Billy Wilder | The Apartment / 1960

everything for the company

by Douglas Messerli

 

Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond (screenplay), Billy Wilder (director) The Apartment / 1960

 

We annually watch The Apartment in our house on New Year’s day in honor of its last scenes. But it’s a silly convention, since the film is not about a particular day, but about every day. Wilder’s vision of the American workplace is about as devastating of a portrait since Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine (I’ll have to reread that play).

     C. C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) works in accounting, and in an early scene, as he recounts staggering figures of the American workplace (“Our company has 31,249 employees, which is more than the size of...Natchez”), Wilder pulls the camera back and away to reveal row after row of hundreds of such desks as Baxter’s, immediately portraying to the viewer his insignificance to the overpowering company and, simultaneously, indicating his “exceptionalness”: he is the only remaining worker in the morass of empty desks.

     Yet we also quite quickly realize that this activity of continuing to work beyond the others is no heroic act and will certainly be recognized by no one. No J. Pierpont Finch (of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying) is he! Baxter remains after work, his voice tells us, because of his “little problem”: he has a bachelor apartment just perfect for the quick sexual rendezvous of the executives. In short, not only is Baxter’s workplace a hell of anonymity and uniformity, even his home has been taken over by the company—with his job and promises of promotion as ransom. As his counterpoint, Miss Kubelik (Shirley McLaine), observes, there are givers and takers. Baxter is definitely one who has been “took.”

     Miss Kubelik (the “Miss” emphatically repeated throughout the film to reiterate, perhaps, the societal evaluation of an attractive “unmarried” woman) is even lower in the company echelons; she is an elevator operator, with no place to go but up. The female equivalent of the nebbish Baxter, she too is being used by the company—in this case through the use of her very body, not only through the pinches and gropings of executives, but through an unhappy affair with the married senior executive, J. D. Sheldrake, Fred McMurray, who plays his swarmy role so well that it is difficult to see what attracted her to him in the first place.

     Both have the lowest of self-esteem, a position in which the company is determined to keep them in order to control and manipulate their lives. Baxter, without identity and home, has such an empty life that he is pleased to be accused by his neighbors for the endless partying and noise issuing from his supposed love life. Miss Kubelik’s compact mirror, cracked when she threw it at her lover, makes her “look like she feels.” It is that object, moreover, which reveals her affair with Sheldrake to Baxter, who, after her later attempt at suicide, saves her life.

     Both characters are brought to higher positions in the company manipulations of them: Baxter is made assistant to Sheldrake and Kubelik promised (yet again) that Sheldrake will eventually leave his wife. And ultimately, Kubelik—like those before her—might rise to the role of receptionist and Baxter (who, after all, is capable and efficient) might obtain a higher executive position. In short, they may ultimately partake in a version of the American Dream—but at a terrible price. They need only to look at the executives around them to see the inevitable dissatisfaction of that way of life. Don't they, after all, desire the bachelor apartment that Baxter inhabits.

     Baxter’s sudden quittance of his job, which leads, in turn, to Kubelik’s even more sudden abandonment of Sheldrake, is their only possible redemption. Wilder knows only too well that in America the young can start over again, that a new Eden is as possible as a new year. Champagne for the happy couple!

     But perhaps next year we should watch this film on Labor Day in honor of all those dead souls who could not escape.                                                     

 

Los Angeles, October 18, 2002

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (March 2008).