First Person, Dead Guy

It's not often we get to hear the dead speak, so when they do, we should probably listen up, right? And boy, does the dead guy at the heart of this movie have a tale to tell.

Famously, a dead man tells the entire story of Sunset Boulevard—we first see his corpse floating in a pool. After this initial prologue establishing that the narrator, Joe Gillis, is indeed dead, we get to see the rest of the movie unfold, with Joe's voiceover guiding us along from beyond the grave. The action of the movie almost entirely follows Joe, since he's the one telling the story, though his voice continues to linger after his death, describing Norma's state of final madness. Pretty impressive for a corpse, no?

Obviously, this is a pretty original way of telling a story. Has Joe's spirit survived into the afterlife, or what? We don't know—we just hear his voice, transcending his own physical survival and explaining zilch about how he pulled that off. Interestingly, the original opening scene for Sunset Boulevard involved a bunch of corpses at the morgue all discussing how they died—and then Joe told his story in that context. But it didn't work with test audiences, so Wilder went back and shot the opening scene we know today—with no explanation whatsoever.

Spoiler Alert

It gives a kind of interesting narrative spin to the movie, too. We already know what's going to happen—Joe's going to die. So, when it seems like he's going to head back to Dayton, Ohio, we should know it's not going to happen. The tension comes from not knowing the circumstances: We need Joe to fill in the blanks for us and chart the course toward his own inevitable doom. Instead of ruining the suspense, the fact that we know Joe is doomed actually creates its own kind of suspense. Weird, right? See, we know Joe can't escape his fate, so watching him fall into it makes us, potentially, nervous. We just watch the movie come full-circle—a dead man reflecting on the circumstances that killed him.