All The Ways Sunset Boulevard Has Aged Gracefully

So, stop me if you’ve heard this before: Hollywood has a dark side.

         Particularly in the wake of something like #MeToo or the double strikes of 2023, you can really get a sense for just how famishing, even degrading, it can be trying to make a living in Hollywood. But of course, it all goes back much further than those. One of my very first essays for this blog, for example, was a catalogue of all the ways Hollywood ravaged Judy Garland.

Yet for all its mess, we cannot take our eyes off of Hollywood, or the people who build it. 

Stardom in particular becomes a popular focal point—what is it really like being on the other side of all that spotlighting? And Hollywood has naturally supplied the market with all sorts of imaginings for this as well. Thus, each generation gets its own version of A Star is Born.

John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara in The Quiet Man (1952)

    Ty Burr wrote in his landmark work, Gods Like Us, “We paid money to watch our daily dilemmas acted out on a dreamlike stage, with ourselves recast as people who were prettier, smarter, tougher, or just not as scared. The stories illustrated the dangers of ambition, the ecstasies of falling in love, the sheer delight of song and dance.”

But the film I’m most interested in today is not any version of A Star is Born, but rather the 1950 masterwork directed by Billy Wilder, Sunset Boulevard. 

The movie sees Joe Gillis, a screenwriter desperate for work. By pure happenstance, he falls in with Norma Desmond, a bygone movie star from the days of Hollywood silent films. Seeing no alternative, he accepts her offer to handle the script for her long-planned comeback in response to the hundreds of fan letters she believes she still receives each month. But as Joe remains in Norma’s palace, and as her hold on him tightens, the true depths of her psychosis are revealed.

The film ends with Joe walking out on her at last while revealing what her manservant has concealed from her--that her fan mails are fabricated and that Hollywood has truly left her behind once and for all. Norma retaliates by vengefully shooting Joe, and he dies as he falls into her pool. The ordeal catches the attention of the press and the authorities, who swarm Norma’s house. Seeing the cameras triggers a sort of psychotic break in her, allowing her to imagine that the lights of Hollywood are on her once again. And she descends into the crowd ready to return to the spotlight at last.

         Sunset Boulevard is really fun to think or write about because it taps into both your love of and disdain for film. It is, first of all, simply a stunningly crafted work, starting with the fantastic script supplied by Wilder himself, alongside Charles Brackett and D.M. Marshman Jr. And it’s a wonderfully acted piece as well. William Holden is just strong enough a presence that he avoids being washed out by Gloria Swanson’s overwhelming charisma while also not forgetting that, in this scenario, he is just the moon reflecting her sunlight.  

And that delicate craft works to create a cathartic takedown of everything about Hollywood culture that is so acidic, like just how often art is made to yield to commerce. Early on, we hear an interaction wherein Nancy Olsen’s character, Betty Shafer, a script-reader, remarks to Joe, “I’d always heard you had talent.” To which Joe returns, “That was last year--this year I’m trying to make a living.” But the real focus of its study is on the nature of the people who find themselves at the forefront of the camera and of audience's imagination--movie stars.

         This movie is the flip side to something like Millennium Actress. That film displays a movie star accepting her role as a figurehead for the hearts and imaginations of a nation and devoting her life to creating art, and it imagines that giving your life over to that pursuit can be a noble purpose. In Sunset Boulevard, we follow a performer who lost something when they gave themselves over to the spotlight, and you walk out of this film feeling called out for some dirty transaction you didn’t realize you had made.

    Sam Staggs observed in his book, Close Up on Sunset Boulevard, that the film is, “... an extreme work, full of bile. It’s as black as obsidian, and as lustrous … Watching it is a painful pleasure because our illusions are mangled along with those of every character. A half century later it’s still ahead of its time, for it’s not only everybody’s autobiography in Hollywood—one long in-joke—but also an accusing finger pointed at the film industry’s oversupply of dreamers. (Those dreaming fans ‘out there in the dark’ also stand warned.) A bitter comedy and a tragedy of absurd ambition, the film is a vivisection of success and celebrity, of Hollywood, America, and the world. Whatever the measure of that success—small, medium, large—in Sunset Boulevard it’s shrouded in noir.”

Perhaps the movie’s first victory is its transparency in how it examines the system it is critiquing. It doesn’t cop out with a happy ending and suggest that Hollywood has natural defense mechanisms in place that prevent people from falling through the cracks. It paints a scenario where a person has been damaged irreparably by participating in this Hollywood game, and another person is killed as a result. 

    The observation that got me interested in writing about this movie was the thought that this film was remarkably rare in its critique of the industry that spawned it. But the experience of drafting this piece had me reckon with just how deep this movie’s connections go not just to the systems within Hollywood, but human nature as a whole. And that's something worth talking about.

Hollywood According to Hollywood

         Hollywood commenting on itself was not at all unprecedented by 1950. Even during Chaplin’s silent short days, we got “Behind the Screen” where The Tramp wreaks havoc on a movie set, exposing some absurdities that go along with this whole moviemaking business.

    Some ten years before Sunset Boulevard, we’d also had a deconstruction of sorts by Preston Sturges in Sullivan’s Travels where a studio director, who specializes in comedies, tries to gain real insight into what it’s like to live in poverty in order to prepare for his next project—a “real film.” But his exposure to the real world has him decide that for the underclass, a good comedy can actually be very salvific.

  But there are also much more recent examples of Hollywood trying to reflect on itself. And in trying to court audiences that have lived through such moments of truth as #MeToo, there’s an extra incentive to look directly at the systemic malpractices that infect the Hollywood institution. But if film has trouble honestly examining other systems, it’s no wonder it’d have trouble honestly examining itself. 

         The Fall Guy maybe thinks it’s laying the cards down about Hollywood, power dynamics, and corporate abuse. And parts of that experiment work well. The film displays all the things that can go wrong in a project as monumental as a feature film, and it acknowledges that some of those participants may have unrighteous designs. But it’s awfully coy, for example, about just how merrily the powerholders in Hollywood will do business with known perpetrators.

    It insists that, “Well, obviously we would never allow a salacious powerholder into our midst once their misdeeds came to light! And we would certainly never sponsor their comeback or put them back in positions of power where they can continue abusing vulnerable workers!” This is much more grating than something like Sullivan’s Travels–which also has a comforting ending but was never pretending to examine how Hollywood protects monsters. 

         I don’t want to build the case that Hollywood’s statements on itself or its history should only ever be blistering displays of self-flagellation. Hollywood sometimes does good stuff too. But I do think there is a lot to be said for a film that can look at its native homeland responsibly. Which brings us to Sunset Boulevard.  

    In time for the film's 70th anniversary, The Hollywood Reporter caught up with Nancy Olsen, who plays Betty Shaefer in the film. Her impression of Hollywood was, “There’s a distortion that isn’t real. You are not treated like who you really are. You are exaggerated.” On the subject of the film itself, she recalled, “I read that script and realized that this was not the usual, that this was daring.”

         The article goes on to say, “Olson says she was not present when this happened, but had friends who were and told her what happened: “Louis B. Mayer [of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer] sat there and watched the film, and when it was over he got up and marched over to Billy Wilder and said, ‘You have disgraced the industry that made and fed you! You should be tarred and feathered and run out of Hollywood!’ And Billy got up and said, ‘Go f**k yourself.'”

But despite that tempestuous first reaction from within Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard would be widely embraced by audiences. The film was a tremendous financial success, and would be nominated for 11 Oscars, including Best Picture and recognition in all four acting classes. Time described the film as "Hollywood at its worst told by Hollywood at its best.” 

      So why does Sunset Boulevard’s commentary work?

A part of it is just the sheer poeticness of it all, and the way it gives visibility to recognizable frustrations. Our POV character is an artist whose own passion and genius is just no match for the demands of a turbulent market, no matter how much he lowers his standards. He throws himself at the mercy of a fallen goddess whose ambitions are so wild that they might just carry him out of the pits. But of course, he ends the film glassy-eyed and motionless in her pool. I have on occasion described to friends in moments of frustration that my own relationship to film can feel parasitic. For however much you give to film—as an artist, as a critic—it does not ever seem to love you back.

         But a lot of it also comes down to its honesty about this thing called complicity. The film's honest about the willful participation in revolting practices. And this is the victory it has over other examples of satire, and other forms of social commentary. It doesn’t just linger on the fact that life sucks and there’s nothing we can do about it. The film knows that life sucks, but it insists that we absolutely could do something about it, we just choose not to because we prefer decadence—which is so much worse.

         The Fall Guy cannot bring itself to do that. It does not want audiences to reckon with how the movie machine willfully participates in so much that is sordid or reprehensible. The executives that jeered at Sunset Boulevard would probably much prefer The Fall Guy for entertaining the idea that executives would not shield the criminals because they were proven box office draws. Hence, Sunset Boulevard winds up being almost singular in its efforts to display Hollywood’s shoddiness.

    A lot of what makes Sunset Boulevard’s treatise work, it works allegorically more than literally. The intent is less to give visibility to the sheer number of movie stars who apparently devolve into psychotic murderers and more to reveal something nightmarish about the nature of obsession—the thing that Hollywood runs on—and what it does to the people who fall into that vortex.

“I AM Big—It’s the PICTURES that got SMALL!” 

         Norma Desmond is one of the greatest characters ever offered by cinema, certainly one of the most influential. You can see echoes of her in basically every Disney female baddie after 1950, but really Norma Desmond is the model for most female villains. Any onscreen lady where you would never want to be the one to take the last avocado ahead of her at the produce section, but you would absolutely attend a New Year’s party at her place.

Norma Desmond, in all her ruthlessness and grandiosity, is one of the most honest representations of celebrity, of stardom, of Hollywood itself. She captures that about it which is captivating, dazzling—but also that which is deluded, even dangerous. She has soared with the gods and commanded the attention of an entire world, reaching heights that the common folk could scarcely dream of. But the fountain of youth has also poisoned her.

    Hollywood’s desertion of Norma can be attributed to the institution moving to a territory where she could not follow—sound films. But Norma can also be read as a reflection on the way that women in Hollywood are especially punished for aging. Women are seen as valuable insofar as they appeal to the male eye. So, Norma occupies this very thin space as a victim of Hollywood ravenousness while also being its very embodiment. Hollywood has moved on from her, but she absolutely has not moved on from Hollywood, and the lengths to which she will go to reclaim her spotlight are frightening.

    The engine of the story sees what happens when a desperate Hollywood writer gets caught in her spiderweb. Joe signs on for work he doesn’t really want for someone he’s hoping will help scoop him out of the slums, and he quickly realizes that his employer is holding him prisoner--physically, mentally, even sexually. He is made to move into her palace and work solely on the project she has assigned him and cut off from all other support systems. She is also allowed to cart him around wherever she goes and dress him as she pleases. And if Joe tries to express any independence, she emotionally manipulates him with some drastic measure like a suicide attempt.

    In this way, a lot of Norma’s behavior can be understood through the lenses of narcissism or manipulative relationships. And so this is also one of the rare film representations of an abusive relationship where the powerholder is the woman. We could potentially shake our heads at Joe for being so reckless in getting involved with Norma in the first place. But again, he tethers himself to her mostly out of desperation, not indulgence, which differentiates him from someone like Michael Douglas in Fatal Attraction. Joe’s situation feels more comparable to something like Parasite where he’s obviously hoping to use this to pull himself out of the gutter, but he is essentially sneaking onto a lifeboat.

         In the end, Norma seals her villainy as she shoots Joe until he falls dead into her swimming pool. Joe, who was perhaps not the height of human dignity, but surely did not deserve to die this way. Joe, who just came out west so he could write movies. Joe, who just wanted to stop the suits from impounding his car. And how does Norma’s story end? She finally gets the cameras she craved. At long last, she is the center of attention. We cannot take her eyes off of her.

On paper, there is a sense at the end that Norma has at long last been “defeated” now that she’s being arrested, but the situation does not let us feel secure that she has been removed from her throne. Rather, she sort of fades out as she grows larger in the frame as the lights wash her out, almost as though she is graduating beyond this mortal plane and achieving some kind of deification.

    Norma Desmond is a memorable character in large part because Wilder’s writing and Swanson’s acting supply her with such electricity, but she also burns herself into our collective subconscious because she represents fear that we are not that far removed from. Like Godzilla teasing the onslaught of nuclear devastation, like Frankenstein’s monster imagining that science might just disrupt our natural circle of life, Norma Desmond stands for something that we can’t pretend doesn’t scratch at us. There is a certain poetic alignment in using a faded movie star as the face for this radioactive egotism.

But the thing is ... I don’t think that Norma Desmond is the alarm bell sounding off for movie stars as being secret narcissists, or latent murderers. I think that the healthy majority of people in front of the camera are neither exceptionally good nor bad, and a select few are even genuinely grateful for their opportunities and aspire to use their platforms to help heal hearts. Norma Desmond as this celebrity who has been lost in the mirage is not what really makes Sunset Boulevard so eviscerating as a commentary.

 

"A Dozen Press Agents Working Overtime can do Terrible Things to the Human Spirit"

        Sunset Boulevard catches onto something very real with how living under the spotlight can wreak unimaginable damage upon one’s psyche. Kate Winslet, for example, is one of those actresses who has been very vocal about how finding considerable attention at a young age invited all sorts of scrutiny that she was absolutely not equipped to deal with. She recently shared,

"The mainstream media in the UK, it's no secret, were absolutely horrific to me. Horrendous in a way that they should all be ashamed of. And every single tabloid newspaper should have sent me a written apology, which they haven’t done. Even that is disgraceful. It's just like, be courteous. Just hold your hand up and say, ‘We shouldn't have done that to you. You were a young girl.’

"I was scrutinized for how I looked because they decided I was fat. Well, what do you think that does to a person's self-esteem? What do you think that does to someone who probably was teetering on the verge of a horrible eating disorder at that age? Because I don't know any young actress at that time in the early 90s/late 80s who wasn't battling with some form of issue around their physical selves because that was simply what the press did."

     The way Hollywood has in-universe abandoned Norma Desmond is also corroborated by a lot of case studies of movie stars being suddenly starved by audiences spontaneously and without any real reason. Sometimes they just fade away, other times they are actively, gleefully expelled by the masses. There isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t see some very targeted thought piece, occasionally from a prominent outlet, that rakes some random celebrity over … nothing. There are some major landmarks of this across film history. Charlie Chaplin was everyone’s favorite movie star—until he was a threat to national security. Ingrid Bergman was a tentpole of American culture—until she became “a force for evil.” Timothy Chalamet could do no wrong until … opera. 

          But Sunset Boulevard doesn’t get that specific in its analysis. Norma’s problem has much less to do with body image or predatory studio executives, things we know all Hollywood actresses are made to endure. Movies like Sunset Boulevard or the first iterations of A Star is Born observed that bad things often happened to Icaruses who flew too close to the sun, but it wouldn’t be until the days of movies like All that Jazz or Postcards from the Edge that the report started to get more specific, when you could start to display the details of things like substance abuse onscreen. 

But there is a special bend to the attention the film does afford to Norma that gives the film a specific kick. If Sunset Boulevard is a sort of horror movie about Hollywood, and Norma Desmond the monster at the center, then it’s the kind of horror movie that’s closer to like The Wolf Man than Dracula. Norma is a monster that you feel very sorry for. 

         Part of the tragedy of Norma Desmond is that you can see the broken heart at the center of her rampage. (I haven’t yet seen the musical adaptation of the film, but Norma’s “As If We Never Said Goodbye,” which features during the episode where she returns to Paramount, makes frequent rounds on my playlist.) Norma Desmond is a woman who was made to feel important but was ultimately left behind after an indifferent system cast her off. She is now stuck in a permanent withdrawal, such that she is incapable of living in reality and has to sustain this illusion that she is still somehow the center of the universe. For all the devastation she leaves in her wake, she is also a victim herself. And this is where the film starts playing with really advanced calculus.

         Feeling sympathy for Norma does not cancel out the unease we feel around her. The spotlight has damaged her, but part of the way that has manifested has been in the mutilation of critical parts of her soul. The film does not absolve Norma, but it imagines that she may not actually be the contaminating agent in this system.

But the main reason why Sunset Boulevard winds up saying more about the state of celebrityhood than something like the Judy Garland biopic, it comes down to a very simple thing. Sunset Boulevard is honest about the complicity of not just studios in this process, but also the audiences being served. Those dozen press agents working overtime, mutating Norma from an idealistic young girl into a monster, they were working on behalf of a crueler master. They were feeding her to an audience that wanted to consume her with no thought and then expel her with even less guilt. That is the film’s second sobering truth: we made Norma Desmond. 

    There isn’t a character in Sunset Boulevard who acts as a surrogate for this. There’s no audience-insert who is either actively poisoning Norma or drowning Joe. But by the time we reach that famous final shot, when we see Norma making eye contact with us as she glides right into the camera like a vampire queen, we feel discovered in our transgression. And when she calls out to us directly there at the very end when she refers to “all those people out there in the dark," we know who is feeding the Hollywood dragon that made all this mess.

    A lot of film voices, including prominent filmmakers, have made some comment on how the medium itself has been adopted by the masses as a method of voyeurism, occasionally in the service of some very base appetites. Most of Alfred Hitchcock's filmography, for example, tracks this very closely. And there's a very straight line to be drawn between something like Norman Bates peeping on Marion as she undresses for the shower and the way that the cameras flock over Norma Desmond as she's being arrested for murder. That is also a reflection on the mutating cycle of human obsession.

But where Sunset Boulevard's vision actually wound up being really prophetic has a lot to do with the things we know about obsession today in a time when everyone has access to a camera and a platform. We’ve been seeing some part of ourselves in Norma Desmond for a while, and now we’ve reached the day where anyone can be Norma Desmond.

 

“Alright Mr. Demile, I’m Ready for My Close-Up”

  The Guardian also ran a 70th anniversary commemoration for Sunset Boulevard where Tom Joudrey observed,

“That’s the real tragedy the film explores – not the noxious effects of ageing or wealth, but the surrender of selfhood that comes from living as a spectacle. When fans stop gawking, her loneliness forces her to invent phantasmic replacements, so that her psychic survival finally depends on her insanity.

“But amid this wreckage, celebrity status didn’t fall into ill-repute; instead, it became the average person’s ambition. Social media enabled anyone and everyone to be digitally seen. Influencers proliferated. YouTube stars opened their bedrooms to the public. Clicks, likes and retweets transformed into a cryptocurrency. Lady Gaga’s mega hit 'Paparazzi' from her debut studio album The Fame captured the zeitgeist: sure, fame shatters you, but it forges resilience and gives a platform to the abject. By bearing their wounds for all to see, Taylor Swift and Demi Lovato announced that naked visibility had congealed as the basis for self-esteem and community belonging. The ideal of self-exposure went viral.

“And that’s the most unnerving revelation of watching Sunset Boulevard in 2020: what ails Norma Desmond is what defines today’s popular culture. How’s that for an influencer?”

Ingrid Goes West (2017)

Now, I’m not here to poo-poo on social media or the people who devote themselves to managing it–social media is how I primarily promote my work. But I feel secure in saying that it is possible for a thing, which is not inherently harmful in and of itself, to pose real risks if not given sufficient structure and governance. And there is a lot about social media that we haven’t wrapped our hands around. It was during the editing process of this piece that the lawsuit against Meta, the company hosting networks like Facebook and Instagram, triumphed in court. The New Mexico Department of Justice said in a press statement,

“The evidence presented at trial – which included internal Meta documents and testimony from former Meta employees, law enforcement officials, and New Mexico educators – established that Meta’s design features enabled pedophiles and predators to engage in child sexual exploitation on Meta’s platforms. Evidence from those witnesses and other industry experts also demonstrated that Meta intentionally designs its platforms to addict young people and, contrary to Meta’s public commitments, expose them to dangerous content related to eating disorders and self harm.”

Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Source Vanity, Nicolas Régnier, c. 1626.

         While Sunset Boulevard’s general exposé on Hollywood as a giant mirage has been fairly transferable across the decades, the nucleus of this commentary—of stardom and celebrity—has only migrated closer and closer to the bases as time has gone on. If it’s true that we really do live in a post-movie-star world, it’s only because the masses have stolen that light from the heavens and are now devouring it here on the ground, chasing the same fame and falling into the same sinkhole. 

Rising to prominence as a YouTube or Tik Tok star involves falling into many of the same traps faced by stars of old, but the insulation between the star and the consumer base is much thinner. Much of the appeal of things like social media is in the consumers' proximity to their product, in this case the influencer. And so audiences have an easier time constricting their idols, and the stars of these days are as bound as ever to a master that will discard them without second thought. YouTube film critic, Lindsay Ellis, released a video essay exploring this very concept as a person whose livelihood depended on this back in 2018 where she described,

The King of Comedy (1982)

“Youtubers are selling more than a service like the bartender or a cast member. The product that Youtubers, twitch streamers, and other influencers sell is almost exclusively affect, and this is a form of emotional labor. More and more discussion has turned to creative burnout. But most of that has focused on consistency maintaining a schedule; little of that discussion has focused on the emotional burden of maintaining the affect associated with the creator's brand. Overtime, little tiny micro traumas can build up as a result of a person behaving in a way that does not reflect their emotional truth … 

“The premium of ‘authenticity’ is predicated on maintaining that the affect is convincing. The challenge for creators is to maintain the illusion for their followers of feeling like they do know this creator when in reality, they only know the affect, the construct, the side of the creator that the creator—most likely without them making a good conscious decision to do so—has decided it is most beneficial for you, the audience, to see.  It is impossible to have a personal connection to a giant faceless mass of people who are in effect your customers. And when the deception becomes clear, fans can get angry.” 

Ellis released this video some short years before, of course, consumers turned on her as well. After an internet wide public shaming over some misconstrued Tweets, Ellis withdrew from the platform. She spends most of her professional time now as the author of the “Axiom’s End” book series, and she posts video essays intermittently on Nebula. (She actually did drop another YouTube video just this week–another surprise during my last week of editing.) YouTubers and other such influencers are carrying the same cross carried by the Norma Desmonds of yesteryear. We are all Norma Desmond now.

No One ever Leaves a Star–That's what Makes One a Star

     The popular image tends to cast actors as the height of insatiable ego. Something like the glitter surrounding the Oscars and shoving cameras in the face of the most famous people in our society while they wave a little golden man around and pontificate excessively, that kind of thing forms the bedrock of a lot of parody surrounding movie stars. It is, for example, a movie star who causes all the trouble in The Fall Guy.

But I find myself becoming less and less dismissive of actors or movie stars as a group, at least until their own specific character flaws emerge—which they often do. If you actually turn down the noise and let yourself watch basically any of these acceptance speeches, I do think a different narrative emerges. I think that the majority of people who receive Oscars, including movie stars, consider it a great honor and a humbling experience to be recognized like this. 

    And moreover, I think the narrative of "ugh, actors!" can be used as a way to diminish or talk over valid concerns within the industry. It wasn't even two years ago that the internet was obsessing over, for example, what an insufferable diva Blake Lively was following the promotional campaign for It Ends With Us. That was a huge buzz on Tik Tok and YouTube. And even before it came to light that Lively was in fact that target of an organized smear campaign on part of her costar and director, Justin Baldoni, to cover for his sexual harassment, the dogpiling on Lively reached absurd proportions. That kind of thing was orchestrated by the powers in place, but the masses very gratefully played along. This is maybe the most essential truth that Sunset Boulevard captures: it doesn't really matter whether we are beholding Norma Desmond on her throne or in her trainwreck, we will obsess just as merrily either way.

        I’ve also debated long and hard over whether or not Hollywood has it in it to produce anything like Sunset Boulevard in the modern day. Hollywood satire remains a reliable go-to for film and television alike. The most common approach is showcasing the bizarre behind-the-sceneries of Hollywood, from something like Singin’ in the Rain or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, demonstrating just what a wild place Hollywood is to make a living. But I also don’t know whether or not society has progressed in such a way that we have gotten better at examining the patterns in the way we consume ideas or entertainment.

I’m reminded of how something like Don’t Look Up and its lampooning of modern journalism in the face of legitimate crises was not well received by, ya’ know, journalists. (And I will acknowledge that I myself didn’t necessarily have the warmest reception to the film when it premiered, although my issues had more to do with satire as a form than where the film was directing its ire, but I have had to admit in the time since that the film mostly pulls off what it sets out to do.)  Maybe critics have never been happy to find themselves in the interrogation room, but they certainly haven’t gotten better about it.

    So, Sunset Boulevard winds up being a rarity in how it depicts Hollywood-ism. But it does have a select few equals in the ranks that are worth recognizing. The 1973 murder-mystery, The Last of Sheila, is a delicious look at the repugnant power economy that Hollywood runs on. Also, where Sunset Boulevard is this sort of poetic expression of the dangers of celebrityhood, Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd is powerful for just how proximate it feels to how the phenomenon unfolds in the real world. And, hey, The King of Comedy is one of like three Scorsese films that I actually connect to. Hollywood gets it right just often enough that you know that they can.

But while Hollywood's sorting all that out, there are steps we can implement on our own time. It is because of windows like this, for example, that I don’t like to report on a film or tv star’s public woes. It’s also why I try to be very selective on the statements I put out in my writing about artists, particularly those who are still living. 

    And this is also why I try to be very judicious about when I give airtime to a celebrity’s private life—or even the things that should be private. I don’t like contributing to any transaction where a performer is financially rewarded for giving up a part of themselves that I would not ask for from another person providing a public service. This is also why I cross-examine news stories with sensational headlines. There are a great many outlets which specialize in this exact kind of seedy coverage, and I make a point to purge them from my algorithm after I’ve identified them. (And, though I myself am not presently afflicted with the spoils and ravages of celebrity, this kind of thing is also part of the reason why I use a pen name when I write.)

          To me, placing the onus on the consumer-base is an essential part of the model. That is a huge reason why Sunset Boulevard is such a powerful document. This isn’t because I’m just a crotchety old geezer who wants the proletariat to wrestle with their own enabling participation (at least … not only) but because I really do think that the power to redirect the current lies mostly in us as audiences. 

This isn't to imagine that all discussion on reform at the top is moot, but we on the ground are also more in control of this situation than we are conditioned to think, and what we do with that influence can mean all the difference.

                    --The Professor