testament (but also recalling Schnitzler’s dream story), the man who rejects the love of a princess must pay with his life. On New Year’s Eve, Joe finally realizes that he must accept the role of lover that Norma has cast him in all along. His gaze is meant to mirror back to her the self-fashioning as timeless glamour star, which she needs to survive. This pact can only succeed, however, if Joe devotes himself exclusively to her. She feigns a suicide attempt and then, when he rushes to her bed, offers a melodramatic scene of the woman abandoned by her lover. Lying on her bed, still dressed in her ball gown and slippers, she threatens to try to kill herself again. With her arms bandaged to hide wounds she has allegedly inflicted on herself, she covers her tears and turns her face away from him. At midnight, as Joe wishes her a happy

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new year, she slowly turns toward him, opens her eyes again, draws him toward her, and locks him into a resolute embrace. Usually the editing in Sunset Boulevard makes use of dissolves to move from one scene to the next.

However, at this point Wilder uses a sustained fade-out, leaving the screen black for several seconds. With this kiss, Norma seals the view of night as a stage and state of mind whose darkness she requires as the backdrop for her reemergence as ageless star. Having cast Joe as her male lead, Max willingly takes on the part of guardian to her sleepwalking.

In Sunset Boulevard there is no Sarastro to pit his law of diurnal reason against this noir queen of the night. She retains her absolute sovereignty, even while disclosing the dark kernel of the American Dream that feeds her insistence on timeless fame and glamour. Indeed, much of film noir plays on the fatal consequences of a cultural project that declares that each individual can—indeed must—realize her dream, regardless of the cost. Obsessed with her celebrity, the former film diva is driven by the notion that she must fulfill a destiny that has been predetermined for her; she must perpetually reconceive herself along the lines of a personal pursuit of happiness. In Sunset Boulevard this conviction is predicated on an imagination whose exclusivity will allow no outside. Only if Norma dedicates herself completely and with utter energy to the celluloid self she has been worshipping can she be certain of her timeless stardom. One night, she invites her rival to visit her mansion: the young and innocent Betty Schaefer, who works for Paramount as a reader and has begun a secret affair with Joe. The contrast between these two women forces the screenwriter to acknowledge for the first time the dark kernel of his own ambition. He recognizes that he can only escape Norma’s fatal seduction if he relinquishes his own pursuit of happiness, and rather than entering into a new romance, returns to his ordinary life in his boring hometown. With utter resolve, he accompanies Betty to her car, and then returns one last time to the grim sunset castle to pack his bags.

From an alcove window on the second floor, framed like a picture, Wilder’s queen of the night observes the farewell scene between the two. Convinced she has defeated her rival, she follows her lover to his bedroom, hoping to seduce him again with her melodramatic gestures. Joe, however, has finally woken up from all dreams and will no longer allow her offer of more riches to detain him from his departure. To prevent him from leaving her, Norma desperately calls for Max, then goes to fetch the gun she keeps

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in her bedroom. Yet Joe has chosen this night to open her eyes and force this self-obsessed sleepwalker to wake up from her dream of timeless stardom as well. He reveals the truth Max has been withholding from her, that Cecil B. DeMille, an influential director at Paramount, never intended to film her Salome script. Max, in turn, remains true to his role as the guardian of her dream existence. Although he does not deny the truth of Joe’s devastating revelation, he maintains his conviction that “Madame is the greatest star of them all.” He thereby provides the cue for the great tragic scene that night, in which Joe finds his sorry fate. His death serves as collateral for Norma’s stubborn insistence that she has a right to return to stardom at all costs.

When at the beginning of their relationship Joe aptly noted that one shouldn’t wake a sleepwalker, he could not have foreseen that the one to take the fall would not be the dreamer, but the one whose voice sought to interrupt her somnambulism. Above all he could not know that Norma’s desire to be a timeless star was so resilient that she is unable to wake from her self-delusion.

When he has left the room, she whispers to him, “No one ever leaves a star.

That’s what makes one a star.” With her revolver in hand, she follows him out into the garden. She will not allow her screenwriter to leave the night into which she has drawn him, because her spectral existence depends on sharing this scene (qua state of mind) with others. To sustain her conviction that her stardom is predicated on no one abandoning her, she shoots Joe in the back.

He falls into the illuminated swimming pool, staggering into this square of light as though he were falling into a spotlight. Norma remains at the edge of this tragic scene. Leaning on one of the columns lining the terrace, she has the last lines in their dialogue: “Stars are ageless, aren’t they?” Having arrived at the fatal reversal of his fortune we are returned to the beginning of the film to the shot of the corpse floating in the pool and the photographers with their flashlights, taking shots of him from all angles.

Joe has indeed shed light on his story. The film narrative his voice called forth from the play of light and shadow on the surface of the pool offers up a self-critical comment on the seduction of Hollywood cinema, whose powerful allure thrives on a second tragic turn life writing can take. The narrator is not the only one who will vanish into the bright lights of a film story about himself. The vampirism of stardom on which this noir vision of Hollywood’s celebrity production thrives is sustained by an uncanny doubling of the film’s heroine with the actress playing her part. Gloria

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Swanson, who hoped she would achieve her comeback in Hollywood with Sunset Boulevard, used photographs and paintings from her silent era stardom to decorate the rooms of Norma Desmond’s grim sunset castle.

The film clips that her noir queen of the night watches with such passion are of her own earlier self. This uncanny enmeshment between a real star and her reel representation culminates in the grand apotheosis, in which Norma’s psychic night ultimately coincides with the nocturnal side of the film medium itself. Having executed her personal Jokanaan, she completely withdraws into her stellar performance of Salome.

If, from the start, Norma Desmond’s perfection of this role was predicated on her ultimate dissolution in this persona, Wilder moves seamlessly from the image of her as a tragically deluded actress to her self-reflexive embodiment of the film medium. Norma Desmond fully assumes the part of the timeless star waiting to shoot a favorite scene from the script she wrote for herself. She sits at her dressing table, refusing to answer the questions the police detectives pose and willfully leaves them in the dark regarding Joe’s death. It is only when she hears of the arrival of the Paramount news cameras that she wakes from her narcissistic enjoyment of her own face in the mirror. Slyly, Max takes on the role of director one last time. To guard her dream world, he lets her believe that the shooting of Salome is about to begin, in the hope that this ruse will get her downstairs where the police car is waiting for her. Completely entwined with her celluloid self-vision, Norma (aka Gloria Swanson) performs the inseparability of film heroine, film actress, and embodied film image. She refuses all rational insight into the vanity and fallibility of her dreams. The only recognition she achieves is coterminous with the dream on which her celluloid life always depended.

Like the ancient Nyx, cradling Sleep and Death in her arms, Norma herself bears a twin desire. Taking her self-fashioning as Salome to the limit, she renders visible how the fatal side of her dream of being a timeless star was always predicated on her living a spectral existence.

One last time she takes directions from her loyal Max. While the cameras begin to turn, she strides down the staircase barefoot as the biblical princess, oblivious to the fact that she is surrounded not by the usual extras but by the police, the press, and curious onlookers. The dream she had so obstinately clung to has now completely enfolded her. On this gray Californian morning she achieves her grand apotheosis in the hall of her sunset

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castle, which the cameras and lights have finally transformed into her own private movie studio. Caught in shocked awe, no one dares disturb this somnambulant descent. Norma herself interrupts her performance once she has reached the foot of the stairs. She feels compelled to confess to the crowd, which she mistakes for those working behind the scenes, how happy she is to be making a picture again. “You see, this is my life. It always will be!” she ecstatically proclaims, “There’s nothing else. Just us and the cameras and those wonderful people out there in the dark.” Swanson’s Norma was, from the start, a timeless queen of the cinematic night. If her first director and her final screenwriter helped her remain in this celluloid world, she is the one who, up to the end, pulls the strings. Her performance brings together the fragile network of images in which actress, star persona, and film medium overlap and dissolve into each other. Demurely announcing, “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up,” she undulates toward the Paramount News cameras. As she moves ever closer, she literally dissolves in the white light of the film image—in the extreme close-up of her face. The white circle once more fills up with shades of gray, which draw all the light with them and leave behind a completely black screen.

The flowing reversal from white to black can be read as a cipher for both the imaginary geography and the self-reflexivity of film noir. This genre draws on shades of darkness to bring to the screen a world in which nothing is quite like it seems. The following chapters treat film noir as the nocturnal film genre par excellence. More than any other genre, it self-consciously addresses the night magic that all cinema performs when it calls forth spectral worlds before our eyes through white light falling on a white screen in the dark.

By declaring the visual play between illuminated darkness and shadowed light to be its main formalizing principle, film noir performs more explicitly than any other Hollywood film genre that the world it calls forth on the screen is to be understood as an affective effect of imagined embodiment.

From the moment that they enter the world of film noir, permeated with shadows, the heroes and heroines of these film narratives experience their desires and anxieties as hallucinations in the real. Because time and again they step out of a shadow into the light only to once again vanish into darkness, or because they become visible only because they have left the light of day to enter into an interior lit for night, they straddle presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, appearance as and dissolution in the film image.

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Figure 12.5

Sunset Boulevard. Disappearing into light. Digital frame enlargement.

Their fragile imaging points to the way the magic of cinema depends on a pact with the audience. We must be willing to imagine the third dimension of space from the projection of light onto the two-dimensional surface of the movie screen. Only in the act of our seeing does the projected play of light and shadow transform into a stage in which we are privy to the performance of the desires and anxieties of others. Although it is not the only film genre to do so, none is as self-conscious and persistent as film noir in exposing the heroes and heroines on screen as nothing more than the effects of the audience’s capacity to interpret something we have only partaken of in our imagination as our own experience. Therein resides both its allure and its proximity to the night. If we recall that in the myths of antiquity, Nyx dwells on the edge of the world, and Sleep, Sin, Death, Punishment, Fate, and Fantasies go forth from her home, then in both the figures and the sites of film noir, one finds a particularly poignant cultural survival of this mapping inherited from antiquity. As shown in the following chapters, these dark film narratives call forth seductive and prophetic scenes, in which dreams are realized while chance turns into fate. We are introduced to a dark world that explicitly draws attention to its presence as the mere effect of a scintillating play of light. This fragile imaginary geography emerges as the scene for experiences that are either inaccessible to diurnal reason or are meant to remain hidden from it. Film noir inherits from the Nyx of antiquity a further conviction: The aesthetic imagining of the night posits at its beginning and its vanishing point an unfathomable darkness, against which but also with which night thoughts make their appearance.