The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975

by Pamela Wojcik

Rethinking the significance of films including Pillow Talk , Rear Window , and The Seven Year Itch , Pamela Robertson Wojcik examines the popularity of the “apartment plot,” her term for stories in which the apartment functions as a central narrative device. From the baby boom years into the 1970s, the apartment plot was not only key to films; it also surfaced in TV shows, Broadway plays, literature, and comic strips, from The Honeymooners and The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Subways are for Sleeping and Apartment 3-G . By identifying the apartment plot as a film genre, Wojcik reveals affinities between movies generally viewed as belonging to such distinct genres as film noir, romantic comedy, and melodrama. She analyzes the apartment plot as part of a mid-twentieth-century urban discourse, showing how it offers a vision of home centered on values of community, visibility, contact, mobility, impermanence, and porousness that contrasts with views of home as private, stable, and family-based. Wojcik suggests that the apartment plot presents a philosophy of urbanism related to the theories of Jane Jacobs and Henri Lefebvre. Urban apartments were important spaces for negotiating gender, sexuality, race, and class in mid-twentieth-century America.

342 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wojcik's study is a model of film scholarship. It is a fascinating reading of the use of the apartment in American media from 1940s to the 1970s and relies on popular films as well as magazines, marriage manuals, cookbooks, newspapers, architecture history, and sociological books to make a compelling case that Hollywood and American culture crafted what she refers to as the "apartment plot" to represent the changing ways in which Americans were living. Through a close reading of key texts such as her alternative and in-depth reading of Hitchcock's Rear Window and Playboy magazine she shows how apartment living became a crucial site to explore issues of class, gender roles, marriage, and race. The book is a must read if you want to know more about 1950s America and its films while also trying to better understand the culture responsible for making many of these classic films.

[University of Chicago Magazine]

Pamela Robertson Wojcik, AM'88, PhD'93
Author

From our pages (July-Aug/11): "Wojcik identifies a distinct genre, the “apartment plot,” that transcends traditional genres of noir, romantic comedy, and drama, in which the urban apartment is central to the narrative. It appears often in mid-20th-century film, television, and theater, says Wojcik, citing Rear Window, The Seven Year Itch, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, among others. Wojcik shows how the apartment plot speaks to questions of midcentury urban race, class, and sexuality."