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Congratulations on your series. You play very well on screen. SUNSET BOULEVARD is one of the two great films on Hollywood watching Hollywood. The other one is THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL. There's a subgenre of screenwriter films that includes THE PLAYER and BARTON FINK, but the former two take the cinematic biscuit...

I think the genre of SUNSET BOULEVARD has more to do with Norma Desmond than Joe Gillis. Joe Gillis is the narrator, but the protagonist is Norma Desmond. Her trajectory is Success/Failure. The real world of ex-stars living on Sunset Boulevard supplied Wilder's kernel of inspiration. Joe Gillis is his alter ego. SUNSET BOULEVARD is a degeneration plot.

I’m wondering what genre(s) Sunset Boulevard falls under.

Joe Gillis starts the film in his Hollywood apartment already a sell out as a screenwriter. he goes from being a prostitute artistically to being a prostitute in every way a man can be a prostitute. so on the value of success he goes from bad to as bad as it gets. at the end he is dead, first spiritually and then physically. in the backstory he was a good guy. so if backstory is taken into account then it is a punitive plot, i.e. a good guy turned bad and punished for it.

on the other hand, for the value of integrity Joe arcs from being a weasel and a scammer to admitting his mistake and saving his friends from his fate and packing up and leaving. in that sense he died a heroic death for his integrity.

success and integrity are difficult to analyze separately because they become intertwined via the negation of the negation.

I’ve heard some people call Sunset Boulevard a horror story. there is something to that because it has a death/crypt image system. after Norma’s suicide attempt prompts Joe to tell her that he loves her she reaches out and grabs him with her claw-like hands like a corpse reaching up out of a grave and dragging him down with her. in the end Joe is damned. he throws away true love and true success and is no longer capable of feeling anything. and so when Norma guns him down she is doing him a favor.

I read that somebody once asked Billy Wilder if he had made a black comedy in Sunset Boulevard and he replied “no, just a picture.”

my first exposure to teleology was when I was introduced to the monkeys typing Shakespeare theory. said theory has been exploited many times to great comic effect by Simpsons writers.

I keep a picture of a monkey at a typewriter on my desktop….for some reason…

Really great work, Bass! Glad you are doing this and share your knowledge with us.
Very insightful and clear lecture, but what is the spelling for the last philosophical word you used to mean the study of design of final purpose of the ends?