Word and Image in “Sunset Boulevard” (1950)

When the film starts, its two leads are already dead, more or less. Silent Screen legend Norma Desmond’s career is dead, and because she’s nothing more than her career, the best she can do is linger in the tomb of her former glory, hoping for a resurrection. And failed screenwriter Joe Gillis quite literally enters the film as a corpse, so, as the film’s narrator, he has no choice but to tell his story in flashback. Thus, it’s safe to say that both Norma and Joe are, well, fatally disadvantaged in the realization of their respective dreams. And yet, both achieve a kind of post-mortem success—Norma as the star of one last film, and Joe as the writer of one last, great, highly-personal tale. (In an expression of what might be the screenwriter’s secret fantasy, he even gets to star in it, to boot.) How is such life after death possible? Arguably only through the magic of celluloid, a medium ghoulishly capable of preserving humans precisely as they are—which all too soon becomes as they were. What can the contrast between silent and talking pictures teach us about the nature of film itself? And how might it reflect the age-old rivalries between word and image, movement and stasis, the living and the dead? Wes & Erin discuss Billy Wilder’s 1950 masterpiece, “Sunset Boulevard.” Upcoming Episodes: Marianne Moore’s “Jerboa,” M*A*S*H. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. When the film starts, its two leads are already dead. More or less. Silent screen legend Norma Desmond's career is dead. And because she's nothing more than her career, the best she can do is linger in the tomb of her former glory, hoping for a resurrection. And failed screenwriter Joe Gillis quite literally enters the film as a corpse. So as the film's narrator, he has no choice but to tell his story in flashback. Thus, it's safe to say that both Norma and Jo are, well, fatally disadvantaged in the realization of their respective dreams. And yet both achievements achieve a kind of postmortem success. Norma as the star of one last film, and Jo as the writer of one last great, highly personal tale. In an expression of what might be the screenwriter's secret fantasy, he even gets to star in it. How is such life after death possible? Arguably, only through the magic of celluloid, a medium ghoulishly capable of preserving humans precisely as they are, which all too soon becomes as they were. What can the contrast between silent and talking pictures teach us about the nature of film itself? And how might it reflect the age old rivalries between word and image, movement and stasis, the living and the dead? Today we're talking about Billy Wilder's 1950 masterpiece, Sunset Boulevard. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, I was just wondering, are you a big fan of Norma Desmond's movies? Have you seen any of them? Is she one of your favorite silent screen stars? 2:03 Wes: Constantly. Yeah, all I do is watch Norma Desmond movies. No, I'd never seen one. 2:11 Erin: Gloria Swanson. Of course. 2:12 Wes: I mean, Gloria Swanson. 2:14 Erin: Yeah. But I'm being a little cheeky there. 2:17 Wes: Yeah, I haven't seen Gloria Swanson's movies or really, yeah, any of those. I guess melodramatic female leading role silent movies. You know, looking at Wikipedia, I can see there's a ton of Norma Desmond kind of as a stand in for a lot of different possible actresses, including one which. Who's the actor? The German director actor. 2:38 Erin: Erich von Stroheim. 2:39 Wes: Yeah. So he really was a silent film director and really worked with. 2:44 Erin: Well, he worked With Gloria Swanson many times or a couple times. But yeah, in fact, he directed the movie that they watch in the film. Yeah, yeah. 2:51 Wes: There's another young actress, I can't forget her name. A very popular silent film actress that he worked with that he sort of discovered. And at the time, I think. I guess he really was of the caliber of DeMille and other directors at that point. 3:05 Erin: Yeah, I love some silent films. Actually. I used to. On tcm, they have Silent Sunday Nights or they used to. 3:11 Wes: Anyway. 3:11 Erin: I haven't been paying for TCM for a long time. In fairness, I was never paying for it. But back when I was living in a house that had cable, we got TCM and all of the Silence that I loved were all comedies. The melodramas are really. They're especially dated and they're easy to make fun of. Of course, early talkie melodramas are also kind of easy to make fun of. But what's interesting about Norma Desmond is I think that her name. I mean, of course she's based on a couple of different characters, real life actresses. But her name, I think is an amalgamation, from what I can tell of the name Mabel Normand and William Desmond Taylor. And Mabel Normand is my favorite silent screen actress. My favorite actor is Buster Keaton. I loved Buster Keaton movies. But Mabel Normand worked a lot with Charlie Chaplin. She was just this great comedienne, actress, director. I think she was the first person to direct Chaplin as the Tramp. Of course, it was much more common then for women to be directors during the silent era. And so, you know, I associate her with, on the one hand, sort of extremely hilarity and sweetness and all sorts of things, but also with tragedy. She died tragically young. She had a terribly tragic life. And William Desmond Taylor, who was her boyfriend, if you could call it that at the time he ended up dying from being shot. There are many theories as to who actually shot him. But I think that that is a little bit of what Norma's name is signaling. In addition to the fact that she's working on a script about Salome, you know, that might give William Holden a bit of a Wilde. But other than that, I think the fact that he will be shot by her is prefigured even in her name. Not that Mabel Normand killed William Desmond Taylor, but that her tragic association with him seems to have led to his death. So there's a lot of screwed up stuff in silent film history. There are a lot of scandals and some really, really creepy things happened. So she's a Great encapsulation of all of that darkness and melodrama. 5:11 Wes: Yeah. You know, looking at Wikipedia, I think the list of other candidates for inspirations for this character include. Right. I don't know how many, but several silent film stars who became reclusive and crazy. So Mary Pickford, Pola Negri, Mae Murray, Valeska Surratt, Audrey Munson, Clara Bow. Oh, so Norma Talmadge, according to Dave Kehr, is the quote, obvious of unacknowledged source of Norma Desmond, the grotesque predatory silent movie queen of the film. Although Norma Talmadge, I don't think she ever became reclusive or had mental problems. She's just was a young actress who was very successful and worked with. What's his name? Von something. 5:56 Erin: Stroheim. 5:57 Wes: Von Stroheim. And then tried to make this transition to the talkie era and couldn't do it, and then was kind of fine with that and like, retired, basically. You know, why this difficulty for these actors who wanted to make this transition and couldn't? I mean, is there anyone who successfully made the transition? 6:15 Erin: Yeah, there are a couple. Someone who famously didn't was Clara Bow. Her voice was not up to par. It's just a completely different skill set. And it's a completely different way of filming, too. I mean, they had to invent things like the boom mic. I believe a woman director invented the boom mic, trying to capture Clara Bow's very thin voice, following her around with a microphone, you know, putting it on. I think a fishing pole was the original boom mic, which is pretty clever. But, yeah, I mean, it was initially, it was this extremely expressionistic style in which everything had to be communicated with one's body and one's facial expressions. And I think. I mean, I'd be curious to know what your opinion is of Gloria Swanson's performance in the film. But, I mean, the woman can really do a lot with her eyes. It's pretty incredible. And also, if you listen to interviews with her, you know, real life, you can hear how different her voice is from the voice she uses for this film. So it's actually much lighter and much. Not too much of a higher pitch. It's not like she has a Minnie Mouse voice or a little girl voice, but she just has a higher pitched, sweeter voice than the one she uses in the film. So she was able to make the transition and she was able to train her voice to do various things for whatever reason. I mean, there was a great deal of resistance to sound at first. It seemed like a fad to a Lot of people I've just recently read. As part of my reading list, I. I read a collection of essays written by the poet H.D. called Close Up, in which she talks about the advent of sound and how startling and upsetting it is for her as, as an aesthete, as a lover of film, and as an avid film goer who, who loved silent movies. Writing this at the dawn of the talkie era, she gives a little bit of an insight, I think, into what the artistic class at least was thinking about how this transition was going to take its effect and what effect it was having on the viewers. And HD describes it as. She describes watching silent films as like playing with a doll where you can kind of animate with your own imagination what everybody sounds like, you know, so, like when you hold up a doll, when you're playing with a doll as a kid, you might do the voices and kind of, you know, play with them in that way. And so in other words, there's great scope for the imagination in silent films. Not all the work is done for you. You have to fill in the audible elements of what's taking place on film with your own imagination. And so talking pictures seemed, you know, the chatter about it seems very much like AI, where people are very concerned that certain mental processes are going to become more automated and taken over and people's brains are going to atrophy and stuff like that. Right. Which of course I'm sympathetic to, but. But for talking pictures, she says, it's as if your doll stands up and starts moving and talking on its own. It's as if it becomes an automaton. She argues people don't want to play with dolls that can stand up and talk on their own, that these things are uncanny and they don't leave any room for participation from the audience at the level that you were previously able to participate and that there's something about it that's creepy and strange. And so I think that this was to a certain extent the attitude of the people in the films themselves who were resistant to these changes, maybe didn't get in on the ground floor of accepting this new medium as being the new standard. And it was easy, therefore, for executives in the burgeoning film industry because it really didn't become a full fledged industry with banking and, you know, backing it and all of that until talking pictures came in. They could say, well, you know, the people more adept to say lines are stage actors. So we're just going to bring in this new talent from New York and have The Broadway people come in and become our stock of players. And if these silent film stars are going to be resistant to it, well, we'll just replace them, you know, like a cashier at McDonald's being replaced by one of those touch screens. So, you know, not quite, but I think all of these things were factors, more or less, the lack of training and adaptability to the new medium and maybe the mindset of the stars themselves and of the directors and producers who thought, well, we'll just bring in new talent for the new medium. 10:39 Wes: This is sort of Norma Desmond's argument. So someone says to her, you used to be big. She says, I am big. It's the pictures that got small. Oh, and I guess this is Jo. And he's like, uh huh. I knew there was something wrong with them. 10:54 Erin: Yeah. 10:55 Wes: And she says, they're dead, they're finished. There was a time when this business had the eyes of the whole world, but that wasn't good enough for them. Oh, no. They had to have the ears of the world too. So they opened their big mouths and out came talk, talk, talk. So I guess, yeah. The argument that you've just presented is that the lack of talking makes for a more active viewer. And a viewer is more actively using their imagination and doing something like play, rather than being passive. Which is interesting in light of the fact that Norma Desmond herself is such an intrusive and controlling figure. And what she's doing with her face, often with her teeth kind of bared, you know what I mean? Like she's gonna, she's gonna bite you and the kind of upturned, proud chin. And then I guess the thing that she does at the end where she's coming towards the camera with her hand outstretched, it's like you get a sense of how intrusive she is. And she, she can convey that intrusiveness just through body language. And of course, that's what she's doing with Joe because she's, you know, she's a sugar mama and he's a kept man and she's dictating what clothing he wears. And you know, gradually in the beginning, undoes all the boundaries, doesn't help him keep his car, and then moves him into the mansion because the room has a. That he's staying in about the garage has a. Has a leak in it. So this feeling of intrusion is very strong. And you might look at a silent film where a lot is going on with faces and there's all this expressiveness and feel like it's too much. Right. If a real person were interacting with you that way. I think intrusion might be, you know, it's more emotionally contagious. You might feel more helpless in the face of that. Where there is something deader about language, the use of language, it is more mundane. It does detract from the emotional intensity in a way. It brings you more into the world of facts and it brings you more into plot and things like that. And, you know, you get a sense of some of that criticism in relation to Joe himself, right? Where he's being in the beginning, he's being held to a kind of literary standard, which is weird, right? You know, there's Betty, who kind of puts the nail in the coffin of any hopes for getting a deal with the studio in the beginning. And then his agent, who says something like, you know, well, it's good to be a poor starving artist. This is actually going to be the best thing that's ever happened to you. Which is odd, right? In light of an industry which is. Is geared towards entertainment and not high literary standards necessarily. It's odd that he, as someone who's struggling, who does have apparently some literary talent, but is ready to sell out. They won't let him sell out. And then later, with Betty, that I was thinking of. 13:45 Erin: Are you maybe thinking of the message picture idea? 13:48 Wes: Yes, I found it flat and trite. And he's like, exactly what kind of material do you recommend? James Joyce, Dostoevsky? So again, here the literary standard comes and she says, I just think pictures should say a little something. He says, oh, one of the message kids. Just a story won't do. You'd have turned down Gone with the Wind. The studio executive says, no, that was me. Who wants to see a Civil War picture. And then she says, perhaps I hated it because I knew your name. I'd always heard you had talent. He said, that was last year. This year I'm trying to earn a living. And then, so she says, so you take plot 27A, make it glossy, make it slick. And I think he says, those are dirty words. And then the film studio executive says, you sound like a bunch of New York critics. So, yeah, I bring that up because it in line with this being held to a literary standard, but also it conveys the idea that the plottedness of movies, right. First of all, that it's in line with Norma Desmond's idea that adding talk, there's something that takes away from some of the magic of the movies when you do that. But also that plotting per se and writing slick, glossy scripts that are meant to kind of. There's something manipulative about it. There's something which is less honest and true about just getting the audience absorbed in the story as opposed to getting them absorbed in the emotional contagion of people doing things with their. Yeah. So then the question is, well, what do we think of that critique? 15:21 Erin: Well, that's a really good distinction. I think I was including Norma in what essentially I saw was a kind of a triangulation that the film is setting up. So we have maybe at the top point of the triangle, Betty and her obvious moral superiority, according to the writers of the film, basically saying that the movie should serve a plot that should be original, that should come from, you know, we can read between the lines and much of what she says to Jo and basically intuit that she believes that things that come from the personal, that are connected to stories that are true, that have some kind of deeper meaning, that are emotional in sophisticated types of ways, positive ways, not melodramatic or other things we might associate with emotional films, but films that have a core, a center, a heart to them and that don't operate off of cliche. I think that would be what the film is advocating for as the best case scenario for a script. Then you have Joe, who is operating from hunger, as Betty says. She says his script Bases Loaded, is written from hunger, who is selling out, who just wants to feed the masses some cliched, trite garbage in order to make a buck. And I think that this part of Hollywood is also expressed by his agent, who, you know, I take this discussion of, oh, you know, it's good for you to write when you're hungry. The best work has been written on an empty stomach. That's a cliche, right? He's operating off of a cliche that's convenient for him because it involves him not having to lend Joe any money. And so it's financially convenient for him to operate on this cliche. And I think, to a certain extent, viewed cynically, Hollywood makes a buck by operating on cliche, Right? So there are the stale plots, the tried and true narratives that just get rehashed over and over again with little tweaks, all designed to, yes, to entertain, but also just to keep the business end of the whole enterprise afloat because it is, after all, a business and are not geared toward the artistic. And then I would say the last point on the triangle is Norma's vision of a script, of a plot. It's kind of the mirror image of the just satisfying the public with the cliche. And the bread and circuses kind of angle of Joe and his agent and maybe the producer, which is giving the public what they want in the form of an idol, a star. Right. We never get any dialogue or anything from the Salome script that she's written, but we can imagine that it's filled with tableaus that are designed to feature her as an object of worship. Right. She's in every scene. And it's evident that the script doesn't make a lot of sense. It's probably all designed to showcase her at her best angles, you know, performing ridiculous scenes in which she is probably some kind of, you know, Salome is supposed to be a teenage girl, so. In which she's woefully inept to actually fulfill the role as written, but which would be designed to show her off as a raging young beauty and give her lots of grand and theatrical and exciting things to do so that the camera can sort of focus lovingly on her face. And we get lots and lots of shots of her. And this is about. Sort of about satisfying her public, but it's really about satisfying the demands of her own ego. Right. So one is maybe on the side of like, just keeping the public kind of happy and satisfied, and the other side is keeping the stars happy and satisfied, maybe also with the downstream effect of giving the public something to worship and adore. But, of course, neither one is this artistic idealistic premium on originality and artistic resonance that I think Betty is advocating for. 19:07 Wes: Yeah, I think that's a good point. I mean, it's a more grandiose vision of what a good movie is. It's still. So Betty has a more sophisticated and technical idea and more well rounded, given that dialogue is allowed, which, of course, I mean, there is obviously dialogue. And she's begrudgingly. Right. Putting dialogue into this movie. She's writing and doing it very bad and poorly. We hear from both DeMille and Jo, but. Right. She has her own critique of new films and. Or contemporary films, put it that way. Contemporary for them. And so does Betty and their critiques in terms of. What is the word? Maybe authenticity or artistic value. But for her, she's identifying the greatness of films with her own greatness. She's identifying it with the specular, to use an academic word, with the imaginary, with the image per se, and in particular, let's say, the emotional power of the image as opposed to the symbolic realm of language, which reflects a greater level of maturity. Just. Just speaking cognitively in terms of our development of. As human beings. But it is also alienating, as Hegel said, because our language is a mediating thing. It stands in between us and the real. So that at the very moment we begin to use concepts and language with respect to individual particulars, we have abstracted, we have gotten away from concrete reality. So if you're sticking with image, images, you just. It's all concrete reality. In a way, it's a bit abstracted because it's. There's no touch and smell and things like that. It's all just image and well curated image and over the top if it's melodramatic. But it. Right. It's not just a landscape painting, so to speak, or even a portrait of someone looking stoic. It's all this, you know, it's happening over time with all this intense emotional expression. But so my, my point there is that, yeah, it's another critique in terms of authenticity, but it's one that equates that and the greatness of film as a medium, of silent film as a medium with her own greatness. Which is to say what. What makes her great. Maybe being beautiful, it seems. But maybe that's the wrong word. Maybe it's just having a certain face. Maybe it's having a famous face. Maybe it's having this skill to do whatever it is she does with her face to convey certain emotions. I don't know. But yeah, I'm just trying to get at your triangle there. The cynical approach that Jo has sunk into Betty's kind of idealism and then Norma Desmond's conception of what film should 21:55 Erin: be, that's so interesting. I'm thinking so many different things here because I also wanted to draw a contrast between this idea of word and image. But I have a slightly different take on it than you. I think, though, I love this idea that. I mean, to put what you said sort of hyper simplistically, like the idea that words technically are images too, but they're at one degree of remove, it seems, or one vector of remove, so that they're more sophisticated, they're more, you know, words are conveying images, but they're not image itself. So there's something more simplistic, I think is what you're saying about the image. 22:27 Wes: They can convey images, but they're conveying 22:29 Erin: concepts and also abstractions. 22:31 Wes: Yeah, concepts which are inherently non imagistic and it's hard to even say what they are. 22:35 Erin: Right, right. 22:36 Wes: For Plato, they are metaphorically imagistic because there's a sense in which we see them concepts or ideas, we look at them, but they're not visible. They're visible, but invisible. But in any case, yeah, thought and langu. Language is a mediating right. Animals don't have this alienated relationship to the natural right world. They're not mediated so much by the conceptual and linguistic. They just dig into the raw experience of sensuous reality. Whereas our experience is tempered by language and by thinking, by concepts. It's not as intense. 23:12 Erin: Right. 23:13 Wes: Once you introduce language, it's not as raw and connected and. 23:18 Erin: Well, I think a lot of what you're saying, especially the latter part of what you said about the idea of the face, one could ask oneself, what is. I mean, film, as you're getting at, is a very, very difficult medium to pin down because it is a mixed medium because it involves both narrative and image. And yet, I think, I would argue, because the photograph is really the origin story of film. Photographic capabilities are at. At the heart of what makes film possible. And that's the kind of the major. The camera, of course, is the major innovation, and it's the major piece of equipment that you need. Unlike, say, a canvas and paint. Therefore, there's a primacy to the image in a film. And I also believe, because I have lots and lots of complicated and kind of psychotic, probably, theories about star power, that the face is more powerful than anything that appears on film. I don't know if you would disagree with that, but I just think that there's something, yes, simplistic about Norma's idea, but it's also spot on the face, 24:15 Wes: as in our experience, our direct experience. Say that again, the face is more powerful than. Yeah. 24:22 Erin: The photographed face on film. Like the closeup. I mean, I think there's a reason why the close up comes up again and again in this movie. The closeup is probably the most representational image of film because the closeup is. It's doing something different than what painting does. Right. It can show tiny, tiny gradations of expression. I do think that the star is deeply important to what film is. And I do think that some faces resonate. You know, I can't think of the right word. They project. Some faces work on film extraordinarily well. This is a common phenomenon, I think, that we all know, maybe personally, you can be very beautiful and not photograph well, and you can be sort of unattractive and photograph beautifully. And there are just certain faces that work on camera. The telegraph. That's the word I was gonna use to further confuse. Use the technology here. But there are certain faces that telegraph on film, and then there Are also personalities, I think, involved in that. So you could have a great face and have kind of an ant personality and not have that frisson. That combination of intangible factors that make someone a great star. When you are a great star and when you are photographed on film in a closeup so that your face is enormous and way out of proportion to the normal size of a human face, that is, to me, that is film. That's what makes film different. That's what makes a Hollywood film a Hollywood film. Because of standard practices of editing and various other conventions that are so commonplace to us that they're invisible, were invented as part of the storytelling methods of film. And this is like the prototypical film image. So though we can accuse Norma of being extremely naive and simplistic and single minded and of course, narcissistic and insane about many things, she's also, I think. Right. And that's. And that's what makes things complicated. 26:22 Wes: She's psychotically correct. 26:24 Erin: Yeah. I mean, you know, she. She's. She's getting down to the marrow of what film is about. And in a way, because she exists in the past and she has this sort of genetic understanding of how film developed, she. She is closer to the bone. Her being involved in the silent era means that she has this pure understanding, like living through a long historical era. You know, she has access to maybe the origin of how history turned out the way it did. And therefore a greater understanding of the original intent behind so many choices that were made, you know? 26:58 Wes: Yeah, well, I think that's a good point about the importance of the face and the fact that particular faces work better than others. Or maybe the way to put it is particular. You use the word personality. Particular personalities work better than other. Or really, the word I like is character. And character really does come across in facial expression and body language and in, you know, intonation and sort of formal aspects of speech where it's not as clearly as conveyed in the content of speech itself. So character is a broad category that can include. Right. For Aristotle, virtues and vices, to be magnanimous is to have a certain character trait. Or it can be a Freudian defense mechanism. Someone has a passive aggressive character. Or it can be just something that's much finer grained and more a matter of quirks. Right. So the sort of things that Dickens was so good at communicating and communicating right in the written word, which is very, very tricky. We underestimate how much of the information we get from other people involves what I would call the formal element or that's facial expression intonation as opposed to content. And I happen to think that there's a whole language of body language. And there's a whole language of facial expression. Which is really a system of natural signifiers built into us. And it's universal. Like smiling, for instance, is a good example. Smiling is a form of communication. Smiling means something, or it means a family. It's a family of related meanings. Depending on the context and the type of smile. But you get what I mean. It's not something we learn socially or culturally. And it doesn't differ significantly between cultures. And this natural sign system, which is smiling, is the tip of the iceberg. It's subtle variations in facial expression that we don't even have names for, I think, really because it's all mainly conveyed unconsciously. And you could even think of certain sequences of facial expressions as sentences. And language, I think, is kind of like spoken and written language is kind of built on top of that pre existing natural language. This is also a theory that was advanced by philosopher Thomas Reid and by one of the Schlegel brothers. I forget which one. And so I'm very like. Anytime I read a philosopher who has this similar idea to me, I get excited. I'm surprised. I don't see it come up as often in the sorts of texts I read for philosophy. What I'm just trying to underline is the importance of facial expression. To communicating character traits. To communicating some inward part of the person. And once you get into talk and dialogue, it does become very tricky. And if you take a class on writing dialogue for film, you might be told, well, just imagine the whole scene without any dialogue first. And then add in the dialogue. And then your dialogue can't be too on the nose, right? It can't just be people robotically saying what's on their mind. There has to be subtext. And if you look at movies, you'll see this principle is obeyed religiously, Even by films that you might not think of as that. Sophisticated people are very careful about how they use dialogue. Because they're trying to avoid this exact problem of its potential for artificiality. 30:27 Erin: I want to take this and spin it out a little bit further. Then maybe in the next part we can get more into the specifics of the film. But we can kind of call this the sort of foundational philosophical underpinnings. But one of the things that this contrast, which I think is related to what you're talking about. Between silent films and talking films. One of the things it reminded me of in sort of philosophical history is this classic contest. I think it literally was the paragone in the Renaissance, the contest between painting and poetry, basically these different mimetic modes, as I think Aristotle would have called them, right. So Aristotle distinguished between painting and poetry for the way that they imitated the means with which they imitated. So painting imitates by color and form. So I think it's the art of spatial stasis and then poetry by language and rhythm. And it's an art of temporal movement and of narrative. And so we can think about this in terms of, you know, word versus image, story that unfolds through time. Like reading a novel, like reading a poem versus looking at a painting and seeing, you know, spatially in terms of what's represented, there's simultaneity. So in fact, some people believe that you should not show like various points of time in the same painting. Like Lessing, I was reading his. His theories from the 18th century. He was a thinker who, like, wanted very, very sharp distinctions between poetry and painting. That there should be no sort of like narrative progression in a painting. A painting shouldn't show, like. Think of it like, you know, cells of a cartoon, right. It shouldn't show people doing things in a sort of like narrative arc or order. It should show just one scene, lots of stuff going on in that scene, sure, but in the same kind of moment and narrative progression purely is the realm of the written word. Of course, Lessing would have been driven insane by film, Right. Because all of this is muddied and he doesn't get to separate things into neat categories. And of course, there are scripts for silent films. And of course image is a big factor in talking films. But I think that it's illuminating to think about the terms that we use and the value systems of the two styles and of Norma versus Jo. I think it's useful to view it in this classic poetry versus painting kind of clash. Because so the terms we use, I mean, of course, the old fashioned term for what we would call a film back then was a picture, right? Then it became a talking picture. But more commonly, over the course of the decades, it came to be called a movie, right? So you have a picture versus a movie gets at this contrast between representational image and narrative movement, rhythm, elements of poetry or of written stories. Norma, obviously, with her ideas about the primacy of the image is frequently shown kind of in tableau, right? She's stalled in time. So there's something of this, like temporal stasis of the image that is inherent in her whole world and the way that her world is depicted versus Jo, who is very concerned with his car and movement moving forward. Right. And narrative and cars are often compared in the film. So there's this being stuck in one place, being sort of like trapped in an image, in a canvas, versus moving forward, moving a plot, progressing. The values of writing and of narrative that Jo seems to kind of represent. And I think that the way that this gets teased out over the course of the film, I mean, I think that Jo and Norma's attraction to each other kind of puts these things in interesting contradistinction. I think that where the film ultimately lands with this are with the values of the writer. Because this is a movie that centers a writer. But at the same time, I think it does give a lot of credence to Norma and that value system. And maybe in the end there's something like a triumph of Norma. I'm not sure. I mean, certainly the writer ends up dead, but killed by the image, you know, so what the end of the movie is ultimately saying about this contest, you know, we could talk about in the next part. But I think it's interesting to view it. I don't think it's too far fetched of me to draw this connection between poetry and painting. Talking pictures and silent pictures. 34:51 Wes: Yeah, that seems. Right now you have me thinking also about the battle between the philosophers and the poets. And Plato expelling poets from the city. 35:00 Erin: And painters too though are. I mean, because both represent in their different ways, right? Both painters and poets are united in being considered suspect by Plato. Is that right? Because of the mimetic quality of both of their. 35:15 Wes: I don't know about painting, actually. And then even poetry is complicated, right? Because it's. There is Homer, there's lyrical poetry, but then also plays are poetry. And you get the sense that Plato's biggest objections are to. Well, and he has objections to the depictions of the gods by Homer as unethical. And his objections to drama involve the ways in which we as an audience might get contaged with the irrationality of the characters on stage and their strong emotions. And so they're as tragic figures being crazy and doing crazy things. And so we get negatively influenced by that. So he advocated a rating system where you. No, I'm just kidding. And then Aristotle, in a way, Aristotle's poetics is a direction, direct response to that. It really doesn't mention Plato, but it's a critique of Plato. And Aristotle's point is that our identification with characters on the stage is More complicated than that. So that's where this concept of catharsis comes in. We might witness crazy people doing murderous and horrible things to each other on stage and come away from that with an actual increase in maturational step forward. He's challenging the theory that we just simply directly incorporate the art object and its content into us. The relationship is going to be more subtle than that. But yeah, so I was thinking, you know, in relation to painting versus poetry, because it. It really is about. Right. The. The painting is the Apollonian and the poetry is potentially the Dionysian. I mean, a further complication is with the right drama you had, it was more about music and characters. They were wearing masks on their faces. So they were strictly prohibited from doing anything with facial expression. Except for the facial expression that was fixed on the mask in order to focus the audience on the actual poetry of the language. But then the musical element. But there's the chorus and all that stuff of what was going on. So. But yeah, you could think of one. Maybe the contrast to make is a more. A more Dionysian versus a more Apollonian element, A more ecstatic element versus what? And then the question is where a silent film image fits into all that. It's not gonna all fit together neatly. But anyway, I'm just thinking out loud, right? 37:40 Erin: No, yeah. In regards to what you're saying about music, I mean, this is one of the strange things about the fact that the contest. The two major players in that are poetry and painting or writing and painting, however we wanna put it, because they're poetry and music, of course, have long been thought to be much, much closer to each other. Of course. Right. And if we look at Aristotle's idea of the means of the mimetic function, poetry and music are super close to each other. They both unfold in time. Their means of mimesis are quite similar. Right. Rhythm, harmony, temporal, like a temporal unfolding through time. Aristotle's sort of evolution from Plato's way of thinking, which I think fits with what you're saying is this idea that mimesis was, for Aristotle, no longer a dirty word. You know, I think there was something about the mimetic itself that made Plato want to exile the poets. Right. That any kind of imitation as being not the real thing is a bit suspect. And Aristotle, I thought, was the one who kind of moved the needle on mimesis being not something that'll get you kicked out of the Republic. 38:47 Wes: But yeah. And it's potentially morally beneficial as opposed to. And morally beneficial even if we're witnessing immorality. Even if we're identifying with immoral characters, that doesn't mean we're just sucking in their immorality into us. It doesn't mean the character trait is being transferred to us. 39:07 Erin: Right, right. And Aristotle, I mean, he doesn't really make this super strong distinction between poetry and painting. He does, I think, compare them to each other in a couple of places in his Poetics, but it's really the Romans who takes Aristotle's ideas and advance them further. And we get in Horace, for instance, ut pictura poesis. Right. As in painting. So in a poem or something like that. So we get these more explicit comparisons as the sort of terms set up by Aristotle continue to be thought about and to evolve. And as you have so many paintings, inspiring poems, or poems, especially inspiring paintings, and something like film really, really confuses that because, okay, it's about photography, but it's also about telling a story. Where is the primacy. Is it in the story or is it in the image? 39:56 Wes: Right. And then the images are not static, but, yeah, they're temporal. 39:59 Erin: Right, right. And it has a runtime and it has, you know, an intermission sometimes, or you go to the bathroom, you miss something. 40:06 Wes: Right. 40:07 Erin: So. 40:08 Wes: So that's the foundations, philosophical foundations of Sunset Boulevard. 40:15 Erin: Yeah. Then we'll talk about the movie next time. 40:19 Wes: All right, so that's part one. Otherwise, you can just wait a week. 40:27 Erin: Thank you, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. 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