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@TK-421 Challenged me to write a post about The Apartment before Christmas. I'm not going to use spoiler tags because this movie is a classic from 1960. It's an IMDb Top 100, and I think it deserves to be there. Great film, I thoroughly enjoyed it. The last paragraph paints this film in a worse light then it probably deserves. It's even a Christmas movie if you want to squeeze it in.
The Summary: Baxter works at a huge insurance company in New York and to to accelerate Baxter’s career trajectory he lets junior executives and later Jeff a senior executive use his apartment to cheat on their wives.
I come from a Christian denomination that - in the not-so-distant past - banned going to movie theaters and all alcohol consumption. Watching this had me nodding my head, thinking I totally see why they felt that way about films like The Apartment. Released in 1960, it's black-and-white, so I think it comes off more risqué because I'm mentally bucketing it with '40s flicks, but Hollywood - always more progressive than the general populace - was already barreling toward the full-blown late '60s revolution. Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot came out the year before and is just as (and in light of current trans issues) even more norm breaking.
I’m no film historian, but if The Apartment wasn’t the first, it must have been very close to creating the template for the bawdy office Christmas party trope. It's all there (short of nudity) full on pre-HR debauchery with people getting hammered, hooking up wherever they can find space. I’m sure Mad Men borrowed heavily for it's office culture.
You can, of course, make the standard progressive culture-war points: powerful men exploiting female staff, systemic sexism, etc. But flip the lens a bit, and this film could almost have been written by a modern manosphere/red-piller.
Baxter is a cuck in almost every sense of the term. He literally crawls into the still-warm bed after the alphas finish their trysts. Even after he learns that Jeff (married father of two) has been carrying on a long-term affair with his love interest Fran Baxter keeps letting Jeff go at his one true love in the apartment. When Fran attempts suicide with sleeping pills, Baxter nurses her back to health, all while actively trying to keep Jeff and Fran together. This isn’t Fran’s first rodeo; her previous beau is in prison. Since it’s the 1960’s she not just in it for the sex, she actually falls suicidally in love with the bad boys, and she doesn’t have any kids. But Fran only turns to the nice guy after she’s been "run through".
P.S. And small culture war take it's interesting to think about how much technology replaced thousands of jobs represented in this film
Haha, I don't know if it was a challenge. You're absolutely right that The Apartment is a great movie. I had a whole plan for my review that would use a vigorous defense of office affairs as its spine. It's cool you did it even though it robs me of the mic. Yours was a better post than mine would have been anyway. I enjoyed it.
That's an interesting question. It does have a distinctly modern "this is a movie office Christmas party" feel. Office Christmas parties generally, however, are attested as far back as A Christmas Carol. My strong suspicion is that The Apartment may or may not have created some iconographic imagery that other films copied but the reason they all look the same is because they're depicting a (sometimes heightened depending on film) real thing. Office Christmas parties are the template for the office Christmas party trope generally and movie offices are often visually mid-century modern. I do miss a nice in office Christmas party. Any combination of the workplace and alcohol. It annihilated my first marriage and slammed multiple human lives into a brick wall. Still a good time.
Fascinating. I see what you're gesturing at, I do. And by any colloquial use of the term, sure, he's a cuck. I don't care about the feelings of a fictional character.
But I think by trying to map the character to the cuck archetype and Fran to the cock carousel aficionado you're making assumptions that are not supported by the text.
Take Fran - it's been a few days since I rewatched the movie but I count two men that she's definitely slept with: her jailbird husband and Sheldrake. That is: her husband and a man she's only still with because she's convinced he'll leave his wife and enter into a long term monogamous relationship with the expectation of marriage. Wholesome.
People in the office gossip about her once it's known she's been to The Apartment. That's gossip. It's part of the critique the movie is leveling at superior - subordinate shenanigans. Textually, she's no angel by having an affair with a married man but I'm pretty sure the film never states that she's done it before. Unlucky in love does not imply she's been raw dogging strangers in alleys. Her husband is in prison, she's emotionally devastated by the affair, and her first kiss was in a cemetery. That's plenty. As a Christian you're welcome to describe a woman sleeping with two men while in separate relationships with each as being "run through" if that's appropriate in your culture. It is not in mine.
Now for that little cuck Baxter. Yes, he's shown as being in a subordinate role. It's a load bearing part of the story. He literally is the subordinate of most of the men he's interacting with and the movie is about the relationship between subordinates and their betters (you filthy proles).
Hierarchies are real, were much stricter at the time, and are a major point of emphasis of the film. Baxter isn't a cuck because he goes to sleep in his used bed. He's tired, working his way up the ladder, and he's a Yes Man. There are benefits to that - it is explicitly stated he's doing it for advancement, not a psychosexual thrill as one would expect of the cuckold, and does in fact get his reward - but costs too. The movie is showing both sides. You do what you have to do to advance: then its your turn to drunkenly bang the young ladies in your subordinates apartment. Until he gets promoted and then he, etc.
Baxter is interested in Fran, absolutely. She stands him up for a quasi-date, fine. People went on a lot more lower stakes social activities back then - pornography distribution technology was primitive.
But Baxter is never shown to be in a romantic relationship with Fran. She is in actual love with Sheldrake. Who she is in a relationship with. (This point and her suicide attempt were going to be a big part of my analysis. Yes, yes, it's all good fun to partake of the office supplies. You should do your utmost to stick to the ones who absolutely know the score and want what they're going to get and you must not lead them on. None of that applies to Fran.) Sheldrake's trysts with Baxter might be a little insulting - he's into the lady, it's his apartment, blah blah blah. Not really the same as a random guy breaking your wife's back while you swallow sadness in the basement. Baxter is a Nice Guy. He's actually not really a cuck unless you extend his desire for Fran into actual possession without any say from her about it.
"Even after he learns that Jeff (married father of two) has been carrying on a long-term affair with his love interest Fran Baxter keeps letting Jeff go at his one true love in the apartment."
This statement is incorrect at its load bearing sections. Yes, Jeff is married and has kids. That doesn't enter into the cuck equation for Baxter. Yes, Fran is portrayed as Baxter's love interest. That does not give him a retroactive owner's pass to her vagina. If your problem is that he lets Sheldrake use the apartment to be with Fran I will be forced to point out that Baxter quits to prevent that very thing once he's both gained a spine and emotionally connected with Fran. When she really is his love interest and past the hormonal crush phase - exactly what do you think is attracting Baxter to her that's different than Sheldrake at first? Does that mean that Fran is also Sheldrake's "one true love"? - he acts like it. If Baxter's actually a cuck we're all getting cucked any time a woman we might hypothetically be interested in has sex with another person.
Good observation. An underrated aspect of watching old films is getting little glimpses of a world that was.
Interesting piece of movie anthropology, although almost certainly inaccurate as anthropology of the real PMC of that era - everything I have read says that graduate-class men of that era mostly married a college sweetheart and stayed married.
The mating system being described here is gerontocratic polygamy - young men can't get laid because old men (the combination of seniority-based promotion and up-or-out meant that the age-based and rank-based meanings of senior and junior were very highly correlated among men on the management track in the same company) are monopolising the prime-age women, and then they get to have multiple prime-age women when they are old enough.
This can be stable if younger generations are larger than older generations (due to population growth or a high young-adult death rate) so there are enough women to go round. I remember reading an economics paper which pointed out that the highest positive bride-prices in the world (dowry is a negative bride-price) were in African cultures which practiced gerontocratic polygamy, and provided a model justifying this. Of course in the hypothetical sarariman/Moral Mazes example of the system the men don't die, they either fail out or get reassigned to the Peoria office and marry a local.
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I watched this in the cinema with my ex years ago. She'd seen it years earlier as a child, and after we came out of the cinema, she commented that, upon a first watch, she hadn't appreciated the significance of the scene where Jeff presents Fran with her Christmas present: a crisp $100 bill. As a child, she'd thought – how kind of him! It was only later she was like ohhhh, he's just treating her like a prostitute.
If you haven't seen it, I'd also highly recommend Wilder's earlier film Double Indemnity, which stars Fred MacMurray (the actor who plays Jeff here). It's one of my favourite movies ever, literally in my top ten. Most "thrillers" from the fifties or earlier can be quite slow and dull by modern standards, and even the better ones are quite far from "thrilling". Double Indemnity is the exception, a movie which is just as tense and nerve-wracking as the year it came out(that scene where Neff can't get his car to start!) , and which still finds room for plenty of wry humour while it's at it.
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Great movie. Got very mad at brother in law for making me watch it last Christmas, actually, because despite my wife being subscribed to an absurd number of streaming services, he insisted on buying another movie through my Amazon account. Which struck me as an absurd extravagance, $4 or whatever totally unnecessary, but it did turn out to be amazing, so that shut me up.
No. That's how things were. It didn't create a trope through film, it represented a reality. Mad Men drew on that same historical set of facts. Christmas parties really used to be fun before we all turned our noses up at them. Go to any local bar association event, corner the oldest man you see, and ask him to tell you stories from the old days. This isn't to say that there isn't a cycle of art imitating life imitating art
And we're shown the alternative to the nice guy forgiving the harlot: she kills herself. The alternative to beta men being cucked is that women who make mistakes just, kind of, shuffle off camera and die. No one has come up with a scalable solution yet. Baxter is obviously the good guy here, in that he is saving her from literal or social death by swallowing his pride.
What's the really interesting cultural reality in the film is the overwhelming nosiness of all the people around everyone in New York City.
Why do the executives value the privacy of Baxter's apartment so highly as to consider its use a major favor? Because back then hotels paid attention to their guest lists, and cared if two unrelated people stayed there, or if people showed up in the afternoon and checked out that evening. A non-concern today, when hotel employees couldn't care less, and in a pinch you could always find a place where you check in and out online without seeing anyone. No corporate hotel property pries into the business of its customers, and no pajeet motel owner could come close to caring what the YTs do there.
Baxter lives in an apartment house where everyone knows everyone's business. The elderly neighbors around him are watching him. Everyone thinks he's a playboy. Nowadays, they might snide-post on twitter about how loud their nextdoor neighbor is, but no one would say a word to him however much he plowed. The doctor cares about how Fran ended up the way she is, today's doctors want to "tolerate" your lifestyle to make sure to do harm reduction. This all has no consequences for the executives he lets the place out to, but terrible social consequences for him, which is what they are more or less paying him for.
Even in a city as large as New York, the very hub of anonymity for the time, reputation is important, and traditional morality still has its enforcers. Baxter is the very model of the lonely, isolated, atomized individual in this film, and he is still constantly worried about what other people think of him. Today's equivalent wouldn't know any of his neighbors. Traditional morality would have no grasp on him. He'd move out before he'd care what some old biddie thinks of him. And no executive needs a discreet love nest, he can just find a way to open a credit card online and spend $100 on a decent hotel room for the day where no one will ask any questions, if any of the staff even speaks English.
Where in 1950s New York, even a single man was subject to a panopticon of judgment, today a married man in the suburbs doesn't worry about it too much.
There is textual evidence in the film that this was either real or the characters believe in it enough to alter their behavior. Specifically, at the end of the film Baxter has his big hero moment when he refuses to let Sheldrake use the love pad. That's not important. Sheldrake is insistent that he still be given access to the Apartment Of Anonymity - even though his wife left him after she overreacted to him being a popular guy and laying it down. He says that he's going to go after Fran now that his wife is out of the picture.
But he still is not willing to risk doing so outside the safety of The Apartment if he can help it.
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There's a tendency to overstate both the moral judgement on successful men having affairs in the past(often there was none- and even if there was, it was a lot less than we'd expect) and the panopticon in practice. You could just go somewhere no one knew your face(the other side of the city, say) and use an assumed name. Nobody would know.
I was required to read, in high school, memoirs of a fifties child from a 'broken home'(they did exist). And hoo boy did he tear through a high-trust society. He nearly gets molested by his dad's gay friend, tells someone about it, and is handed a war trophy rifle and told not to let it happen again. On the word of a fifteen year old boy. Based, you might say, but this is the same society where he opens a checking account in someone else's name with no ID, because he's tall for his age(due to shoe inserts. He also has fake glasses to make him look older) so it's plausible he looks like an adult, who's gonna question. He uses the same hack to get ahold of booze, condoms, change his grades, etc. When he's living with his mother(in elementary school this time) she converts to Catholicism(a very serious commitment at the time) to try to get an exit strategy from her abusive, deadbeat boyfriend. The nuns who are supposed to be taking care of him so she can work are unable to, because he just... leaves, and then fakes correspondence between the two(he doesn't want the abusive boyfriend gone, he lets him skip school to work on cars and run around in the countryside). Eventually the nuns distract the boyfriend enough for his mom to take him and leave cities, he never finds them again, and she leaves the church(too many rules, I suspect) and marries a dickhead who beats him for not getting A's. So he just... never goes to class, except to change his grades. Manually, with a pencil on his report card. No, they don't type it up, who would lie? He did, as it turns out. He uses the same trick to get a scholarship into a prep school, which he promptly fails out of, and celebrates this achievement by drinking in a bar at 17- nobody asks for his ID, he just claims to be 18. That incident is prompted by his friend group knocking up a local girl, but nobody knows who did it- so they just argue with each other until someone folds and claims to be the daddy, and marries her with the explicit intention of divorcing after two years.
A high trust society makes it really easy to get away with stuff by just... lying all the time. His dad also tells just cartoonish lies all the time, the few times we see him. The high-functioning and successful older brother, when we see him, is mostly believing the two pathological liars in his life claiming blatantly implausible things to beg for favors and money. So are the other responsible adults. The kids fight, drink, shoplift, smoke cigarettes, borrow cars to go joyriding, have early sex(some of this is implied to be rape), skip school, etc etc. When they're caught by authority figures, they just lie about who they are, and the cops call the wrong set of parents to ask their kids to beat them. Men have to marry the girl they knock up, but most of the female characters in the story- except his mom, who might be some rose coloured glasses but also has an abusive partner of some description for most of it- are promiscuous, so it's more about which man gets caught holding the bag than who the actual dad is. The main character's stepsister is strongly implied to convince her 'good boy' boyfriend to sleep with her after she discovers she's pregnant by a half-caste townie she was cheating on him with so she can blackmail him into marrying her. Everybody is scamming each other absolutely all the time and everybody falls for it in a way that just seems totally implausible. Teachers, cops, bank employees all accept unlikely stories of sudden changes with no verification or supporting evidence.
This is what high trust societies are like. You can totally just tell not the truth and get away with it. There's discussions of izzat on the motte- I don't know, but it's hard not to see similarities in the worst examples of jeet behavior our anti-Indian racists come up with- to my mind the issue with Indians is less lying and more 'they don't like to pay their bills and they treat their workers like crap' than outright dishonesty. In the fifties, you could totally just tell the hotel employee you were married but the name change got caught up in paperwork. This wasn't 90's Ireland where honeymooning couples need a copy of their marriage license to rent the same hotel room. People just shew up out of nowhere and did whatever they want with flimsy excuses and everyone let them. I'm curious as to what our resident Japanese have to say about life in notoriously high trust and homogenous Japan- is just... saying stuff going to get you your way all the time, even if it's obviously untrue?
What’s your theory on how they sustained a high trust society given this kind of defection? Are these just small-community mores being applied to larger places that hadn’t yet come to terms with their size?
They didn’t. Little Billy the roving teenage delinquent wasn’t something that had always existed, he was a new phenomenon of the 1950s. It was the first sign that the newly industrialized, urbanized, anonymized society was starting to fall apart at the seams. Twenty years later it had gone from Billy to burned-out urban wastelands, hard narcotics, and feral gangs of murderous super-predators. Society had to adapt. Which is what lead to our low trust quasi-police state of three strikes and that’s life and helicopter parents cowering in walled off suburbs.
The 1950s were an alienated, degenerate time, it’s just that you don’t notice because everything that came after was worse.
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Your points about the relative privacy of the modern era are well-founded. On the other hand, in the fifties, if you checked into a hotel under an assumed name to bed your mistress and your wife's best friend spotted you in the lobby, it'd be her word against yours. If it happened today, she'd take a HD photo of you.
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