Just saw this film again after many years, kind of funny, William Holden starts off already dead in the pool at the beginning (great underwater shot looking up), but narrates the action here and at the end too. I thought that was funny and kind of a silly oversight. Overall the film is okay, interesting period piece.
RSHRE
Think of it as Joe's ghost filling us in on what happened. It was originally going to begin with Joe's corpse being wheeled into the morgue and all of the other corpses explaining how they died and Joe tells the tale similar to the version used. Test audiences didn't like that opening, I like this version more.
Annoying the world since 1960!
It's a storytelling device. And, it's Film Noir, which always plays with death in different and interesting ways.
shareThat's the big secret of this movie. He actually didn't die in the water. After the final fade out, he gets out of the water in a fit of coughing, and stumbles away to tell us his story.
shareLOL! That's good!
I must confess though.... the ghost theory works for me. There's some pretty scary stuff going on in this film anyway.
OP - you’re not long on imagination, are you? Better stick to documentaries.
shareI really hate the modern era. I mean, how did we "educate" people to ask questions like this?
shareHis ghost / spirit
shareIt's a literary framing device to introduce and end the story. It's fantasy. Learn to suspend your disbelief, be less literal, and just go with the flow.
shareIt was Wilder having fun with storytelling. He’d had the idea of starting a movie with an opening narrative by a corpse for a while. It was obviously deliberate. Your assertion that it was an “oversight” is idiotic.
shareOther films have done this as well, such as American Beauty and Menace II Society (although -- SPOILER -- we don't know that the narrator was deceased the entire time until the very end of the film).
Then there's Clockwork Orange, where the narrator attempts to kill himself late in the film, but survives, then logically points out that had he "snuffed it" he wouldn't still be around to tell his story.
As another poster already pointed out, it's a storytelling device. Why it was decided that Sunset Blvd. would choose to tell the story this way (or the other films I mentioned) might vary from storyteller to storyteller but it certainly draws you into the film in a unique manner.