I wish I could tell you that Sunset Boulevard is about Joe Gillis. After all, he’s our protagonist and our narrator, played with masterfully sarcastic wit by William Holden. The film opens with Gillis floating dead in a pool and the rest of the story is told in flashback to show how he got that way.

Gillis is that most maltreated and underappreciated creature in show business: He’s a screenwriter. When we first see him alive, he’s living in a cramped apartment and struggling to stay one step ahead of the repo men. He gets a few scenes with his agent and a studio exec, going through actions and participating in verbal exchanges that should ring a bell for anyone with a passing knowledge of Hollywood’s inner workings. More than anything else, Gillis wants to keep on living in Hollywood, telling whatever stories he can to do so.

Alas, this movie is not really about Joe Gillis. Rather, everything about this movie begins and ends with Norma Desmond. And that’s exactly how she’d want it.

Norma Desmond was a silent film star who fell by the wayside with the advent of talking movies. She openly scorns such modern technologies as sound and color, constantly declaring that she’s still the world’s biggest star (“It’s the films that got small!”), though she’s quite visibly desperate to make her big comeback return. To that end, she writes a bloated and hopelessly awful script about the life of Salome, with the intention of casting herself in the title role and getting Cecil B. DeMille to direct. So, when Gillis finds himself stranded in Desmond’s garish mansion, she of course hires him to polish up the script. Gillis takes the job because the money’s good, even though he knows she’s a lunatic and that the job is next to impossible.

Desmond and her protrayal by Gloria Swanson must be seen to be truly believed and understood. Her ego seems to warp the very fabric of reality. Her entire life is structured around keeping herself in her youthful glory days, cutting herself off from any external reality. Her self-serving delusions and all-consuming need to be loved are so pathetic that she effortlessly draws every nearby person into her strange, made-up fantasyland. In mind, body and soul, Norma Desmond is a grotesque parody of what it means to be a celebrity.

Perhaps my favorite bit of commentary comes from none other than Cecil B. DeMille (he plays himself here). It’s a brief line, so quick you could easily miss it, but he says that Desmond was only difficult to work with towards the end of her career. “A dozen press agents working overtime can do terrible things to the human spirit,” said DeMille. This says a lot about the role of paparazzi and the press in the lives of celebrities: Did her chronic delusions of grandeur result from round-the-clock adoration and press coverage? There’s also the journalists at the end of the movie to consider, glamorizing Desmond and playing by her rules even while she’s being taken away as a murder suspect!

And let’s not forget Desmond’s only loyal company, Max. Nobody does more to maintain Norma’s outrageous ego than her faithful butler, played with poker-faced strength by Erich von Stroheim. He sends her fake fan letters, he projects all of her old movies and he’ll always say with a straight face that Norma Desmond is the world’s greatest star. We later learn that he’s not just doing this out of loyalty to Norma, but for his own selfish purposes as well: A long time ago, Max was the director that discovered Norma Desmond and later became her first husband. He gambled everything on her career back then and he continues to do so now.

Of course, Gillis is just as guilty of maintaining Norma’s perfect little life, but for very different reasons. The man hates her and he’s not exactly shy about it. Unfortunately, he’s stuck living at the mansion without a car, which makes any kind of transportation in L.A. impossible. Norma also has a ton of money and work available, something that Gillis was constantly struggling to find in his former life. At first, Gillis seems to be perfectly fine with grinning and bearing it, so long as he doesn’t have to hide from bill collectors anymore. And if that means having to pretend to Norma’s fanbase of zero that he’s her boyfriend, so be it.

However, Gillis finds that he just can’t keep living this way. He goes out behind Norma’s back to go work on another screenplay with Betty Schaefer, a young aspiring writer beautifully played by Nancy Olsen. Desmond inevitably finds out, grows jealous and does her best to break them up. When Gillis stops her, she begs for him to hit her or scream at her, to do anything at all except to give her the one thing she can’t stand: Hatred. The following sequence is very interesting, as Gillis gives Schaefer a full confession as to what he’s become. This 1) establishes that Gillis has reached his breaking point, and 2) frees Schaefer up so that she can 2a) go back to her nice-guy fiancee without having to go on carrying a torch for Gillis, thus 2b) ruining the last good thing left for Gillis in L.A. so that he can go back to his Ohio hometown guilt-free.

But even before Gillis can make it to Sunset Boulevard, he just had to try and tell Norma that the emperor is, in fact, naked. As much for his sake as for hers, Gillis acts out against this lie that Norma’s been living this whole time. He should have known better. Earlier in the film, Desmond attempted suicide after Gillis spurned her for the first time. Norma had already proven that she’d rather die than live in a world where she’s not universally beloved. And it never occurred to him that she’d kill the one man who ever spurned her, rather than let him go.

I know it might seem like I’m spoiling the entire movie, but I hope you’ll trust me when I say that I’m just scratching the surface here. The character of Norma Desmond is a dazzling and multi-faceted jewel of a clusterfuck. Analyzing her actions or mindset with any amount of depth will inevitably peel away innumerable layers of Tinseltown satire. I didn’t even get into the plastic surgery commentary (Desmond obsesses over looking young for a movie shoot she doesn’t know will never come) or the implied drug abuse (at one point, Max points out that Desmond can’t take sleeping pills, since they’re now a suicide hazard). Seriously, I could be here all day trying to type this stuff down.

Hell, I haven’t even mentioned the technical aspects of the movie, every one of which is extraordinary. Visually, the film somehow manages to show the glitz and glamor of Hollywood and of Norma Desmond’s mansion, even though the entire film is shot in black and white. The score and the use of voice-over both give the movie a noir feel that I found very refreshing. The screenplay does a fantastic job of selling Norma Desmond’s gradual slide from crazy to criminally insane and the dialogue is full of great repartee between Gillis and Schaefer. Even on his own, Gillis is given a lot of very clever, very witty lines.

Sunset Boulevard is at once a noir-lite drama, a snapshot of 50s-era show business (complete with several icons of the time appearing as themselves) and a timely parody of Hollywood, all wrapped around a character who is celebrity satire incarnate. The actors are all amazing beyond words and the screenplay is pure gold. If you are a movie lover in any capacity, you should consider this mandatory viewing. Seek this film out immediately.