THE NEW BIOGRAPHY of Billy Wilder by Ed Sikov, On Sunset Boulevard, describes an incident that took place between Vladimir Nabokov and Billy Wilder at the director's Hollywood home. Nabokov was examining Wilder's modern art collection, and when the director asked him which of the paintings he liked the most, Nabokov said he liked a Balthus. The reason I bring up this piece of trivia is not to throw light on some unknown and important aspect of Billy Wilder's filmmaking, but just to take pleasure in the fact that Billy Wilder and Vladimir Nabokov once stood together in the same room, looking at modern European art. True, I would have much preferred to have read about rotund Hitchcock and rotund Nabokov standing in a room admiring Balthus' famous painting of the post-coital nymphet, Les Beaux Jours, but I'm more than pleased with this image of BW and VN standing in a room full of expensive art.

But maybe my mention of this brief and meaningless encounter between the great men is not entirely whimsical or indulgent. There is something to be said about the art (or strategies) of Nabokov's novels and one particular movie by Billy Wilder, Sunset Boulevard, which was made in 1950. Wilder's other films have nothing in common with Vladimir's art; they are at best silly comedies (Ninotchka, Seven Year Itch) and sound comedies (Some Like It Hot, The Apartment), but never -- with the exception of the noir classic Double Indemnity (Wilder's greatest achievement) -- do they even come close to being as sophisticated, as intelligent, as Nabokovian as Sunset Boulevard. Indeed, any movie that has a bald-headed German butler and a middle-aged actress burying a chimp in a child's coffin at night is nothing but Nabokovian (from Nabokovia -- meaning "a state of excruciating insanity" caused by "intolerable bliss").

The story of Sunset Boulevard, as everyone knows (or should know), is about a young and indigent screenwriter who accidentally meets an aged and faded film star from the silent era, Norma Desmond, played by Gloria Swanson. The actress lives in a big house -- like Dickens' Mrs. Havisham from Great Expectations -- with a stuffy butler named Max von Mayerling, who is played by none other than the great Erich von Stroheim. The mad actress offers the mediocre writer the miserable job of doctoring her mad screenplay, Salome, which she hopes will launch her back to spectacular fame. Of course, the broke screenwriter says yes, and soon he becomes a kept man. The faded actress falls in love with her handsome catch, but the writer falls in love with a woman his own age, and so the actress shoots him dead for breaking her fragile heart.

Wilder's film is about madness and fiction -- or better yet, madness and cinema -- in the way that Kafka is about madness and jurisprudence, or Ellison is about madness and race. Thematically, all of Nabokov's important novels are organized in this way; it's always a matter of madness and some form of art or illusion. And in the case of Kamera Obskura (about a rich, married man who falls in love with a young and mediocre film actress) and Despair (about a rich man who murders his movie double), it is, as in Sunset Boulevard, a matter of madness and cinema. In fact, these two books not only share thematic similarities with Sunset Boulevard, but structural similarities as well: plot- and character-wise, Kamera Obskura is almost identical to Wilder's film. And at the end of Despair, the murderer yells to the cops, "Frenchmen! This is a rehearsal. Hold those policemen. A famous film actor will presently come running out of this house." In the famous concluding scene of Sunset Boulevard, Gloria Swanson sees the newsreel cameras and cops and thinks she's in a movie: "I just want to tell you how happy I am to be in the studio again, making a picture. You don't know how much I have missed you all, and I promise I will never desert you again. After Salome we will make another picture, and another picture.... And now, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up."

One Nabokov specialist, Phillip Iannarelli, points out a "Nabokovian hitch" in North by Northwest's climactic moment between Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint (a boy in the background plugs his ears before the gun appears from Saint's purse and is fired); he describes that moment of accidental precognition, which is analogous to the sense of impending doom every character in Sunset Boulevard chooses to overlook, as "reality encapsulated and encroaching on a work of art." And if this mix between reality and art becomes too intense, the result is usually madness, "excruciating madness."

However, as in the end of Nabokov's Bend Sinister, this madness is not excruciating for the victim (they have abandoned our miserable world!), but for those who witness the businessman yelling nonsense from the window or the aged actress descending the staircase toward the newsreel lights. In Sunset Boulevard, the witness is us.