The Norma Desmond 50
One of the great joys of writing The Fractured Mirror, beyond, of course, feverishly anticipating the massive wealth and fame I will undoubtedly achieve upon its publication, is realizing just how many great movies have been made about movies.
I am astonished and amazed by the depth and richness of American movies about the film industry. Few movies about the crazy-making world of Hollywood are as deep, rich or enduring as Sunset Boulevard.
It’s one of those movies you can watch over and over and over again. It never gets old. I pick up something new with each re-visit.
The last time I watched and wrote about Sunset Boulevard for The Fractured Mirror I was struck by how young Norma Desmond is.
As a kid, Norma Desmond didn’t just seem old: she seemed ancient.
So I was surprised to learn that within the world of Sunset Boulevard, Norma Desmond is only fifty years old.
FIFTY! SHE’S ONLY FIFTY!
That’s not old. That’s not ancient. It’s younger than both Jennifer Lopez and Paul Rudd.
But within the context of Sunset Boulevard, it makes sense that Gloria Desmond feels like a tragic relic of a long-ago era despite literally only being a year out of her forties.
That’s because the world changed tremendously in the thirty years separating Norma Desmond’s 1920 silent heyday and 1950, when sound was king and movies faced fearsome competition from television.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how Norma Desmond, the epitome of a sad old has been living forever in a haunted house of memories, isn’t actually old because I am only a few years away from being fifty myself.
I’m forty-six years YOUNG now. That means that in 2026 I will officially be as old as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.
That doesn’t feel great! But it also feels weirdly appropriate. I’ve got four more years until I hit my fifties/enter my Norma Desmond period but I already feel thoroughly disengaged and disconnected from the pop culture of the present.
And my JOB is to engage and connect with pop culture! Yet I look at the lineups for Coachella and think, like many of you, that I don’t know who ANY of these people are.
That’s why I love going to the Gathering of the Juggalos and will miss going this year. Many of the acts peaked culturally in the mid 1990s, when I was roughly the same age as Norma Desmond and Gloria Swanson during their respective silent screen heydays.
I am a ghost of my younger self, a specter of the more successful, hopeful person I used to be. We all are. Time turns us all into Norma Desmond, whether we’re ready or not.
That’s why we must make peace with time and aging and mortality so that they do not destroy us. That is easier said than done.
I am currently depressed as fuck about getting older. I feel more like Norma Desmond and Howard Beale than I do contemporary cinematic characters like, I dunno, the Minions?
I am a man out of time but I do not have the luxury of going mad. I have to make a living and provide for my family, and you fortunately and unfortunately need to stay at least moderately sane and marginally engaged with the world around you in order to make that happen.
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