Sunset Boulevard

On the 2026 VCE English and EAL text list, final year. Sunset Boulevard is a List 1 multimodal text (film) for Reading and responding to texts. 2026 is its fourth year on the list and it is not on the 2027 list, so this is the last year it can be examined. It was the most popular Section A text in both 2024 and 2025, chosen by about a quarter of students. Remember: no more than one of your two List 1 texts can be multimodal.

The film in brief

The film opens with police cars racing along Sunset Boulevard to a mansion where a man lies dead, face down in the swimming pool. The dead man, Joe Gillis, narrates, and the story flashes back six months.

Joe is a struggling Hollywood screenwriter, broke and about to lose his car. At Paramount, the story analyst Betty Schaefer tells the producer that Joe's latest script is flat and unoriginal. Fleeing the men sent to repossess his car, Joe blows a tyre and pulls into the garage of a decaying mansion. Its owner is Norma Desmond, once a great star of silent film, who at first mistakes him for the undertaker come to bury her pet chimpanzee. She is writing a script for her return to the screen, a vast version of Salome, and she hires Joe to fix it. Her butler, Max von Mayerling, has Joe's belongings moved into the house before he has agreed to stay.

Joe drifts into dependence: Norma buys him clothes, pays his debts and treats him as a possession. When he tries to escape to a New Year's Eve party thrown by his friend Artie Green, he learns that Norma has cut her wrists, and he returns to become her lover. Norma sends her script to Cecil B. DeMille and visits him on the set of Samson and Delilah; the studio's calls turn out to be about hiring her antique car, not her. Max, who reveals that he was Norma's first director and first husband, writes the fan letters that keep her illusion alive.

Joe begins sneaking out at night to write a script with Betty, who is engaged to Artie, and they fall in love. Norma discovers the collaboration and phones Betty. Joe invites Betty to the mansion, shows her how he lives and sends her away. He packs to go home to his old newspaper job in Dayton, Ohio, and tells Norma the truth: the studio does not want her, the fan letters are from Max, and she is a fifty-year-old woman. As he leaves, Norma shoots him and he falls into the pool. In the final scene, police and newsreel cameras fill the house. Norma, now lost in delusion, believes she is on a film set; Max directs her descent of the staircase and she moves towards the camera for her close-up.

Director and context

Billy Wilder (1906 to 2002) was an Austrian-born filmmaker who worked in Berlin before fleeing the Nazis and becoming one of Hollywood's leading writer-directors. Sunset Boulevard was made at Paramount, written by Wilder with Charles Brackett and D. M. Marshman Jr., and won the Academy Award for Best Story and Screenplay.

Contextual points to use in essays:

• The end of silent film. Sound arrived in Hollywood in the late 1920s and ended many silent careers. Norma belongs to that lost world, and the film is haunted by it.
• Casting that blurs fiction and reality. Gloria Swanson was herself a major silent star. Erich von Stroheim, who plays Max, was a famous silent director who had directed Swanson; the old film Norma screens for Joe is a clip from their real collaboration. Cecil B. DeMille plays himself, and silent-era figures including Buster Keaton appear as Norma's card-playing friends, whom Joe calls the waxworks.
• Hollywood about Hollywood. A studio film that exposes the studio system's cruelty, its disposability and its worship of youth.
• Film noir. A doomed male narrator, a dangerous woman, shadowy lighting and a crime told in flashback are noir conventions. Wilder also mixes in Gothic horror (the decaying mansion, the organ, the midnight funeral) and dark comedy.

Form and structure: film techniques to analyse

• Voice-over from beyond the grave. Joe narrates the whole film, and he is already dead. His cynical, witty commentary shapes our view of Norma, but he is also an unreliable judge of himself. Ask what he leaves out.
• Frame narrative and flashback. The film begins with the ending, so there is no suspense about whether Joe dies, only about how. The structure makes the story feel inevitable, like the plot of a crime film.
• Mise-en-scene. The mansion is cluttered with photographs of the young Norma, heavy furniture and a pipe organ, a museum of the past. The empty, rat-infested pool is later cleaned and filled, Joe swims in it, and it becomes his grave. Norma's antique car with its leopard-skin upholstery is a symbol of her faded glamour and, ironically, the only thing the studio wants.
• Lighting and cinematography. Low-key lighting, deep shadows and the projector beam in the screening scene. The famous shot of Joe's body from beneath the water. On the DeMille set, an old lighting man picks Norma out with a spotlight, and for a moment she is a star again.
• Performance styles. Swanson plays Norma with the large gestures and intense facial expressions of silent acting, set against Holden's naturalistic Joe. The contrast embodies the clash between two eras of cinema.
• Framing and power. Watch how Norma looms over Joe in the house and how the final scene turns the police and reporters into her film crew.

Key characters

• Joe Gillis. Talented but compromised, he knows he is selling himself and despises himself for it. He is witty and self-aware in narration, passive in action. His final honesty is also cruel. He is a victim of Norma and of Hollywood, and a willing participant in his own corruption.
• Norma Desmond. A former star who cannot accept that her time is over. She is grand, funny, manipulative, needy and finally dangerous. Wilder presents her delusion as both absurd and tragic; she is the product of a system that made and discarded her.
• Max von Mayerling. Norma's butler, and secretly her discoverer, former director and first husband. He sustains her fantasy through loyalty and love, but his devotion also traps her. In the final scene he directs her one last time.
• Betty Schaefer. A young script reader with ambition and integrity, the opposite of Norma. She represents the Hollywood Joe could have had, based on honest work, and the future of the industry.
• Artie Green. Joe's friend and Betty's fiancé, an assistant director. His warmth and his normal, noisy party contrast with Norma's empty ballroom.
• Cecil B. DeMille. Playing himself, he treats Norma kindly but cannot tell her the truth, showing how the industry manages its has-beens with courtesy rather than honesty.

Ideas, concerns and values, and how they are built

Illusion and reality

Norma lives in a world of old films, photographs and fan letters, most of them manufactured by Max. The mansion's mise-en-scene, the screening of her old film and the final staircase scene show fantasy overwhelming reality. Joe is not immune: he tells himself he can leave whenever he likes.

Fame and the Hollywood machine

Hollywood makes stars and discards them. The DeMille visit shows the studio's mixture of affection and indifference; the calls about the car expose what the industry actually values. The film's ending turns Norma's tragedy into a media spectacle, suggesting that celebrity culture consumes people even in their ruin.

Ageing and youth

Norma's beauty treatments, her fear of the camera's judgement and Joe's final cruelty about her age show an industry and a culture that punish women for ageing. VCAA set a 2024 topic on how Wilder portrays Hollywood's infatuation with youth.

Control and dependence

Norma controls Joe with money, gifts and emotional blackmail; Joe controls the story through narration; Max controls Norma's illusions; the studio controls everyone's careers. By the end, Norma has lost control of reality and Joe has lost his life. A 2025 topic asked to what extent the film is about the loss of control.

Integrity and compromise

Joe's choice to stay with Norma for comfort, and his self-loathing about it, is set against Betty's honest ambition. His late decision to tell the truth is the one moment he reclaims his integrity, and it gets him killed.

Gender roles

The film reverses the conventional power dynamic: the older woman has the money and the younger man is kept. Joe's discomfort with this, and the way the film frames it, are rich material for discussing how gender roles imprison both characters.

Victims and villains

Almost every character is both. VCAA's 2025 topic on individuals being both victims and villains invites you to show how Wilder builds sympathy and judgement at the same time.

Key scenes and why they matter

1. The opening: police cars and the body in the pool. Establishes the noir frame, the dead narrator and the inevitability of the ending.
2. Paramount: Betty criticises Joe's script. Introduces the industry's demands and Betty's integrity.
3. Arrival at the mansion and the chimpanzee's funeral. Gothic horror and black comedy. Norma's first scenes reveal her grandeur and delusion, including her insistence that she is still big and the pictures have become small.
4. The screening of Norma's old film. Norma, lit by the projector beam, watches her young self. The past is literally projected over the present.
5. The New Year's Eve party and Artie's party. Two parties, one empty and one crowded, contrast Norma's isolation with the life Joe is losing. Norma's suicide attempt pulls him back.
6. Norma's visit to DeMille on the set of Samson and Delilah. The spotlight scene gives Norma a brief return to stardom; the truth about the car shows how she is really seen.
7. Joe and Betty writing at night. Honest work and genuine love, the life Joe could have. Max's revelation about his past with Norma comes in this part of the film.
8. Joe's confrontation and death. Joe shows Betty his situation, sends her away and tells Norma the truth, then Norma shoots him.
9. The staircase. Norma descends to the newsreel cameras believing she is filming Salome, with Max directing. The final close-up dissolves into a blur, as if the image itself is breaking down.

How VCAA frames topics on this text

VCAA's 2024 and 2025 exam reports describe three topic types: a proposition followed by Discuss, Do you agree? or To what extent do you agree?; a quotation from the text followed by a proposition or question; and a direct question. Each text gets two narrow topics about specific ideas and values.

For Sunset Boulevard, the 2024 report cites a quotation topic built on Joe's remark about being fifty, asking how Wilder portrays Hollywood's infatuation with youth. In 2025, the topics asked to what extent the film is about the loss of control, and proposed that Wilder suggests individuals can be both victims and villains. Expect topics on illusion and reality, fame, ageing, control, power and dependence, compromise, and responsibility for Joe's fate.

For a film, your evidence is scenes, dialogue and film techniques. Name the technique (voice-over, close-up, low-key lighting, mise-en-scene, framing, costume, performance, music) and explain what it makes the viewer think or feel.

Practice topics (original, not from VCAA)

These are practice topics written for this page in the VCAA style. They are not past exam topics.

1. In Sunset Boulevard, Joe is as trapped by his own choices as he is by Norma. Discuss.
2. How does Wilder use the mansion to explore the power of the past?
3. Sunset Boulevard suggests that fame destroys those who pursue it. To what extent do you agree?
4. Max's loyalty does Norma more harm than good. Do you agree?
5. In Sunset Boulevard, honesty comes too late to save anyone. Discuss.

Planning example

Topic (practice)

In Sunset Boulevard, Joe is as trapped by his own choices as he is by Norma. Discuss.

Contention

Norma's money, need and control keep Joe in the mansion, but Wilder makes clear, through Joe's own narration, that Joe chooses comfort over integrity at every turn; his escape comes only when he finally chooses honesty, and by then it is fatal.

Paragraph 1: Norma's trap

The mansion as a spider's web: Max moves Joe's belongings in without asking, the gifts and clothes buy his obedience, and the suicide attempt on New Year's Eve pulls him back. Analyse the mise-en-scene of the house and the framing of Norma over Joe.

Paragraph 2: Joe's choices

Joe's voice-over admits he knows what he is doing. Analyse the contrast between the two New Year's parties: at Artie's he has a chance to leave and he goes back. Argue that his self-aware narration makes his passivity more damning.

Paragraph 3: Betty and the road not taken

The night writing sessions show that another life was possible. Analyse the lighting and tone of these scenes against the Gothic house, and Joe's decision to send Betty away to protect her.

Paragraph 4: the final choice

Joe's decision to leave and to tell Norma the truth is the only time he acts decisively. Analyse the confrontation and the ironic image of him dying in the pool he wanted.

Conclusion

Wilder shows a man trapped by a woman, an industry and himself, and suggests that the easiest trap to fall into is the one we choose.

Common pitfalls

• Making Norma a joke or a monster. Wilder invites pity as well as horror; strong essays hold both.
• Taking Joe's narration at face value. He is witty and persuasive, and he is the one telling the story.
• Listing techniques. Every technique must connect to an idea in the topic.

Watch the film

Sunset Boulevard is in copyright, so this page analyses the film without quoting its dialogue. It is rated PG and widely available on DVD, Blu-ray and streaming services; your school will have a copy.

Sources

• VCE English and EAL Text List 2026 and Text List 2027, VCAA.
• VCE English 2025 examination and 2025 examination report, VCAA.
• 2024 VCE English examination report, VCAA.
• VCE English and EAL Study Design (version 1.4), VCAA.