The Apartment: What Makes Us Human

Earlier this year, director of the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy and this summer's Superman movie, James Gunn, attributed the chaos of modern Hollywood to one simple factor. Speaking with Rolling Stone, he said, “I do believe that the reason why the movie industry is dying is not because of people not wanting to see movies. It’s not because of home screens getting so good. The number one reason is because people are making movies without a finished screenplay.”

Without the insider knowledge that a Hollywood director has, I’m still inclined to agree. While the artistic and corporative threads of filmmaking have always been in competition, watching many tentpole films of the last fifteen years or so has felt more analogous to a dentist appointment than anything I'd call entertainment, and I can almost always trace the problem to something that should have been taken care of before the cameras ever started rolling.

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022)

    When I think about the movies that have disappointed or frustrated me the most, I think of movies where things like character arc or motivation were unclear, which isn't usually the problem if, say, your sound designer is slacking off. Some movies feel like they fell apart in the edit, but more often than not, it's a matter of the writing not supplying certain fruits.

But it was very shortly after Gunn made this pronouncement that I found out that the screenplay for what I’d say is the best written movie ever made … was basically built as they went along.

Billy Wilder’s The Apartment belongs to a special class of favorites in my book. Alongside Silver Linings Playbook, this isn’t just one of my “personal favorites”™, this is one of those movies I fall back on when forced to select “Best Movie Ever Made.” And some people obviously agree with me. It has some very familiar character references. AFI Top 100 Movies. IMDb’s top 250. The Academy.

Bosley Crowther opened his review of the film for The New York Times, saying, “You might not think a movie about a fellow who lends his rooms to the married executives of his office as a place for their secret love affairs would make a particularly funny or morally presentable show, especially when the young fellow uses the means to get advanced in his job. But under the clever supervision of Billy Wilder, who helped to write the script, then produced and directed ‘The Apartment’ … the idea is run into a gleeful, tender and even sentimental film.”

    And apparently, they pulled this off without a finished script to work with. Billy Wilder and I.A.L Diamond had a concept, they cast the characters, and sort of filled in the blanks on the road. Lead actress Shirley Maclaine said that they only had 29 pages of finished screenplay when they started filming. She recalled, “We didn't know how it was going to end. We didn't know what essentially the plot was. We trusted Billy and Izzy.”

         The story that resulted from this was largely built around the chemistry of the two leads. Maclaine herself inadvertently coined one of the film’s most iconic lines, “Why do people have to love people anyway?” while in conversation with Wilder, and he immediately had them go back and reshoot a key scene with that line added into the dialogue. This kind of project responds in real time to the demands of the performers as they are shaping the story themselves.

         No. This isn’t me playing “Gotcha!” with James Gunn. I have hope for the future of Hollywood largely because of this guy, and I take special comfort in his promise to never greenlight a movie for DC until he is satisfied with the screenplay. I don’t think that The Apartment situation does much to disprove his thesis--the production methods and timetables for a 1960s drama and a contemporary blockbuster just aren’t the same.

         But this did get me thinking about what makes “good writing” anyway, and this inevitably leads me to shine a mirror on that which has shone in years gone by. Film enthusiasts have been beating that drum for time and all eternity--Classic Hollywood is there for us to learn from. We track the lightning so we can figure out where it strikes.

    And so, we’re going to take this moment to train ourselves once again on what it looks like when a film’s writer treats their charge like every word counts. Because a movie like Billy Wilder's The Apartment doesn't feel like a corporate automation. In weaving humanity onto every page, it proves the vitality of not only the cinematic form, but of the people who build it--and the people it's built for.

  Writing for Dummies   

      The thing about writing in film is that … it can look like a lot of things based on the needs of the story. Good writing in a fantasy epic looks different than it does in a contemporary rom-com. The bedrock of writing a good screenplay is knowing the needs of the specific story you are writing.

         Dialogue, for example, is one of those things that will vary wildly between projects according to the motivation of the piece. Some films have their characters speak in this heightened, poetic talk that doesn’t come naturally to people in real life. Other films aspire to capture the sound of how two joes will converse waiting at an airport, warts and all.

     Expectations for what this all looks like also change across time. Film as a medium has had plenty of opportunities to respond to the needs of the society it reflects. In the early days of the artform, back when the idea of talking pictures was a huge novelty, film tended to favor this heightened portrayal of human interaction.

The Last Detail (1973)

    Then come the days of New Hollywood and the incentive to make film more REAL, and the medium starts to deflect to a more REALER way of talking. There are a lot of correct ways to write a film. But at the same time, there are absolutely universal principles that transcend setting, genre, audience, theme, etc. 

Films tend to be centered on an idea, if not a full-on argument. That thesis may or may not be explicitly stated in the text, but you can trace the ideas a film is advocating across the many tools that filmmaking employs—particularly in the writing. Part of understanding good writing is in understanding the arithmetic of narrative. Things like set-up/pay-off, three-act structure, conflict and resolution, etc. We could use The Apartment to dissect basically any of that and have a really good object lesson about composing a balanced screenplay.

But another part of writing is a bit more humanistic. Good writing in good films looks at the society it is creating in and dares to say something about it. This is a bit harder to evaluate than something like “does your protagonist have a stated goal yes/no?" But that human piece is what draws us into film, into art, in the first place.

So what kind of film is The Apartment? What is it trying to argue?

            The film sees a man working an office job, CC Baxter, at a prestigious insurance company in New York City who climbs the social ladder by lending out his apartment to his bosses so that they can have a safe space for their extra-marital affairs. He lets them use his apartment for their trysts, and they reward him with promotions.

         We pop in on Baxter right when he catches the attention of the head of personnel, Mr. Sheldrake, who wants in on Baxter’s game. In exchange for access to Baxter’s apartment, Sheldrake makes him an executive. This puts Baxter in prime position to start courting the elevator girl, Fran, but as luck would have it, that is also the girl that Sheldrake is having his affair with—this is who Sheldrake is bringing to Baxter’s apartment.

         Fran and Sheldrake’s relationship is deteriorating, but Sheldrake continues to tease her with the promise of leaving his wife for her. Eventually, though, Fran feels degraded for being used by her boss, and after a fight with Sheldrake in Baxter’s apartment, she downs his bottle of sleeping pills. Baxter returns home one night to find her passed out and enlists the help of his doctor neighbor to save her.

         Once she is clear, Sheldrake instructs Baxter to keep a close eye on her, but also to keep his name out of this ordeal. Over the span of a few short days in his apartment, Baxter and Fran grow closer. By the end of this all, Baxter and Fran more or less return to their routines. Sheldrake promotes Baxter to an executive position and recommits to his relationship with Fran after his wife initiates divorce proceedings. (There’s a subplot in which one of Sheldrake’s secretaries, an old fling, spills the beans of his affairs to Mrs. Sheldrake.) Both Fran and Baxter have what they want, but they feel the hollow parts of themselves after their time together.

And so when Sheldrake asks for the key to Baxter’s apartment for the purpose of continuing to romance Fran, Baxter refuses his boss, even with his executive position on the line. Baxter walks away from his job, and Mr. Sheldrake, intending on starting over somewhere new. Sheldrake blithely relays this to Fran, opening her eyes to how much Baxter loves her and how much she loves him. She leaves him alone in the restaurant without a word and runs to Baxter, where they reunite in his apartment.

Part of what singles out this movie as a favorite in the field of writing is the fact that the dialogue is just so fun to listen to. The characters that inhabit The Apartment all speak eloquently and expertly. Though none of the characters are aspiring to be witty, their interplay all comes out articulate and verbose, which makes the conversations very pleasant to listen to. Almost more than the actual "boy meets girl" template, the rich verbosity of the characters is what gives this film away as a "rom-com."

And my choice to describe it as such has surprised some people. The basic setup is there, and a lot of the film is very, very funny. But a huge turning point of the film is one of the main characters attempting suicide. So it’s a film that has to accommodate a wide emotional palette. The film is a comedy, but one that also takes itself very seriously.

         As with a lot of Wilder’s films, the setup was broadly satirical. Wilder is using this story as a mirror for the real problems he observed in society. Satire, of course, often slips into caricature. In order to accurately capture the scope of the transgression, you kind of have to inflate things a little bit. But something relatively unique about Wilder’s perspective is that he’s good about not inflating things so much that you lose sight of the real individuals forced to walk through this. Thus, movies like The Apartment get to have it both ways. 

What kind of film is The Apartment? Well, at its heart, the film is about two people who realize they are living beneath their dignity, and their efforts to reclaim that have them discovering how much better their lives have been for each other in it. 

I surveyed a lot of potential threads we could use to examine this thing called “writing,” and I ended up gravitating toward the parts of the screenplay that represented the tightest corners this story had to navigate. In this essay, that will mean looking at the ideas the film explores–and the tone it uses to explore them. It will also mean looking at character likeability and what it takes to get that character to their finish line. 

Love vs Capital

         I went back and forth on how to organize the flow of this essay. I was going to save the thematic overview of the film until much later after I’d laid down some of the technical groundwork, but it felt appropriate to hit this base first. After all, films really begin with an idea. Films have to say something about something. So, what is this film saying?

Modern Times (1936)

    At its root, this is a film examining the workforce and just how much of humanity, especially America, worships the workforce. This is the story of a person who has made corporate obedience the center of his existence and the toll that reaps upon his soul. Derek Thompson wrote for The Atlantic in 2019,

“The best-educated and highest-earning Americans, who can have whatever they want, have chosen the office for the same reason that devout Christians attend church on Sundays: It’s where they feel most themselves …

“But our desks were never meant to be our altars. The modern labor force evolved to serve the needs of consumers and capitalists, not to satisfy tens of millions of people seeking transcendence at the office …

“One of the benefits of being an observant Christian, Muslim, or Zoroastrian is that these God-fearing worshippers put their faith in an intangible and unfalsifiable force of goodness. But work is tangible, and success is often falsified. To make either the centerpiece of one’s life is to place one’s esteem in the mercurial hands of the market. To be a workist is to worship a god with firing power.

“On a deeper level, Americans have forgotten an old-fashioned goal of working: It’s about buying free time."

Parks and Recreation (2009)

Now, this obviously isn’t to discount a person’s ability to excel in their chosen field and do tremendous good with it. Neither is it to diminish the virtues of being dependable, disciplined, or passionate with your calling.

But what often begins as a necessary gateway, something you do to better your station in life or to contribute to a community, often molds into something degrading. Even nefarious. You can end up sacrificing a lot of your personal wellbeing in the service of a faceless entity that does not care for you. Moreover, you can justify a lot of harm, to yourself and to others, if you can tell yourself you’re doing it to secure a better future—for yourself or for your employer. Without getting too Marxian today, the efforts spent pursuing a better life for oneself all tend to get absorbed by a higher overlord who does not care for your wellbeing. Hence, we have films to examine this kind of thing.

    Wilder has listed, for example, King Vidor’s 1928 film, The Crowd, as a major inspiration for The Apartment. Both films explore the same dichotomy of achievement in career versus personal fulfillment. Like Baxter, the protagonist in The Crowd has also embraced the career mindset that causes men to frame every decision purely in terms of whether this will advance their financial standing.

    This he does believing that success in this field will somehow better qualify him as a husband or father, but the story exposes how giving himself over to the inertia of the workforce deprives him of something very human. And more, being accomplished in the workforce will not make him a more whole person. One of the intertitles notes, “The Crowd will laugh with you always, but it will cry with you only for a day.” You see the influence of The Crowd in a lot of the visuals of the film, but much more centrally you see it in the journey the character goes through in learning to realign himself with human values.

Baxter has bought into corporate doctrine and sacrificed both his happiness and his dignity on the altar of the workforce. That’s how he winds up sleeping on a park bench in the dead of winter believing it will work for his ultimate good. Roger Ebert observed, "One of the ways this is an adult picture and not a sitcom is the way it takes Baxter and Miss Kubelik so long to make the romantic leap; they aren’t deluded fools, but jaded realists who have given up on love and are more motivated by paychecks ... In many movies, the characters hardly even seem to have jobs, but in 'The Apartment' they have to be reminded that they have anything else."

    Mr. Sheldrake, then, becomes the face of corporation and the way it continually bends the workforce to its will. The screenplay introduces him as “substantial looking, authoritative in his middle 40s. A pillar in his suburban community, a blood donor and a family man.” He is framed as being aspirational, and that’s a huge part of how he earns the cooperation of his underlings. The same sort of spiel that Sheldrake uses to romance Fran plays naturally alongside the way that large corporations placate their workforce into obedience. That is how he gets Baxter to hand over his apartment for the sole purpose of romancing the girl he is in love with because it will let him use the executive washroom.

The transactionality of these relationships likens both of them—but especially Fran—to a sort of corporate prostitute, made explicit when Sheldrake gifts her a hundred dollar bill for Christmas. Fran and Baxter mirror each other as two saps who have been suckered into these degrading positions where they are made to feel cheap under Sheldrake’s design.

Baxter’s own home space being the center of this discussion adds an extra layer to this conversation. The home and the workforce are these opposite spheres. Or at the very least, they ought to remain separate. Baxer’s major violation is the way he turns his hearth into a place of business. That is why he is so out of balance.

    And it’s only when Baxter is taking care of Fran that “The Apartment” is restored to its original function as a space for the cultivation of personal wellness and communal bonds. This is when Fran and Baxter start to become wholler versions of themselves, which naturally occurs in tandem with them growing closer. Writer, Tyler Sage, put it really well when he described the film’s ultimate conflict, saying,

"Beneath this, the film also presents power itself – that unavoidable root of 'empowerment' – as a problem in human affairs, rather than a solution to them. Which is to say that, at base, C.C.'s problems stem from his rather underhanded attempts to climb the corporate pyramid. It is this quest for advancement, this naked desire for more power, that has made him alienated from his own home and denigrated by his superiors, who have turned his domestic space into their playroom …

"Neither character can escape through empowerment. The only way out is through connection, through the friendly card game between the two new lovers that ends the movie and provides Fran with her famous last line: 'Shut up and deal!'"

As with a lot of hustle culture, Baxter subjects himself to the whims of his superiors thinking these are necessary sacrifices toward a larger goal, and we are free to suppose that he would have continued along this way if he had not had this experience with Fran.

 

Tone

    Tone was one of the things that Wilder really struggled with in writing and directing. Drama and humor only overlap within very thin margins, but movies that pull it off have tremendous pay-offs. Comedy is a powerful tool to display the contradictions within society. Drama, meanwhile, offers deep emotional purging that can make a satisfying emotional experience. A story that can walk in both territories stands to gain quite a bit.

    Jack Lemmon’s son, Chris Lemmon, described The Apartment saying, “The overriding thing that is incredible about The Apartment that makes it a groundbreaking film for its time was the ability to show enormous scope. To not just be a comedy, not just a drama, not just a sarcastic social commentary, but be all of those things put together.” Part of what this intertwining of comedy and drama reveals is how these things interact in real life. Most of us aren’t living in either a drama or a comedy. Real life has harrowing swells of moral cataclysm, and sometimes it’s also really dumb. This duality is honestly a huge part of what makes this film so believable.

Gaslight (1944), Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Time Bomb (1964)

In literary terms, tone is a reflection of the author’s attitude toward the subject they are examining, which becomes the cue for how the audience is meant to view the piece. Are we supposed to feel grave and somber, or is it meant to be viewed with some irony or levity? Sometimes navigating tone is understanding what lane your movie belongs in. Other times, it’s knowing how to weave between the lines gracefully.

An issue that a lot of contemporary films run into with tone is not knowing how seriously to take itself. The default for most blockbusters is to adopt a low-stakes, breezy tone and preserve it at all costs. Modern Hollywood has this problem of telling its own audience that anything goes and nothing really matters, and then they wonder why movies are not really priorities for the rising generation.

I'm going to take a moment, though, and talk about a recent movie that handles two opposite tones very well, last year's A Real Pain. Said film is a comedy tracking the relationship between two cousins who are participating in a Holocaust tour to honor their late grandmother who endured the Nazi regime. So, it’s a comedy … about The Holocaust. This is a very tall order, but the movie sticks the landing for a number of reasons.

    Timing has a huge role here—knowing when a joke is appropriate. We don't, for example, have any laughs when the characters are literally touring Auschwitz. This works because the focus of the joke isn’t really anything about genocide or mass extermination.

    Rather, the film examines certain ironies in the legacies that unfold in the wake of such harrowing experiences. Both of these guys emerged from this devastation, and yet they are polar opposite characters with different personalities and occupying different stations on the social pyramid. They are naturally volatile elements whose combination spurs a great chemical reaction, and their interplay feeds most of the film’s comedy.

         But their disparities also reveal something about the ways in which two branches from one tree can diverge, and those divides also represent holes in both of their lives—emptiness that neither of them really know how to fill. This is where the drama comes in. What does it mean that two dudes who are born out of the same trauma can have such absurdly different worldviews and lives? And which, if either, of them can say they are carrying the legacy of their heritage?

In Bruges (2008)

         The thing about movies with comedic and dramatic elements is that they inevitably have to end up being really weighty. They have to probe deep questions and contradictions within society and then reveal something about them. Sometimes they represent that with absurdism and contradiction, sometimes by highlighting a deep aching. That’s true when we’re exploring what it means to live be descended from survivors or just what devastation a commodified society can wreak upon a human soul.

         Which brings us back to The Apartment. You’ll notice again that the film weaves the thread very tightly in some segments. A lot of the funniest moments in the film actually occur right after Baxter has discovered Fran has taken a bottle full of sleeping pills, and I’d like to take some time and talk about how the film weaves humor into a very turbulent scene. Fair warning, this chapter deals with a major character’s suicide attempt. If that’s not content you feel comfortable interacting with, I’ll catch you in the next section.

    A lot of the humor here comes from the discrepancy between the knowledge of each of the players involved. Baxter in his listlessness has just picked up a girl from the bar expecting for a night of blameless sex when he discovers Fran passed out on his bed. When he discovers the empty bottle of sleeping pills next to her, Baxter realizes that something dire has happened and he springs into action, but along the way to get Fran help, he becomes the subject of some very effective punchlines.

A major part of why this situation is open to humor is that we, the audience, have already seen Fran taking the sleeping pills. We are not surprised to find her on the bed the way Baxter is. And so, this segment isn’t forcing us to digest this horrible development alongside anything that would make light of it. If anything, the moment that we see Baxter recognizing the gravity of the situation creates something of an exhale–we know that help is on the way now. And so it’s easier to lubricate the moment with some absurdity.

    There’s a recurring joke where Doctor Dreyfuss, who knows nothing of Baxter’s situation with his bosses, just thinks that his neighbor is careless with his dating. That misunderstanding is part of the price Baxter pays for lending out his apartment in order to advance his station. And so when the Doctor walks in and sees Baxter entertaining another girl while one is dying in his bedroom, Baxter is not in a position to correct him. He just has to swallow it. The gag isn’t that Fran is dying on his bed, it’s that Baxter is having all his inadequacies displayed in rapid fire.

And none of these laughs come out while Fran’s lifeless body is onscreen, and so there is a necessary degree of removal. Every moment that Fran is onscreen is a sobering moment. We don’t laugh again in the film until we are secure that she is okay, and we spend quite a bit of time wondering whether she will be. Once Baxter’s fling is gone, our attention falls back solely onto Fran and getting her out of this situation. Comedy is and always has been a method of humbling the subject of the joke, and in this case, using the moment to gravely humble Baxter for his carelessness works really well. High risk, high reward.

    The inclusion of Fran’s suicide attempt becomes essential to the film’s larger dialogue because this act of despair becomes the central focal point for the aching that emerges in the lives of both Fran and Baxter. This gravity gives the comedy its weight so that it doesn’t just dissipate after the laughter subsides. All those biting observations about the commodification of human dignity, they hit a lot deeper once you see the human cost with something like this. James Powers wrote in 2017 for The Hollywood Reporter, "In this desperate action, both Miss MacLaine and Lemmon realize in facing death they have been alive, and for some better purpose than for each to serve his machine."

This movie understands that this interplay between humor and drama not only has flow, but also progression. It’s only after Fran and Baxter have been through this very sobering ordeal together that they become unguarded enough to reveal their most vulnerable selves to one another. And from that vulnerability springs levity and humor, and from there, real companionship. Thus, we move from comedy into drama, and then back into comedy. And along the way, we catch some other things as well.

Character Likeability

Wreck-it Ralph (2012)

Unless your film is some kind of specialty genre like hard satire, you basically always want to center your film on a likeable character because they will keep your audience invested in the story you are telling. Likeable characters generally have to be selfless, champions of the little people. And if not that, then at least proactive, a master of their own destiny, someone who will make things interesting. Or else, they're somehow displaced in their environment and we can all kinda see how much better it would be for everyone if they took the fast track to success.

Wilder was particularly concerned with whether audiences would see Baxter as a sympathetic character because ... we don’t really see Baxter as any of those things. But film is one of those spaces where you can show your audience how to cheer for a character they would not “like” in real life—if a storyteller knows how to present those flaws.

    This is halfway similar to what we talked about with the Guardians of the Galaxy situation. The main characters at the start of the film are washed up criminals, but they are still immensely likable right from the start. These guys are flawed, yes, both in the way of having an actual criminal history and in just being a bunch of angry dum-dums. But they are also very entertaining, which makes us want to keep them around. And more, the films give us an angle that helps us see them as more than just their rough spots.

These guys are making maladaptive choices, yes, and making a mess for everyone else along the way, but the things keeping them in their little prisons say a lot about the attitudes that keep many of us trapped in our own respective prisons. They are, in other words, relatable. If you can display that, then your audience goes from “this guy is a loser, why am I wasting time with this schmuck” to “this person understands what it’s like to be stuck, and I hope that they figure things out.” Because if they can, maybe there’s hope for the rest of us.

What really sells a viewer on a character is their potential for good, which happens when you have a clear view of both a person’s seed for altruism and also the apparatus that is keeping them in place. The appeal of this thing called cinema is in how it opens up doors in our imagination to perceive exits out of these situations that we wouldn’t necessarily see otherwise. And that’s the case for both the Guardians of the Galaxy and The Apartment. 

    Baxter’s a doormat yes, but he’s not spiteful or malignant. Neither is he like throwing his coworkers or subordinates under the bus or anything. He’s not like Matthew MacFayden in Succession, petty and self-promoting, while also degrading people who are more disadvantaged than him. Baxter’s mostly just in competition with himself. Based on his behavior in his normal interactions, Baxter’s resting state appears to be one of politeness and general pleasantry. I don’t think Baxter is truly underhanded or unlikeable. He’s just bought into the same capitalist indoctrination that pervades most of the work force.

That’s actually always been a part of what endears me to this movie. It puts a dial to how destructive and commonplace the sin of complicity is. Baxter did not initiate this setup with his bosses. He just sort of allowed it to happen, which is how a lot of characters wind up in their situations. Part of what gives a story tension is the uncertainty about whether or not they will make the jump once they realize that they are living a lie. Jack Lemmon shared in an interview with AFI,

“Another thing I loved about The Apartment now that I think back was the fact that there were so many faults in the characters. Billy would seemingly go out of his way to manifest the faults within characters because we all are faulted.”

        A major reason why Baxter is still sympathetic in his flaws is that his situation is recognizable. Even if we haven’t been in identical circumstances, we can sympathize with the dilemma he is put in. It’s the same basic reason why we might still find Hugh Jackman sympathetic in Prisoners for going to any length to rescue his kidnapped daughter even though his methods unlock a very real brutality in him--wouldn’t we go to any lengths to bring our kid home?

In Baxter’s case, the designs of society kind of train a person to believe that any sacrifice made in the name of achievement is worthwhile, and choosing to step away from that requires a person muster a kind of self-assurance that the world does not offer naturally. Thus, we watch his situation unfold partly because we crave insight into what we might do in a situation that doesn’t feel too removed from us.

Where some films, especially contemporary films, honestly flounder is in not making your character testing enough, or else keeping their flaws vaguely defined. The general truism is that perfect characters are boring, and I don’t think the reason for that is as simple as audiences having some baser need to have their baser instincts reflected onscreen. The thing about perfect characters is that they offer no tension. You feel no suspense about whether or not they will get what they want because there’s nothing getting in the way of their progression–as there is with a guy like Baxter who is trying to reclaim his humanity in a system that rewards sycophantic obedience to the workforce.

    What reveals Baxter’s worthiness as our protagonist, despite his flaws, comes in his experience with and treatment of Fran. And that line begins well before they are involved romantically. Early on, we see the executives making degrading comments about the elevator girl who won’t give them a date, and this is where Baxter speaks up for her to his superiors, “It could just be she’s a nice, respectable girl—there’s millions of them.”

Baxter’s ability to see Fran as a person is what contrasts him against his superiors, and this signals that he still has that pilot light of benevolence. Our interest in the story rests on whether or not that light will be sufficient. And the answer unfolds in this second half of the story where we’re dealing with the fallout of Fran’s suicide attempt, and this apartment which has been used to trampoline Baxter’s career escapades transforms into something different.

    Most of the third quarter of the movie sees Baxter trying to mask the incident in order to keep Sheldrake’s name out of the papers—so from one perspective his actions are purely self-preservation. But it becomes clear after a while that as much as he’s protecting his boss or even himself, he’s also protecting Fran out of very real feelings for her wellbeing. On page 93 of the screenplay, just after Dr. Dreyfuss has given Fran the okay to fall asleep, the screen directions read that Baxter, “… switches on the electric blanket to keep Fran warm. Then he slumps into a chair beside the bed, looks at her compassionately.”

Baxter will also pay some prices for his protectiveness. One intersection comes when Baxter’s supervisors try to pressure him for holding up the apartment, when he is flaking on their appointments because he is busy allowing Fran to recuperate. Baxter tries hard to protect Fran’s identity, even though she might pose a suitable alibi and get him out of a bind with his bosses. And even when they figure out that Fran is in the apartment, Baxter does not disclose what she is doing there. He allows them to think she is just there entertaining him. And this has consequences for Baxter.

    They report Baxter to Fran’s brother-in-law when he comes asking where Fran has been these lost days. When he shows up to Baxter's apartment, Baxter lets him think that Fran's accident was all his fault, and this culminates in Baxter getting a fist to the jaw. Thus, Baxter experiences some punishment for leaving himself at the mercy of his sadistic overlords while also putting himself on the line for another person.

At the end of the day, Baxter is not a bad person--he is a person in conflict. Like many great film characters, he is in a state of dissociation. He allows himself to believe certain things because he has bought into the idea that it serves a greater end. But because his base DNA is good, these hurdles tear away the accumulated corporate trash that had been cluttering up his soul.

 

         Character Arc

Gone with the Wind (1939)

       The nucleus of any solid movie is a discernible character arc, the journey a character takes to becoming a wholler version of themselves. 

You have certain films that flourish the dance. Some characters are here to model growth, some are there to model resilience. These stories are generally there to test the fortitude of a certain character and the values they represent, and these work when you see the odds really stacked against them. Stories can also track a character’s failure to turn the corner. This often becomes the basis for tragedy.

But what’s more common is tracking a person’s evolution. For Baxter, the main arc sees him willfully submitting to the workforce machine, believing that this will result in some grand pay-off later, and eventually detaching from it. This is a strong conflict because we all feel the pull of capital and prestige.

    Generally, a character’s arc is building up to some kind of culminating moment. This comes when they finally do something they were not willing to do at the start of the film. E.g. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Joel’s inherent conflict-aversity leaves him too timid to go after Clementine after she walks out of his life. But after internalizing just how much better his life was with Clementine, he overcomes his natural timidity and goes after her, begging her to give them a chance.

In Baxter’s case, that moment comes when he chooses not to hand his key to Sheldrake so he can continue wooing the woman he loves, when Baxter finally chooses to rebuff his employer’s offer for promotion in favor of something personal, something real. This is what the film has been building to, the moment when his old way of existing no longer becomes tolerable.

And that change is really proven when it’s an internal factor moving them out of their space, not their circumstances. Real character reveals itself when it’s a character’s principles and beliefs that compel them out of their old existence. One of my favorite examples of this in film is probably with On the Waterfront, which sees an under-the-table errand boy for a powerful mob boss slowly reckoning with his complicity in a wicked man’s abuse of power.

    The stakes of The Apartment are much less life-and-death than On the Waterfront, but part of the reasons why both films work is because they track a person’s gradual ascent to individuality and dignity, and both of these arcs are propelled by a person choosing to reject their old excuses and start living as their best selves. Terry in this film has seen what his service to an evil man has cost his community and the people he loves, and so he takes great personal risk when he reports his boss to the authorities. Screenwriter and Professor, Linda Cowgill, writes,

“In the most powerful films, there is a moral component to the story. It isn’t as simple as good vs evil or right vs wrong, although one cannot ignore such moral certainties. There are situations where we know the right thing to do, but we also understand the difficulty in doing it. When a character does the right thing under hard circumstances, however, it engenders respect from the audience because we witness a hero in action and admire his courage.”

  Baxter could have easily continued his trajectory of sliding up the corporate ladder, and killing off the parts of himself that would make this objectionable, but that’s no longer good enough for him. The same can be said for Fran. She could easily go on with Sheldrake, especially now that he's not married any longer, but she sees a better future for herself, and she takes that off-ramp.

  And this is part of the reason why I thought it would be useful to talk a little about the “tone” of The Apartment. The tendency with examining the workforce is to aim for the extremes. You have media that takes a comedic approach and highlights the absurdity of the space. And you also have shows and television that look at the issue dramatically, capturing what a formidable hold the workplace has on American culture and what a difficult beast it is to slay. Neither face really bodes well for imagining a way out of the mess.

But this film is neither as fatalistic as something like Severance nor as blithe as something like The Office. And in finding the shared territory between comedy and drama, the film spins an honest portrayal of someone extricating themselves from the mess—and without compromising on its commentary.

  I think the conclusion to The Apartment actually winds up catching the truth as well as anything else. Baxter and Fran don’t really break the system when they break free of their prisons—they don’t really “change anything.” Their insurance firm will no doubt replace them with new stool pigeons, and Sheldrake will likely continue preying on the young women of the office.

But I also think that whenever this mythical change in American culture does come about, I think it will look more or less like a magnified version of what we get here: young idealists realizing in their own time and own way that they deserve better than the corporate system will ever allow. The machine needs cogs in order to keep operating, and if enough moving parts did decide to disengage, it would dismantle on its own.

Shut Up and Deal

One final note on tone and attitude–in the film’s final dialogue exchange, Baxter tells Fran, “Didn’t you hear me, Miss Kubelik? I absolutely adore you.” And she just replies, “Shut up and deal,” and they both just kind of smartly grin at each other while they go on with their card game. Various accounts will say something about Wilder not wanting to go for a schmaltzy final scene. Hence, the closer has Fran playfully deflecting Baxter’s declaration. 

And this is an impulse I see performed in many contemporary films--this deliberate skirting of emotional vulnerability--and it almost always annoys me. But it doesn’t here. This is honestly one of my favorite endings in film history, and certainly one of my favorite lines.

The Fall Guy (2024)

Why doesn’t this read as insecure? Why doesn’t this annoy me, the way that so many other movies do? Well, it’s a lot of reasons, but mostly it’s that by this point, I’m not left doubting whether or not these two players, or film which they occupy, carry rich emotions.

    Because I don’t think that Fran is saying that she doesn’t return his affections here. Neither do I actually think she’s like ribbing him for possessing such emotions. I think it’s the opposite, or so we get to assume watching her return Baxter's sappiness with a big ol' grin of her own.

    I think with this line both she and Wilder are showing confidence in how the relationship they have built has proven its integrity in the short time they’ve spent together. Based on their history and the way they’ve literally saved one another, Fran feels confident enough in Baxter for him to recognize where he stands with her. And what she wants next is to just get on with this next step in their relationship. Hence, “Shut up and deal.” I’m not saying I would protest a more straightforward love declaration, but I also believe this reveals something about why this situation works where so much of modern filmmaking is just rife with insecurity. 

         Part of what moves me to single this out as the best screenplay, out of hundreds of aces, has a lot to do with the specific subject—my own observations about the way that making work and productivity the center of existence deprives you of something and the urgency to disengage. And there are obviously a million different routes to this. Not everyone has the same relationship to work—not everyone has the same autonomy to just detach from the workforce if it is seeping them of their humanity. We could spend a lot of time on this.

    But asserting our independence can also look like a number of things. Anytime we choose to cultivate our human connections over subservience to corporate interests, the machine's hold on us slackens, and our ability to exist autonomously widens inch by inch.

Kolya (1996)

   When they're doing their job, good films commandeer the mechanics of the medium to reveal something about our collective humanity. We have patterns to detect when the cinematic machine is operating at optimal capacity, things a Hollywood executive ought to be able to catch onto before they sign off on a script.

    But more than trying to assign a quantifiable value to things like theme or novelty, we train ourselves in recognizing these things as we grow more fluent in human interaction. When we become more fluent in human interest in real-life, we start to recognize it onscreen.

   And if we as audiences are doing our job, we get to take a little of it home with us, and thus continues the beautiful cycle.

                    --The Professor