You Love to See It: The Apartment

In the opening voiceover to Billy Wilder’s 1960 Christmas movie The Apartment, C. C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) explains that shifts in his insurance company’s vast NYC headquarters are staggered so that its more than thirty thousand workers don’t jam the building’s elevators upon arrival or at quitting time. Ironically, a great deal of the subsequent film concerns whether or not Baxter can get into the titular domicile — the apartment he lets his corporate superiors use as a pied-à-terre in exchange for a boost up the ladder. The parallel is clear: the many fall in line so the rich can do as they like. It’s Baxter’s rejection of this dynamic when he quits his cushy job over his love of elevator operator Fran Kubelik (Shirley McClaine) after spending most of the film groveling after his boss, her callous, selfish lover, Jeff Sheldrake (Fred McMurray), that gives Wilder’s story such a kick. Simple, yes, but the symmetry is pleasing. Baxter is willing to go nowhere with no one rather than be one of the elect.

It’s the things Baxter doesn’t tell others, though, that drive most of The Apartment’s subtle character work. He accepts a reputation as a womanizer to preserve his company’s executives’ marriages, allows his good-hearted neighbors Dr. Dreyfuss (Jack Kruschen) and Mildred Dreyfuss (Naomi Stevens) to think he drove a woman to suicide rather than embroil Sheldrake in the scandal, and even conceals Sheldrake’s ultimate disinterest in Kubelik as well as the fact that his wife, not he, instigates their divorce. He has an essential lack of regard for others, thinking first of the same order which preserves the careful timing of the company’s elevators whenever crisis rears its head. It is an order imposed by self-interest, an order represented by the film’s famous forced perspective shots of vast office pools stretching out into eternity like something out of Brazil.

Wilder positions a certain strain of New York Jewish culture, as represented by the Dreyfuss’s kindness as well as by their frank and unflattering judgements of Baxter’s character, as the antithesis to corporate greed. “Try being a mensch,” Dr. Dreyfuss tells Baxter after helping to save Kubelik’s life. “A human being.” He and his wife are as unpretentious as they are unsentimental, and it’s the doctor’s words Baxter throws in Sheldrake’s face when he quits his job. It’s nothing unique as far as artistic statements go. Man rejects success in favor of love. Watching it today, though, when the social machine Wilder satirizes by matching the film’s soundtrack and Lemmon’s nods to the jerks of an electric typewriter has swallowed so much of our world, it’s moving beyond words to see a man reach the gilded apex of success and realize the cost to others isn’t worth it.