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In Billy Wilder's classic film Sunset Boulevard, an uncanny incongruity between words and images penetrates the heart of cinematic convention. The formal aspects of the film itself do not unsettle the spectator; Wilder constructs a visual narrative which rarely departs from the standard techniques of the medium. A voice-over narrator both introduces each scene and interprets the film's visual imagery, guiding the viewer through a series of events leading up to a murder. This familiar suturing of script and spectacle lulls the viewer into a false sense of security. Uncanniness insinuates itself into the picture through Sunset Boulevard's subject matter, which tears apart the sutures which hold words and images together. The film thus exposes a tenuous, contrived, and potentially antagonistic partnership between those representamen.s upon which cinematic signification depends. Sunset Boulevard deconstructs the "natural" affinity between the seeable and the sayable by polarizing the movie's leading roles. Joe Gillis, the narrator, writes screenplays. His tendency to disparage images reveals his conviction that they undermine the authenticity of words. His nemesis, Norma Desmond, is a former silent screen star who believes that the advent of talking pictures has destroyed her career. Norma despises words, which she insists, have vitiated the purity of visual imagery in the film medium. The ill-fated union between these two characters dramatizes the disaster which ensues when words and images refuse to complement each other, creating a rupture in representation as signs struggle for an autonomous existence of their own.
The presentation of the title in the initial scene foreshadows the film's morbid fascination with words and images. The camera zooms in on the street name, Sunset Boulevard, painted on a curb side. The ominous music which accompanies this title, the close-up of the dirty, cracked pavement, the gutter-level perspective (which subsequently drags the opening credits along the surface of the street), and the oblique camera angle which sets the painted text offkilter, all imbue the title's fusion of words and imagery with sinister significance. Of course, the name, Sunset Boulevard, further conveys thematic import. Besides designating a real street in Los Angeles, the adjective "Sunset" also denotes a road which leads to a literal death for Joe Gillis, and in Norma Desmond's case, a symbolic one. In examining this title,...