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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
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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