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Conclusion: Movies, Politics, and Narratives of Nostalgia
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| 219 Conclusion Movies, Politics, and Narratives of Nostalgia The scene opened onto an ornate, overstuffed bedroom in disarray with Hedda Hopper, in her mid-sixties, hatted and gloved, seated on an unmade bed, speaking rapidly into a white telephone on the nightstand. “Times City Desk? Hedda Hopper speaking. I’m talking from the bedroom of Norma Desmond. Don’t bother with a rewrite man, take it direct. Ready?— As day breaks over the murder house, Norma Desmond, famed star of yesteryear , is in a state of complete mental shock.” The film was director-writer Billy Wilder’s “pessimistic and bitter” Sunset Boulevard (1950), and the actress played herself, a movie gossip columnist determined to get the scoop on a tragic Hollywood murder.1 The perpetrator, Norma Desmond, was a former star of film’s silent era played by Gloria Swanson, whose acting career also flourished during that era. Cecil B. DeMille and others from film’s early days appeared as “themselves.” Hopper’s appearance in this iconic Hollywood film acknowledged her place and reinforced her prominence in American cinema during its golden age. Yet the filmmakers originally wanted both Hopper and Louella Parsons in the film, enacting their famous rivalry by competing for the telephone to get their stories out first. Parsons, however, turned the role down. According to her biographer Samantha Barbas, “she felt that the part, as a crooning, predatory press gossip, would tarnish her reputation.”2 Hopper had no such qualms. She also had no qualms about quoting criticism of her performance and her politics from a review in the Daily Worker. The Communist newspaper minced no words in describing Hopper and DeMille as “two of the most bigoted, Sybaritic, ostentatious and fraudulent reactionaries in all filmdom,” a description Hopper wore proudly. In fact, as Sam Staggs notes, “It’s hard to think of a movie with more right-wingers on it than Sunset Boulevard.”3 Nominated for Best Picture and winner of two Oscars for art direction and story/screenplay, Sunset Boulevard remains the most respected film in which 220 | Movies, Politics, and Narratives of Nostalgia Hopper ever appeared, and it offered an unflinching view of the decline of old Hollywood that both criticized and invoked nostalgia. Norma Desmond lived in the past. For the character, the past of movie stardom was infinitely superior to the present of obscurity, and her excessive longing to return to her glory days resulted in delusion, dementia, and, ultimately, death for her much younger lover, failed screenwriter Joe Gillis. “The great theme of Sunset Boulevard,” film scholar Jeffrey Meyers argues, “is the mad attempt to sustain an impossible illusion.”4 While the film’s plot effectively presented nostalgia as “false and disabling,” its meditation on old Hollywood also sparked nostalgic sentiments among Hopper and her industry colleagues. “At a special showing of ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ for movie bigwigs,” Hopper wrote, “many of them sat there and wept. Each saw in it a bit of his own life.” She went on to recall fond memories of Gloria Swanson’s “triumphant” past in silent film, a past Hopper shared.5 Hopper’s own careers as actress and gossip columnist spanned the past and present of Sunset Boulevard, and she, too, expressed “bittersweet yearning for the past, the pang of recognition that accompanies the taste of one’s own fleeting mortality.”6 Although her gossip career was as its height when the film came out in 1950, she saw and feared Hollywood’s and her own decline. In harking back to the silent era of filmmaking, which ended abruptly with the advent of sound, the film commented on the waning of the studio system in the new “age of television.” Moreover, in using performers like Hopper, Swanson, and others who were in their acting prime during the silent era, Sunset Boulevard showed Hollywood as “an unstable, rapidly changing place, where creative giants may be forgotten within their lifetimes.”7 A scene that perfectly captured this sense of time moving on and people being left behind occurred when Norma Desmond gathered together three old friends to play cards at her dark, decrepit mansion. These were Desmond’s “actor friends,” the Joe Gillis character, played by William Holden, observes in voice-over, “dim figures you may still remember from the silent days. I used to think of them as her Wax Works.” Years later, Hopper visited a Movieland Wax Museum that included Gloria Swanson in an “elaborate setting” from the film. “There I met many old...