Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard is 75 this year. It’s the story of Norma Desmond, once a great star of silent films, living, when we meet her, in “a brooding Sunset castle” with her ex-husband Max, now her butler. Max writes fake letters from fans who no longer exist, so Norma can imagine herself a star. Norma watches her old films obsessively, imagines she will make a comeback in Salome, and loves a pet monkey, who she buries with the ceremony of a prince.
When her delusions are exposed by her young lover, Norma, a glittering narcissist, murders him. She was played by Gloria Swanson, also a great star of silent films: Sunset Boulevard was her Salome, her comeback. It is a cruel and brilliant film, and its reach is long. Norma is fictional, but her story created the idea that the average famous, incalculably gifted woman is insane. We all know that Hollywood does terrible things to its women: objectification at best, rape at worst. We talk less about how we diminish, and erase, their art, in which they are invited to collude.
I thought of Sunset Boulevard when I watched Maria, the new biopic about Maria Callas, starring Angelina Jolie. It is, in many ways, a remake of Sunset Boulevard, and Jolie plays Norma, though I suspect she doesn’t know it. Norma yearned for the close-up and the scene where a lighting technician shines the beam on her is the best in the film. “Let’s get a good look at you,” he calls from his eyrie. He doesn’t mean it. The real inner woman is of no interest to Hollywood. She just reflects the light. Jolie loves the close-up too: she has internalised something.
Most films about famous female entertainers are variants on Sunset Boulevard. We have Sunset Boulevard starring Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland (Judy), Sunset Boulevard starring Ana de Arnas as Marilyn Monroe (Blonde); Sunset Boulevard starring Marisa Abela as Amy Winehouse (Back to Black); now we have Maria too, the latest gilded film to call the subject of its devotion mad. You might say that Garland, Monroe and Winehouse were all mad: all were addicted to drugs, and they died young. But madness wasn’t their defining characteristic, even if these films insist on it. Their industry treated them as things, first alive, now dead: as a young actress Monroe was invited to expose her breasts to studio executives and Garland, given drugs to make her work as a teenager, was not allowed to rest. It was the same for Winehouse.
Maria is a film about the best-selling classical singer in history, and the most important opera singer of the 20th century. This is not a controversial view, and it is not disputed. Callas lost her voice early for a singer — we’re not sure why — and she had a relationship with the shipping tycoon, Aristotle Onassis — we’re also not sure why — who later married Jackie Kennedy. Neither of these facts, though unfortunate, can erase Callas’s contribution to music. Unless you are her cinematic biographer, that is.
Like Sunset Boulevard, Maria opens with a death bed: her own. It is 1977, and Callas is 53, or she was. She is lying on the floor of her exquisite Paris apartment, dead as newsprint. Then we travel backwards in time to the previous week. Maria, tended by servants who act as parents, is broken. She has lost her voice and her lover, the tiny Onassis. She is addicted to Mandrax, which she hides from the servants, and she feeds her meals to the dogs. This is the material of the obsessed but unseeing biographer. It is not Callas. They just use her name, as if for branding.
Sophia Lambton, classical music critic and author of The Callas Imprint: A Centennial Biography, tells me this is fiction. Callas listened to her records all her life: Maria says she feared them. She did not call her records perfect. She was not reclusive. Onassis did not hate opera or try to thwart her career: and she left him, not he her. She suffered from low blood pressure and died of a heart attack, but she was not a drug addict.
The real Callas was made happy by music, but Maria is not interested in music. The result, of course, is lifeless, and Jolie plays Callas as a poised corpse. Craving profundity in every shot, Maria lands on South Park with better clothes. With an already-dead heroine, the only real drama is: where to put the grand piano? By the end everyone is so emotionally cauterised, only the dogs are capable of a response. The credits thank Cartier: perhaps that was the point of it all.
Maria insists Callas was cursed. Judy (2019), another retelling of Sunset Boulevard with Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland / Norma Desmond, does the same: again, it begins at the ending, a place without hope. It is set in 1969, the year of her death, when she was gravely ill. If you hoped this film might be an homage to Garland’s contribution to music — to her fleeting joy, and the joy she gave — you are wrong. There is no music, just sickness, as if that were Garland’s only legacy. Yet watch her dance with Fred Astaire in Easter Parade and outdance him! Garland’s voice does not appear in Judy. Zellweger sang for her, as Marisa Abela sang for Amy Winehouse in Back to Black (2024), and she won the Oscar denied to Garland in her lifetime. Garland thought Hollywood hated her. Whether it knew it or not, she was right.
Perhaps the most vicious retelling of Sunset Boulevard is Andrew Dominik’s Blonde (2022). It is from a Joyce Carol Oates novel that seethes with envy, and it dealt with Marilyn Monroe. There is a scene where Monroe’s soon-to-be-aborted son begs to live — this scene is set in her vagina, while, elsewhere, his useless mother, who was really an autodidact and the greatest comic actress in film, chokes on JFK’s cock. Monroe is reduced to loveless acts in pursuit of a father who will not return. Blonde is framed as a search for the father, and, in such quests, the heroine is turned again into a child, though, in Monroe’s case, an obscene one: a child who cannot even be a child, though in reality she could steal a scene from Jack Lemmon. Some sick child.
But this is the manifesto of Sunset Boulevard and all its awful children. The female star, with her autonomous gifts, is just too threatening to be admired. She must, instead, be pitied, and turned into a cautionary tale for girls: her success is itself a failure, because it is the root of her tragedy. In lesser hands than Wilder’s, the message is a call for women to stay mundane: from cinema’s most self-hating, and desolate, franchise.
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SubscribeGreat interview. It’s interesting to see how Freddie mentioned right at the beginning that they had to be careful how they discussed covid vaccines because it’s a “sensitive” subject. Translation: youtube might cancel them if they’re deemed to be spreading “misinformation.”
One thing Pfizer and Moderna gained from these vaccines, in addition to massive short-term profits, is a vast pool of biological data about the effect of mRNA vaccines in humans. If I remember correctly, in exchange for putting Israel at the head of the line for its covid vaccine early last year, Pfizer was granted access to the complete health records of the Israeli population (Israel maintains a national database of citizens’ health records). That is a treasure trove for figuring out the biological effects of this class of vaccine.
I would love to know what Pfizer and Moderna have concluded from analysis of these huge data sets. Maybe we’re entering a new age of mRNA-based vaccines, cancer treatments etc, or maybe not.
Pity it is not mentioned that how many cases a Nation/State/City had from Covid is inversely proportional to the amount of vaccinations (ones used by us anyway). All data shows this but for a few outliers that had some exceptional situation. A run through Worldometers https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
And then click on the column header ‘tot cases/1 M pop’. This arranges all the countries in the world from most to least cases per million.
NOTICE, more vax, more cases – AND note Nation by race, the Western Nations worst, then the South/Central Americas, then Central Asia, ME, Africa. The Far East, had almost no cases. China – 74 cases per million, 3 deaths per million…..
This is an illness which targets some, but not others. Naturally this means it is amenable to:
Risk Stratification, the medical term which was 100% disregarded to force all to the one size fits all VAX. An obscene system where children are forced to vax, although the vax is a much greater risk to them than covid is, and especially if they have natural immunity.
“Risk stratification enables providers to identify the right level of care and services for distinct subgroups of patients. It is the process of assigning a risk status to patients, then using this information to direct care and improve overall health outcomes.”
Covid happens to be a disease perfect for wrecking the West, as long as the Western Governments were complicit in using this disaster to make everything 1000X worse than it need be. Which they were. The Agenda is breaking apart now, though – if the MSM will keep showing the cracks we may be saved from the drive to The Great Reset.
If your numbers are correct then it would appear the vaccine industry is not unlike the panel beating business. In lean times you give a mate a crowbar & send him around the neighborhood to drum up a little business.
The initial caution may be wider than just YouTube’s censorship – they are discussing market-sensitive information, and if you start getting onto lines of discussion of e.g. allegations of fraud, then you’re in legal liability territory.
hahaaa – classic intro from Freddy
“here on Unherd we are always looking for new and interesting sources of information – things off the beaten track that might give us some advantage over the establishment media,” “One area is the Financial Markets – normally I am pretty dismissive of them….”
!!!! Finance is ALL. Finance is Power, it is what has been the cause of all history, of everything, of the entire Covid SARS-2 Response (unless you still are so silly as to think it was about health) and the Trillions and Trillions of National Debt created and then passed onto the Global Elites; the Negative Real Interest – Inflation, about to cause vast starvation in the Third/Developing World, ending of pensions and savings, the coming Great Depression, and then One World Government under the Davos, WEF, where we own nothing but are happy…..
This is like the Bellwether saying ‘I have always been pretty dismissive of the whole – Wolf, Bot Fly, Abattoir thing – finding grazing, rain/sun, and discussion on if dandelions taste better than Mangel-wurzels to be much more important.’
Godot has appeared on the streets of Kiev.
Follow the money?! I thought the question of moving goal posts was particularly interesting with regards to investment trust. Goes to all forms of trust, it seems to me. Also thanks for the final question!
Another brillant interview……that is ruining my evening being loaded with Valneva shares.
thanks to the both of you for that !!!
The cherry on the cake Louis is that you might be right. Next winter will tell us how and if.
Refreshing to hear compared to the doomsday doctors like Hans Kluge of the WHO
Aren’t the deviation in numbers, statistics, etc, more a product of the government’s attitudes to COVID and population “control” than true outcomes volatility ?
Excellent. Economics & finance are paramount. I started getting the FT (aka The Vaccine Times), at the beginning of the pandemic and it’s been a great education about the importance of markets. I’ll wager that Moderna will keep its current, more plausible place in terms of profit. We were always told (by our economics lecturer), that prestige was as important in driving corporations as profit. Even if their vaccines are crap, they’ve made my folks happy and Moderna is a household name.
Good interview, well done.
worldometer figures currently give Israel 1047 deaths per million of population whereas South Africa is given 1611 deaths per million population which important figures need to be included in this discussion.