"The, uh, stuff that dreams are made of"

For me, the above quote from The Maltese Falcon, when taken in context, illustrates exactly what film noir is all about. If you’re not familiar with The Maltese Falcon, here’s a brief summary to give you that context. [Warning: 60-year-old spoilers follow] The story follows Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart), a private detective. Spade and his partner take a case tailing a man, and by the next morning the partner is dead. Spade looks deeper into the case, and finds that the girl who hired them (Brigid O’Shaughnessy, played by Mary Astor) is not who she says she is. She’s actually part of a gang of criminals (including Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo and Sydney Greenstreet as Kaspar Gutman), who are working to find an invaluable antique statuette of a black bird, the Maltese Falcon, which they stole and then had stolen from them. After being assaulted, suspect by the police of murdering his partner, and nearly dying, Spade manages to track down the bird. When he examines it, Spade discovers the statue is actually a worthless fake, made of lead. The real Maltese Falcon is still in the possession of its last owner. At the end of the film, after Spade brings in the police and they arrest the gang, a cop points to the Falcon and asks, “What’s that?” Spade answers “The, uh, stuff that dreams are made of.” It’s a very Romantic line when taken out of context, as I’ve often seen it, but when you look at the story that leads up to it, the line is a perfect encapsulation of the pessimism and darkness of Film Noir. Spade goes through hell to get the Falcon, and it turns out to be worthless. This is the stuff of dreams? It is if you believe that dreams themselves are usually worthless and not worth fighting for.

“Uh, Clint,” I hear you saying, “We watched Sunset Boulevard, not The Maltese Falcon. Why’d you make me read all that?” The answer, dear reader, is that these same themes are at work in Sunset Boulevard. In fact, you could say that Sunset Boulevard is all about dreams. Joe dreams of making it big in Hollywood, Norma Desmond dreams of a triumphant return to film, Max dreams of making the love of his life happy, and Betty dreams of moving up from reader to screenwriter. And of course, all their dreams come true, right?

Oh.

By the end of the film, Joe is dead, Norma Desmond is on her way to the loony bin, Max can do nothing for her, and without Joe, and Betty probably gave up hope of finishing their script. That’s four lives, the lives of all the main characters, ruined. And why were they ruined? Because Norma Desmond couldn’t let go of her dream, and instead made it realer than reality in her mind.

Reality and unreality are also explored in Sunset Boulevard. From the start, the viewer is presented with two worlds: the glamorous, ritzy, Hollywood ideal, which Joe dreams of, and the hardscrabble reality in which he lives. Excluding the initial scene of Joe’s body floating in the pool, the hardscrabble world is what we are shown for the first fifteen minutes or so, and therefore our suspension of disbelief adapts to this world, making it seem like reality to us. Because of this, the shift in tone when Joe arrives at Norma Desmond’s house strikes us as odd in a way it might not have if we were exposed to it right out of the gate. (Of course, the dead chimp helps too.)

As we stay in Norma’s world for a while, much longer than we were in Joe’s world, in fact, we become accustomed to it. That is not to say that we begin to see her as “normal”, of course, since the suspense in the film hinges on the fact that Norma is insane. However, our sense of reality within the world of the film becomes accustomed to the lonely house with the constant sense of foreboding.

This goes on for so long that when we finally return to the “real world”, Artie’s New Year’s party, there is a sense of unreality to it. This sense is aided by a certain unrealness in the staging. There are more people at the party than would reasonably be expected, and other smaller touches, like punch made from cough drops and Joe and Betty’s exaggerated dialogue add to the effect. While Norma’s mansion was shown in wide shots with long depth of field, the party has a much shallower depth of field for the most part, which might create a feeling that something is missing. (“It was the pictures that got small.”) Through all these small touches, the viewer is sucked into Norma’s mind, so that although we may not support her actions, we can at least sympathize with her.

If you’re reading this, that means that you’ve either managed to slog through the entire post, in which case I applaud your tenacity, or else you’ve cheated and skipped to the end, in which case, Shame On You. In closing, it would seem that Sunset Boulevard is a film about the pointlessness of dreams and the shifting nature of personal reality. I’ll leave you with the thought that when Betty speaks of her dreams of being an actress being shattered, she says “It was the best thing that ever happened to me.”