PDF@Zoetropolis presents: Sunset Boulevard
Part of the America 250 Film Series
Series 3: Reinvention & Transformation
The Dream Machine—America’s Promise of Self-Recreation
American mythology has long made a seductive promise: you can become someone new. Shed your past. Write your own story. Reinvent yourself at will.
But what happens when the performance swallows the performer?
We begin our next America 250 sequence with Billy Wilder’s mordant, magnificent Sunset Boulevard (1950), one of Hollywood’s greatest films about Hollywood itself. Gloria Swanson gives an unforgettable performance as Norma Desmond, a forgotten silent-film star still living inside the image the movies once made of her. William Holden plays Joe Gillis, a struggling screenwriter drawn into her decaying mansion, her fantasies of return, and the dream machine that has consumed them both.
Sunset Boulevard is noir, melodrama, satire, ghost story, and self-indictment. It asks what happens when identity depends on an audience, when fame becomes a trap, and when illusion begins to feel more livable than reality.
As part of our America 250 series, we’ll use the film to think about one of America’s deepest myths: the belief that the self can be remade. Is reinvention freedom? Performance? Delusion? Survival? And what happens when a culture becomes addicted to its own image?
Join us for a brief pre-screening introduction, a featured cocktail, the film, and conversation afterward.
Thursday, July 23 at 6:30 PM
Zoetropolis Cinema Stillhouse