I never watched Will and Grace when it first aired; it was one of many things I missed in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s when I was homeschooled. The extended Sunset Boulevard reference in the reboot trailer that was released this week, however, caught my attention. Not only because I was just in a production of the musical, but also because that particular reference is so evocative and powerful today -- evocative in ways I doubt Billy Wilder could ever have anticipated. The story is a cautionary tale about the dangers of living in the past while ignoring the present, but what does that lesson mean to us now, in a world of reboot fever and media-enabled nostalgia?
Will and Grace wasn’t what actually got me thinking hard about this question, though -- it was the movie Mindhorn, which went live on Netflix about a week and a half ago. Taken together, they provide a thoughtful examination of the pitfalls and merits of pop-cultural nostalgia.
Mindhorn takes as its protagonist Richard Thorncroft, a washed-up actor best known for playing cybernetically enhanced detective Bruce P. Mindhorn in an outrageously ‘80s TV show of the same name. Richard’s best career days are definitely behind him, thanks partly to a failed attempt at making it big in Hollywood but also to an eyebrow-raising TV interview that, to modern audiences, recalls Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch. Twenty-five years after the series Mindhorn ended, the Isle of Man police constabulary asks Richard to reprise his role in order to catch a murderer who believes Mindhorn is a real person. The movie’s first scene with modern-day Richard literally starts out with a shot of the Sunset Blvd. street sign in Los Angeles -- which, when the camera pulls back, is shown to be just a photograph. Richard, balding and wearing a toupee that is definitely not the same color as his remaining hair, is thus set up as a Norma Desmond figure, but unlike Norma, he’s actually offered a chance for a comeback when the police ask him to play Mindhorn. “Maybe going backwards is the new going forwards,” Richard’s agent says to him, and when he goes back to his flat, he gazes at his collection of old merch and newspaper clippings in a scene highly reminiscent of The Incredibles. That scene is so thoroughly imbued with potential, with the possibility of not just a return but a redemption -- but does he, in the end, go forwards? Does he get what Norma Desmond so desperately longed for?
Not really, actually.
One striking aspect about the movie, that differentiates it from Sunset Boulevard, is that Richard is confronted everywhere with doubles of himself, reflections or inexact replicas. He mistakenly attends an audition for which one Richard Crowthorn had an appointment. Both he and the murder suspect, Paul Melly, have assorted Mindhorn merchandise, including Mindhorn action figures. Even the presence of his stunt double Clive, in the movie’s brief flashback to a 1989 episode shoot, sort of hints at his eventual obsolescence, his fading into a sea of lookalikes. The motif of replicas pops up in a couple other places in the movie, too -- crude plasticine models of a telephone and a videotape, the Electric Railway sign on the Isle of Man that echoes the Hollywood sign. The movie’s primary payoff, really, has to do with delivering on this motif. Sure, the real murderer goes to prison, but Richard ends up retreading so many of the same old paths. He ends up marrying Patricia DeVille, his old co-star and former flame; a CD he released in 1990 is reissued; the first few seasons of Mindhorn get released on DVD. Melly also superglues him into a replica of his old costume, a getup he doesn’t escape for the whole rest of the movie. Going backwards, for Richard, really does seem to be the new going forwards, in the sense that he ultimately can’t escape his past legacy and is instead doomed to rehash it in various forms ad nauseam. Much like Norma Desmond, actually.
Will and Grace’s use of Sunset Boulevard, on the other hand, provides an alternate vision of what reboots could be. The trailer uses the song “As If We Never Said Goodbye,” from the 1993 Andrew Lloyd Webber musical version, as its central gimmick, which is immediately intriguing because it’s borrowing from what is in a very real sense another reboot. On another level, though, it’s poignant because that song is the closest Norma ever gets to actually achieving her dream of a triumphant comeback (as much as she doesn’t want to call it a comeback). She sings that song in the middle of Act II, on the Paramount lot while visiting her old friend Cecil B. DeMille. We know as well as Joe Gillis and Max Von Mayerling do that Norma won’t actually get what she wants. We know that her self-insert screenplay she sent to DeMille is My-Immortal levels of horrendous, that her heyday is now and forever gone, that she can never again be the big star she once was -- but damn if that song doesn’t make us root for her. Damn if we don’t believe every word she says for those three-and-some minutes. The stars of Will and Grace evoke that sense of triumph when they use this particular song -- but they actually deliver on it better than Norma does, because they change the lyrics Weird-Al style to apply to their particular situation. They present a remix, not a rehash. They actively play with and transform the song, and in doing so, they present a vision of what reboots could be. Transformations, not translations. Expansions, not reproductions.
The funny thing is that Will and Grace still endorses nostalgia, still embraces the tidal wave of reboots. Sunset Boulevard’s central theme, then, is not nearly so simple as it may have been back in 1950, or even in 1993. Maybe that’s the real tragedy of Norma Desmond -- that she’s a woman ahead of her time, that she was unlucky enough to be the only one in her era nostalgic for a rose-tinted pop-cultural past. Nowadays, what with not only Mindhorn and Will and Grace but also the Broadway revival of Sunset Boulevard itself, I’m inclined to think Norma would fit right in with us.
