Summary:
Joe parks his car in the garage of the grandiose, dilapidated mansion, where he also spots an old luxury vehicle. As he wanders around, he identifies the house as “the kind crazy movie stars built in the crazy 20s.” Suddenly, a woman wearing sunglasses behind bamboo blinds shouts out, “You there! Why are you so late? Why have you been keeping me so long?” to Joe. A befuddled Joe is then ushered inside the mansion by a stoic butler—Max—who then dismisses Joe’s unprofessional attire and sends him upstairs to the waiting “madame.”
As Joe ascends the marble staircase, Max morbidly tells him, “If you need any help with the coffin, call me.” Joe pauses for a moment but continues walking upstairs, where he meets a well-dressed, sophisticated middle-aged woman. Once she guides Joe to a spacious room, she goes to a massage table and removes a shawl covering her dead, beloved pet chimpanzee. The woman asks Joe, “How much will it be? I warn you, don’t give me a fancy price just because I’m rich,” and Joe then realizes the woman and Max mistook him for an animal mortician. Joe informs the woman of the miscommunication, that he simply parked his car in her garage because it seemed empty. The woman takes her dark shades off, and Joe recognizes her as Norma Desmond—a once famous silent film actress. He says, “You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be in pictures. You used to big,” to which Norma replies, “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” Joe sardonically responds, “I knew there was something wrong with them.”
Norma then fiercely condemns the modern movie and how its sound, synchronous dialogue, and Technicolor ruined the careers of silent-screen icons like Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, John Gilbert, and Rudolph Valentino. During her tirade, Joe informs her of his screenwriting career. Norma eventually inquires,“you have written pictures, haven’t you?” to which Joe replies, “The last one I wrote was about Okies in the Dust Bowl. You'd never know because, when it reached the screen, the whole thing played on a torpedo boat.”
Norma then leads Joe to a huge living room, where high piles of paper sit on her desk. She announces she is writing a script about the Biblical figure Salome, which she hopes will become her triumphant return to the big screen, to be directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Norma demands Joe to read her script, and Joe - having no pressing engagement - agrees. In voice-over, Joe remarks on the poor writing quality of the script, stating, “Sometimes it's interesting to see just how bad bad writing can be. This promised to go the limit.” While he's reading, Norma sharply examines Joe with piercing eyes, and Max brings champagne and caviar. The mortician “just for comedy relief” arrives with a baby coffin for the dead monkey, and a snarky Joe comments, “It was all done with great dignity. He must have been a very important chimp, the great grandson of King Kong, maybe.”
Joe begins concocting his own plan to grab some quick, easy money. He sweet-talks Norma and tells her the script is “fascinating” and shows promise, but needs some editing and organization. Norma says she needs the editing to be done by someone she can trust, but comes to offer Joe the job upon realizing the compatibility of their Zodiac signs. Joe cleverly puts up a facade and hesitates because he’s a “busy” and “pretty expensive” writer. When Norma says the job will be worth his while, Joe accepts the position and feels self-congratulatory for maneuvering himself into a well-paying job.
Max escorts Joe to the room above the garage, where Joe agreed to stay while editing Norma’s script. Max ominously comments that he made the bed for Joe earlier in the afternoon, and later reveals the magnitude of Norma’s former stardom. He references how she was worshiped by the public, stating, “In one week she got seventeen thousand fan letters. Men would bribe her manicurist to get clippings from her fingernails. There was a Maharajah who came all the way from Hyderabad to get one of her stockings. Later, he strangled himself with it.” Half perplexed, half amused, Joe says, “I sure turned into an interesting driveway today.”
Later in the night, Joe looks out the window and examines the mansion’s surrounding decay. He lingers on a tennis court with faded markings and an empty pool, where a group of rats fight for a moldy orange. Joe then spots the somber burial of the monkey, and Joe looks at Norma and Max with a certain pity—“[it was] as if she were laying to rest an only child. Was her life really as empty as that? … It was all very queer, but queerer things were yet to come.”
Analysis
In these scenes, we are critically introduced to Norma, one of the most fascinating femme fatales in cinema history. Norma may seem somewhat of a delusional caricature with her dramatic theatricality, grandiose mannerisms, and self-assurance that the public still adores her despite not starring in a film for decades. Nonetheless, she remains a compelling character, in large part due to Max. As Norma’s fiercely loyal butler, he tends to Norma’s needs, praises her as a great star, and reinforces illusory beliefs about her enduring stardom. We may pity Max for devoting his entire life to Norma and falling prey to the allure of celebrity, but we never question his willingness or motivations. The lengths Max goes to boost Norma’s ego convinces Joe—and the audience—there must be something in Norma worthy of genuine love and affection.
Norma instigates Joe’s doomed fate. This may not be explicitly evident in these scenes, as Joe is convinced he outsmarted Norma and finessed himself in a high-paying job - “I felt kind of pleased with the way I'd handled the situation. I dropped the hook and she snapped at it." Though Joe believes he found a quick way to earn some cash and get his life back on track, these scenes foreshadow his impending dependence on Norma, as well as his eventual death.
First, there is Norma’s dead chimp, Norma's closest companion besides Max. When Joe observes the chimp’s elaborate, somber funeral—one of the symbols of Norma’s excess of wealth, alongside her luxurious vintage car—he pities its utmost seriousness. He comments, “[it was] as if she were laying to rest an only child. Was her life really as empty as that?” In other words, Joe believes that Norma’s seeking of companionship from a monkey reveals the fundamental emptiness of her existence. She does not yearn for authentic human relationships, but rather something she can train to provide some entertainment in her life. While Joe instinctively perceives Norma and Max as sinister and “cuckoo,” he ignores these warning signs and decides to stay, with his narration commenting, “it was all very queer, but queerer things were yet to come.” Little does (living) Joe know, he will become a substitute for the dead monkey. Joe soon simulates his affection for Norma, fetches her cigarettes, and performs other small errands in exchange for life’s necessities—a home, food—and extended pleasures of Norma’s lifestyle—expensive clothes and gifts. Also, he is not permitted to leave the house without Norma’s accompaniment, and she must approve of his edits to her script. Like the chimp, Joe becomes fatally dependent on Norma, and their relationship concludes with his death.
Norma’s decision to write a script on Salome (in which she plans to star) foreshadows her and Joe’s future dynamic. Salome was the daughter of Herod and Herodias, who used her seductive dancing to procure the death of John the Baptist. Unsurprisingly, Salome resonates with Norma; she still views herself as a young, seductive temptress who could naturally flourish in the role. By the end of the film, Norma becomes Salome—not on the silver screen, but in real life. She tempts and manipulates Joe into staying at her mansion and becomes responsible for his death. Joe does not predict his forthcoming inability to leave Norma, which results in him symbolically fulfilling the role of John the Baptist, with his head on a platter for her.
Despite their inherent differences, Norma and Joe share a disdain toward the contemporary movie industry. In one of the film’s most famous lines, “I am big, it’s the pictures that got small,” Norma condemns modern films unworthy of her stardom. Instead of confronting her own decline and inability to adapt to the standardization of talkies, she projects her resentment onto the new technology of the changing medium. According to Norma, the prevailing of words over images crippled the contemporary motion picture, which surfaces when she initially views Joe—a screenwriter—as the manifestation of Hollywood’s alleged downfall. She laments, “You've made a rope of words and strangled this business! But there is a microphone right there to catch the last gurgles, and Technicolor to photograph the red, swollen tongue!” While Norma cites the presence of sound, dialogue, and Technicolor as detrimental to the artistic enhancement of film, this decry is disingenuous. Norma feels more concern toward her own waning stardom than the state of film itself, and uses the technological advancements of the medium as a defense mechanism to justify her own career stagnation. She refuses to inwardly confront her repressed feelings of inferiority and irrelevance - dismissing the medium and living in denial is significantly less painful.
Joe shares this outward resentment toward the film industry. However, his disdain arises from his failure to meet the demands of the industry and the formulaic hackwork of the job—“The last one [script] I wrote was about Okies in the Dust Bowl. You'd never know because, when it reached the screen, the whole thing played on a torpedo boat.” In fact, he ridicules Norma with verbally ironic remarks like “Next time I’ll bring my autograph album along, or maybe a hunk of cement and ask for a footprint” after her self-absorbed diatribe about modern Hollywood. Though Joe thinks Norma is ridiculous and demonstrates a lack of pity toward her, his and Norma’s cynicism share some similarities: they both resent the film industry because of their lack of success. Joe used to dream of having a fruitful screenwriting career of high artistic merit, but failed. Likewise, Norma dreams of everlasting stardom, but her popularity dwindled with the advent of talkies. These two seem to diametrically oppose each other, but their frustration both stems in their personal defeats, which in turn fosters a mutual dependence in forthcoming scenes.
A sense of death and decay permeate Norma’s menacing mansion, which symbolizes the soon-to-be-forgotten status of the silent era. Norma’s estate appears so mausoleum-esque, Joe believes it vacant at first. Only two people live in the eight-master-bedroom estate, the drained pool crawls with vermin, the tennis court has faded markings and a sagging net, and the gates resembling prison bars are copious. These features all signify the lifelessness of the mansion. In turn, the lifeless, deteriorating mansion evokes the silent era, as proven by Joe’s comment, “[the house was] the kind crazy movie built in the crazy 20s.” The perished house belongs to the bygone, nearly forgotten era of Hollywood, thereby symbolizing silent film’s own decay. It is no wonder Norma has not abandoned her rotting house—it represents the past to which she so fiercely clings.
