The hysteric hag of Sunset Boulevard

Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), the protagonist of Billy Wilder’s 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, is a hag. While possessing no supernatural witchy powers, Norma embodies the hag by transgressing patriarchal norms of aging femininity. And she does so excessively, making a spectacle of herself through her melodramatic physicality, refusing the mantle of invisibility, risking what Mary Russo has termed ‘the scandal of anachronism’. Norma’s central transgression is her obsessive pursuit of glamour despite her age: ‘There’s nothing tragic about being 50, not unless you’re trying to be 25', we are told by the film’s narrator. Depicting Norma’s obsession with youth as emotional and psychological breakdown, Sunset Boulevard dramatises the horror of the scandal of anachronism, perpetuating an image of the aging woman as unruly, as in decline, as the abject excesses of the category Woman that must be pushed into the shadows.

Norma’s crisis is framed within a flashback, filtered through the memories of struggling Hollywood screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden), who promises to aid Norma’s return to screen, and who is shown to have been murdered in the film’s opening. Narrative voice, then, is denied Norma, and the male mediation of her struggle ensures that she is rendered an object of horror, marked, as Lucy Fischer (1997, p.166) writes, ‘by distance, loathing and fear’. Never is this so clear as in the depiction of Norma’s mansion, shot to emphasise the cavernous coldness and hostility of the rooms, half-lit with lamps and candles that cast shadows over the walls and floors, a rat-infested, run-down and neglected space. An extension of Norma’s body (Joe refers to ‘the ghost of a tennis court with faded markings and a sagging net’), the mansion’s depiction perpetuates the patriarchal view of the aging, barren female body as in decline, horrific as ‘an affront to the male conception of the female’ (Ibid., p.167) in its lack of reproductive desirability.

While the low angle shots of Norma lurking in the shadows, dressed in black, imbue her with an ominous vampiric menace, what particularly marks Norma as horrific is her refusal to accept her prescribed status as in decline, rendering her a threat to patriarchal conceptions of feminine chronology. This threat is produced through Norma’s glamorous mask, a mask that is clearly visible due to the juxtaposition of aging’s perceived lack of femininity and the mask’s extreme femininity, which produces a critical distance. In her treatise ‘Youthfulness as Masquerade’, Kathleen Woodward (1988, p.129) writes that masquerade in old age is concerned with ‘forging links to one’s past selves’, and as such might be regarded as ‘a bridge which re-creates, momentarily, the past in the present’. Specifically trying to recuperate her own glamorous youth, as indicated by the numerous photographs of young Norma around the mansion and her obsessive watching of her old films, Norma collapses her own chronology by representing her own past and present simultaneously. She is, in the fashion of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque pregnant hags, the perfect embodiment of the grotesque in her disruption of all order, a threat to the distinction between life and death.

That this disorderly threat is positioned as abject is perhaps confirmed when Norma sees herself in the mirror and reacts with horror, a moment in which Norma is situated with the audience, inviting us to view her anachronistic mask with revulsion. However, Norma’s transgressive use of the masquerade may also serve to problematize the role of woman as image in potentially subversive ways. Joanna Frueh (1997, p.209) suggests that because the aging woman is conceived of in terms of a lack of femininity, she can engage in gender parody and play:

‘If femininity, like masculinity, is an illusion, a cultural construction that marks female bodies into social submission, then gender is a repetition of performative acts that the old(er) woman, who is no longer identifiable as stereotypically feminine, […] can outrageously parody.’

Characterised as in decline, when Norma wears hyperfeminine glamour as a mask, she reveals femininity itself to be an elaborate construction. The constructed, performative nature of idealised femininity and gender itself is reinforced through Norma’s performances for Joe, the ‘Norma Desmond follies’, during which she performs imitations of her past self and of Charlie Chaplin, as well as through the gruesome montage of the surgical and cosmetic procedures required to maintain the mask.

In one sense, the gruesome montage allows the horror of Norma’s anachronism to be read instead as the horror of a patriarchal society, represented by Hollywood, that strictly controls and enforces the boundaries of the category Woman. Here, the aging female body might serve to lament and criticise patriarchy’s treatment of women once they are no longer desirable, youthful, and (re)productive. In another (perhaps more radical) sense, Norma becomes a figure deconstructing and directly challenging patriarchal constructions of Woman, who might be read as a figure of resistance to patriarchy’s boundaries, whose unruly, anachronistic performances of shifting female identity allow for a subversive female viewing pleasure that mocks and resists the normalisation of the monolithic feminine mask.

At the same time, Woodward (1988, p.119) is careful about overstating the subversive potential of youthfulness as masquerade, arguing that ‘at times the most radical gesture may be in fact to take off the mask’, that is, to revel in the grotesqueness of the transgressive barren body itself. Sally Chivers (2006, p.216) suggests that Norma’s unwillingness to take off the mask is what undermines the film’s subversive potential: ‘in place of witnessing her in a grotesque parody of her own aging flesh, viewers witness her submission to a gruesome series of treatments designed to erase all sign of time’s passing’.

If Norma Desmond is a hag who resists the patriarchal need to push aging women into the shadows, she can only do this by grasping for youth. Her desperation for the normalisation of the mask, to no longer be read as old, undermines the subversive potential of gender parody. Moreover, her disorderly anachronism is ultimately contained in its reduction to the product of a delusional mind, perpetuating an image of the aging woman as prone to psychological decline. The normative distinction between aging body as decline and youthful body as vitality is maintained, even while Norma is offered sympathy for the position she is in. As such, Norma Desmond is perhaps more hysteric than hag, and, ultimately, in risking the scandal of anachronism, is subjected to the ‘ridicule, contempt, pity and scorn’ that Russo (1999, p.21) describes.

Works cited Chivers, S. (2006) ‘Baby Jane grew up: the dramatic intersection of age with disability’, Canadian Review of American Studies 36(2): 211–27. Fischer, L. (1997) ‘Sunset Boulevard: fading stars’, in Pearsall, M. (ed.) The other within us: feminist explorations of women and aging. Boulder: Westview Press, pp.163–76. Frueh, J. (1997) ‘Visible difference: women artists and aging’, in Pearsall, M. (ed.) The other within us: feminist explorations of women and aging. Boulder: Westview Press, pp.197–219. Russo, M. (1999) ‘Aging and the scandal of anachronism’, in Woodward, K. (ed.) Figuring age: women, bodies, generations. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp.20–33. Woodward, K. (1988) ‘Youthfulness as masquerade’, Discourse 11(1): 119–142.