Occasional Deconstructions

Chapter 2. Uncanny Temporalities, Haunting Occasions: Sunset Boulevard

Chapter 2 UNCANNY TEMPORALITIES, HAUNTING OCCASIONS: SUNSET BOULEVARD Cinema, like all other forms of writing, leaves something behind, something involving material effects that cannot be hidden. Peter Brunette and David Wills Keep it out of focus—I want to win the foreign picture award. Billy Wilder A word on the subject of the various figures of appearing—image, morphe, eidos, and especially phantasm . . . we come right back to . . . the “coming before” of the other in the I, i.e. as phantasm. But I would not free myself so easily of phantoms . . . I think that we are structured by the phantasmatic, and in particular that we have a phantasmatic relation to the other, and that the phantasmicity of this relation cannot be reduced, this pre-originary intervention of the other in me. Jacques Derrida 35 I M atters of structure and sequence are announced in and through the notion of “film,” staging and representation also; and, through these, the projection of a certain economy or genealogy of cinema, having to do with what remains, what haunts, what retreats and returns, without either having vanished completely or, indeed, ever being there at all. Film is always caught up, even as it mediates, temporal loops, traces, and folds, as is well known. Film, it can be said, is always the scene in which haunting takes place, regardless of narrative concern, thereby revealing in the processes of apparition, arrival, revenance , and withdrawal, the subject’s being “structured by the phantasmatic .” Moreover, the ghostly condition of the filmic scene, as the revelation of our “phantasmatic relation to the other,” articulates the irreducibility of this relation.1 Film’s possibility as everywhere an act of unfolding and staging of spectral relation is here explored through the traces of structures of inheritance, albeit structures that remain in and as ruins of themselves. The processes of uncanny transference, transport , transmission, and translation—addressed through the singular example of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard are read for their occasional effects, for the ways in which they articulate the temporal disruption of the subject by the material effects of the otherwise immaterial interventions and calls of the other, leaving identity in ruins. II Sunset Boulevard (dir. Billy Wilder, 1950) concerns the life—and death—of Joe Gillis (William Holden), a struggling Hollywood screenwriter . It also focuses on the death-in-life of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a once-famous actress of the silent screen, and now parody of her previous incarnations, as she lives among her memories, delusions, and the remnants of a ghostly Hollywood past. Gillis, attempting to save his car from being repossessed, turns into the driveway of Desmond’s rundown Sunset Boulevard mansion. At first, for some inexplicable reason , he is mistaken for an undertaker, the corpse in question being that of the actress’s dead chimpanzee. However, on learning Gillis’s real profession , Norma invites the writer to stay, to look over an unwieldy, melo36 Identities in Ruins dramatic script retelling the story of Salomé, on which Norma Desmond has been working. Agreeing, Gillis finds himself also agreeing to stay at the house, ostensibly for convenience’ sake, but, in reality, to avoid debt collectors. Once there, he finds it increasingly difficult to free himself from the claustrophobic situation into which he has been dragged. Eventually, following a love affair between the has-been actress and never-was writer, an evasive encounter between Norma and director Cecil B. De Mille, a series of melodramatic arguments, and a failed suicide attempt on the actress’s part, Joe attempts to leave, only to be shot by the demented Desmond. The film opens, after the credits, with the image of Gillis’s corpse floating in the mansion’s swimming pool. An invisible narrator, the dead Joe Gillis, provides the incorporeal voice-over, in order to set the record straight, and to tell the “true” narrative of events, before the media can translate and thereby distort the reality, for which he believes he is the authorial voice. Thus, the film opens with a displacement that is also the sign of an unsuturable gap to which I will return—the disruption between sound and vision, the unseen and the seen, supposing, against all hope, that invisible sound will offer access to, or otherwise stand in for a narrative veracity in the face of all the visual distortions. Sunset Boulevard is a film predicated on, and also promising, the possibility of...