In preparation for your film screening today and for some writing afterwards, carefully read each of these questions.

1. Any object that appears in a movie other than costumes is called a prop. Even insignificant objects can have a powerful effect, especially in silent movies--where Norma Desmond cut her teeth, her métier, as the French say. These objects/props give information about story and characters by evoking associations in the viewer's mind. Thus they work like illustrative words in a text; take, for instance, these words from Gilman's story: "a garden...full of box-bordered paths, and lined with long grapecovered arbors." Which props in Sunset Boulevard do you remember best and what do they tell you.

2. What are some narrative/visual techniques employed by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Billy Wilder to convey or heighten the mood/tone of the stories?

3. Gilman's main character is trapped behind "that gate at the head of the stairs" and on "this great immovable bed-it is nailed down." How does Wilder show Joe Gillis's entrapment.

4. In both "The Yellow Wallpaper" and "Sunset Blvd.," the main character is the narrator. Curiously, both narrators seems to experience a loss of control to someone or something of power. Is this sense of manipulation, this loss of power manifested in the changing narration?

5. This passage from the film is key: "It was a great big white elephant of a place, the kind crazy movie people built in the crazy 20s. A neglected house gets an unhappy look. This one had it in spades. It was like that old woman in [Charles Dickens's] Great Expectations, that Miss Havisham in her rotting wedding dress and her torn veil taking it out on the world because she'd been given the go-by." Compare the "colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say haunted house" of Gilman's story with Wilder's "white elephant of a place."

6. Mirrored images of the female protagonists appear in both The Yellow Wallpaper and Sunset Boulevard. Discuss this common motif.

7. What do we make of the "second self" created by artists who are not allowed to make art? Gilman's narrator, being unable to write as a creative outlet, is forced to project herself onto the wall of her room. Similarly, Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) surrounds herself with images of her glory days in order to be reminded of her former achievements. Even Joe Gillis refers to these pictures as remnants of a "celluloid self."