This is not a review - it’s a look at a Hollywood classic through a studied but informal lens. There’ll be spoilers for the film in question.
Sunset Boulevard is a classic 1951 Hollywood film noir/drama held together by EXCELLENT screenwriting and meta-commentary on Hollywood career life. It's about a down-on-his-luck screenwriter who comes across a secluded lady in a hillside mansion who initially hires him to ghostwrite her screenplay and then gradually sucks him into a life of being her emotional meat puppet. The key to the hot take is in that last sentence. This film is remembered as Hollywood looking back on itself and how its obsession with appearances can end up destroying itself, and is thus well-liked by Hollywood-types, but at its heart, it is first and foremost ... a VAMPIRE STORY.
Vampire stories are about heroes being drawn in towards a mostly-normal person with something different about them and then discovering they're ultimately something sinister, and then having to get away from them.
Twilight upended the formula by being about getting closer to them. That's part of why it's different.
Similarly,
Sunset Boulevard is a film about a woman seducing an unassuming man into an emotionally abusive relationship, but the way it chooses to tell it is steeped in gothic vampire tropes and habits. The fact that it's reversing the genders and examining issues of personal appearance perhaps makes it more difficult to look at on a personal level, but it also makes it ring true, since things we don't like to talk about arguably need to be talked about at least a little.
So, to start from the beginning:
Joe Gillis, seeking a safe refuge in Hollywood, knocks on the door of a large mansion on a hill. No one lives there except the reclusive owner Norma Desmond and her grim, misshapen manservant Max. The hero is let in, and Desmond is mysterious and exotic in the extreme, wearing a fantastic wardrobe and being vague but controlling. Upon hearing he is a screenwriter, she decides he must prolong his stay, so he can work on the script she's written, and despite something being off about her, Joe is intrigued by what he sees of her and agrees so he can stay there. That night, he looks out the window and sees a dilapidated, empty property, and outside, an oddly solemn funeral procession is held for a pet of Desmond's that died, complete with small coffin. Everything about the mansion seems to come from another age.
Over time, Joe settles into a routine, but the more suspicious Desmond becomes. She has friends around on occasion, but for the most part it's her swanning about and strangely indulging her own ego by rewatching her old features; it being revealed that she used to be a big star but fell out of the spotlight; making her essentially Hollywood royalty, but a strange breed of royalty unconcerned with anything current.
Joe grows increasingly uneasy, and it reaches a head when he realizes Desmond doesn't really have anything in her life besides this egotism, and now - he realizes uneasily - her relationship with him. He tries to escape briefly, but no sooner does he leave, then he's drawn back in by her apparently injuring herself at hearing he left her. And with his return, she metaphorically sinks her nightmare fangs into his neck and starts seeping his lifeblood.
He becomes a subject, a thrall of her whims and desires, letting her dictate most of what he wears and some of what he does. Nothing explicit is shown, but it's seen she bears an unhealthy amount of control in his life, and is really only seeing him as a means of sustenance, not a person in his own right. Her watching her old films and calling up her old pals and trying to make herself look younger and even her relationship with him are all really about one thing - holding onto her youth and the power and vitality it bestows. The only problem is that everything else must pay the price for it.
Joe still has things anchoring him to reality, but they're few and far between, and he eventually receives a final confirmation of all his fears - Max, the timid manservant, was once a charismatic film director and leader ... and used to be Desmond's husband. Joe is not the first man she has ensnared and sucked the life from. She will not stop, and Max is so infatuated with her after years of spent time with her he cannot conceive of escaping her control at all. This is not going well.
Eventually, Joe makes a choice. Pushed by a friend, he gets up, he casts away her favors and gifts, and he gets up to leave. No amount of mysteriousness, royalty, or wealthiness is worth losing his life for. But she stops him from leaving, and shoots him in the back when he insists. The vampire has claimed her last victim. But without someone to leech from, she falls too. Spiraling into madness, she is stuck in a permanent state of whole-heartedly reliving her past, and as is apparent to everyone watching, her life will not last long with her life-supporting mechanisms now destroyed.
You see this? This is Dracula. Dracula is a mysterious stranger on a hill with wealth, class, mysteriousness, and unusual habits. People are entranced by him, but eventually realize he just wants to feed on them, and try to get away from him. The ending is different, but every vampire story is different too. In this case, it's a tragedy where the hero dies, not a success story where the vampire does. The fact that the background of Golden-Age Hollywood is there is really them telling a contemporary story with an older blueprint, which is part of why the film's so good. This is probably why the director
Billy Wilder is also mostly famous for directing films starring some of the earliest and most successful star-studded Hollywood dramas - he knows about obsession with beauty and status, and
Sunset Boulevard is about how beauty and status can blind us, and even the people possessing them.
The moral of all this is really the same moral of the original vampire stories too, which is if a mysterious but cool stranger with some weird habits invites you up to their isolated mansion and finds excuses to make you stay, you get the heck out of there. No amount of comfort is worth having your personality sucked away by someone, even if they seemed superficially kind. Listen to your danger sense, and don't get your blood sucked.
