Those still giddy about Vatican II appear like a straggling line of octogenarian cheerleaders—irrelevant and embarrassing.
Once upon a time, Hollywood used to produce movies. Real movies, that is. They were like serious novels but on celluloid. They were movies that explored the depths of the human condition, with its soaring peaks and dreadful valleys. It was a time when formidable creativity was placed at the service of truth and beauty. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Hollywood was the closest thing modernity had to Quattrocento Florence.
No longer. Today’s Hollywood is more a landfill for Woke ideology and degenerate carnality. This billion-dollar industry is insulated from the aspirations of the human soul, and its workaday employees (to call them actors would be an insult to that noble calling) occupy a caste system that renders them as fake as the Olympian gods of old. Excuse me, that would be an insult to the Olympian gods.
Sunset Boulevard is one of those Hollywood gems. This Billy Wilder 1950 classic is a deeply disturbing exploration of hubris slipping into madness. Sophocles would have approved. The movie circles around Norma Desmond, a passé Hollywood legend who persists in thinking that today is yesterday. Her tragic delusion plays all over her face: caked with dense layers of makeup resembling a graveyard of broken dreams and wasted aspirations. In frame after frame, the mesmerized audience sees the erstwhile matinee idol descend into lunacy, hermetically sealed away from the world of reality.
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