Los Angeles is also a city that suggests passion, terrific possibilities for illicit love. Films set in Los Angeles borrow the City's sensuality, its physicality. Even murder becomes glamorous in Billy Wilder's "Double Indemnity" the moment the camera glides up Los Feliz and enters a Glendale mini-mansion and locates Barbara Stanwyck wearing only a towel and high heal pumps, and a sexy sneary smile that kills Fred MacMurray long before she shoots him, a unique love story. "I love you, baby." "I love you, baby!" Growl, growl, shoot, shoot, come, come, die, die." It may also have redefined terms for fidelity. "The machinery had started to move and no one could stop it."

     In other sweaty "noirs"--whether in black and white or Technicolor--the setting of Los Angeles contributes a sense of fate conspiring, just as the city's undercurrents conspire to grind. "The machinery had started to move and no one could stop it," says MacMurray about his fatal passion with Stanwyck. A similar sense of inevitability augments the drive toward injustice in Robert Wise's "I Want to Live!"

     Among the voyeuristic films that stare in fascination at themselves and reflect a city enthralled by its many reflections, Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett's "Sunset Boulevard" sets the pattern, a narcissistic, consciously self-conscious film about narcissism in a narcissistic city. Its metaphoric title appears on concrete. The film wasn't shot on Sunset Boulevard. It was shot on Wilshire Boulevard.

     Not only is Gloria Swanson's performance as Norma Desmond appropriately stylized; but so is the structure of the film. When at the opening Norma Desmond summons the man she believes to be an undertaker claiming the body of her pet-monkey, she also alerts the audience: "You there, why have you kept me waiting?"

     Viewed in retrospect by a dead man, the film links past and present into a journey toward inevitability, fate asserted; it links the past and the present without flashbacks through a series of reflections: Early photographs of Norma Desmond abound. Led to believe we're watching a clip of a young Norma famous movies, we're actually viewing a clip a Gloria Swanson film. That actual film was directed by Erich Von Stroheim, whom Swanson, the mistress of Joseph Kennedy, fired and who here plays her butler. Silent film stars pantomime themselves.

     When Norma Desmond returns to Paramount, Wilder's wicked sense of irony about Hollywood is displayed: Cecil B. DeMille informs Norma Desmond that Hollywood has changed, at the same time that he's directing an actual biblical clunker, "Samson and Delilah," while Norma Desmond is offering him her not-dissimilar treatment of "Salome."

     At the end, the film's structure winds into a circle of reflections. A Paramount newsreel camera, filmed by the movie's cameras, arrives to capture the filmic action. Norma Desmond snaps out of a trance when she hears that the cameras are rolling again, but they're newsreel cameras. Simultaneously she converts a small mirror into her key-light, the prized glowing territory of light given to only a few great stars. Her mansion turns into a set within the set of this Hollywood movie.

     As she descends to face the deceiving cameras, her indictment of the audience in the opening sequence extends: "This is all there is, just us, and the camera, and those wonderful people out there in the dark"--the people who kept her waiting, abandoned her, the audience now watching her decline in fascination.

     The film fades into a shimmering backdrop. Is that the pool into which Narcissus drowned in search of his own reflection? Or has Norma Desmond been saved by disappearing into her own stardust, her particular salvation?

     Even ostensibly "realistic" films emphasize performance in incorporating the set of Los Angeles. Several borrow from Sunset Boulevard, some subtly, some overtly; I have often observed that there is a vast difference between "homage" and "pillage."

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Original material by John Rechy appears frequently on these pages.