The Apartment Billy Wilder (1960; USA)
The Apartment Billy Wilder (1960; USA) Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine; Fred MacMurray
viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 31st Dec 2025; ticket: £7
the coming of the ID
I saw Wilder’s ‘The Apartment’ when it first came out as young boy about 12 years old. I remembered three things about it: Jack Lemmon’s performance (as C C Baxter), the wit of the script and thirdly the images of the office of Consolidated Insurance where Lemmon worked: a vast hall, a cathedral of commerce and capitalism. It was filled with hundreds of desks in serried rows stretching out horizontally and laterally forever into the distance. An incredible sight. It seemed to me impossible that such a huge array of workers could exist, impossible to imagine what all these people were doing (perhaps it didn’t matter whether they did anything; so deployed, like ceremonial parades of soldiers marching past the great leader, they were simply a symbol of the power to compel such orderings): impossible not to feel that this space did anything else but crush the soul of those chained to their desks in a grid iron of overwhelming banality.
I remembered nothing of the role of Shirley MacLaine, of which more later.
Wilder opens ‘The Apartment’ with a montage of New York City. From above we see the great city, we see its monumental buildings, moving in we track the workers on their way to labour in these huge structures. The final shot in the sequence establishes CC working at his desk, behind him we see the vastness of the office space on the 29th floor. On this second viewing it immediately occurred to me that I’d seen almost the same shot in King Vidor’s 1928 movie ‘The Crowd’. ‘The Crowd’ follows the life and career of an ordinary American John Sims who ends up as another expendable clerical donkey working for a large corporation in another vast office space that expands to look even larger than ‘The Apartment’ space and contains thousands of workers all bent over their desks, heads bowed in existential submission.
‘The Crowd’ is a ‘silent movie, a melodrama but Vidor’s use of symbolic imagery takes the viewer outside of the binding clinch of the plot. Vidor’s realisation of the office is to make the space resemble hell. This world of work is a creation of the devil. The vast space filled out with bent-over clerks arranged in lines stretching back to infinity tells that the individuals here are lost and helpless. Trapped: there is no way out of this world. Vidor’s movie is a moral statement.
Vidor is pointing to the death of America as land of opportunity. All that’s left is empty rhetoric and the mesmeric quasi religious repetition that anyone in America can make it. John Sims’s father drills into him that through hard work and ambition anyone can move from Log House to White House. It’s become a chimerical lie. In reality the large corporations have taken over the country with the consequence that achievement in America is restricted by oligarchy and nepotism. ‘The Crowd’ chronicles the consequences for those cheated by the promise of ‘The Dream’. A life of endless drudgery and insecurity as a rent and wage slave. Promised the world but rewarded only with the distraction of entertainment. ‘The Crowd’ is an indictment that refuses to conclude on a note of hope.
Move on 30 years 1960 and ‘The Apartment’. It a different ballgame. We have the same setting, the huge dehumanised office space, the desks occupied by those condemned to labour in such places. But Wilder’s perception is quite different. The office space is not seen from its evident surface as a symptom of oppression; the focus has shifted to what lies beneath the surface. Wilder strips away the surface and represents the office space not as hell but as a rhizome of sexual desires. Underneath each of those desks lurks an activated ID, desirous of freedom. Escape from the reality of work lies not in collective solidarity, rather through individualised fantasy pivoting about the needs and desires of the body. There is of course gender differentiation: for the men sex is both power and physical satisfaction, for the women the body for all its pleasures is a means to desired security. And as represented by Wilder the corporate office is a sort of executive’s harem, a privilege that goes along with the key to the executive locker room. ‘The Apartment’ signifies that by 1960’s the representation of the work situation has shifted from above the belt to below the belt; from the representation of oppression to the satisfaction of and indulgence of individuated fantasy.
And C C Baxter? He’s a below the belt operator. Whereas in the hard assed world of the office workers in ‘The Crowd’ the division between workers and executives had the structural elements of the Indian caste system: no way across the surface, everyone stays put. However with the development of the rhizome of desire the possibility opens up for individuals like CC to tunnel through the system and working from beneath the surface, able to corrupt it for their own purposes. Wilder thereby in ‘The Apartment’ acknowledges that other elemental factor that destroys what’s left of the American dream: corruption – and corruption’s handmaiden, cynicism.
‘The Apartment’ is a sitcom in the ‘Whitehall Farce’ mode animated by mistimed assignations. Wilder’s shrewd scripting locates it at the core of the social and political relations that were starting to characterise American society.
I remembered Jack Lemmon’s playing even years later because his performance reminded me of Buster Keaton. Lemmon at his best has the stoic deadpan facial reactions that were BK’s trademark. Of course Lemmon smiles in the film, but then ‘The Apartment’ is a talkie. It’s much more difficult to avoid smiling in the talking pictures and BK never really came good after the end of the Silent Era.
But I had no memory of Shirley McLain (plays Fran). Perhaps it has to do with agency? Fran like the other women characters in the film has no agency. For all that he is put upon Wilder’s script assigns CC Baxter with choice. MacLaine is just a puppet of the script, a pawn in the game of plot machination, having to duck dive bob and weave to enable the narrative to come to its rather staid conclusion. But the cost to MacLaine is the destroying of any semblance of the integrity of her character. The low point comes when the the script demands she declare her infatuation with the bossman Jeff. MacLaine tries hard with these lines. She can’t make ‘em stick: it is simply unbelievable that anyone could love this croaking reptilian sleezeball. At this point, Fran’s credibility disolves like silk in acid, leaving the audience indifferent to her fate.
Overall ‘The Apartment’ represents a low point in Hollywood’s depiction of women though reflecting accurately the status of women in America in the 1950’s. Although Jeff’s wife kicks him out, in general the female parts are demeaning. Women are represented as beings without agency as little more than second rate citizens and objects for male sexual exploitation. As a specimen cultural product of the era Wilder’s movie is a sure indicator that the gender imbalance in power of the times had reached criticality and was in dire need of radical correction. Interesting to note 1960’s saw the dynamic manifestation of contemporary feminism start to make some inroads into the patriarchal hegemony. “The Apartment’ is an amusing comedy, but with women the butt of much of the humour the thought occurs as the extent to which it may have caused female viewers to look at the film from a another particular angle and draw their own conclusions.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk