Framing Interiorities: Interiors, Objects, and Hidden Desires in Billy Wilder's "The Apartment" (1960)

The Apartment (1960), directed by Billy Wilder (born Samuel Wilder, 1906-2002) from a screenplay that he wrote in collaboration with I.A.L. Diamond (born Iţek Domnici, 1920-1988), is one of the director’s most bitter and melancholic, but also tenderly romantic films. The Apartment was also a great success; it received 10 Academy Awards nominations and won 5 Academy Awards. Described by critics as a morbid and disillusioned work, in which “they all get drunk, have sex [except the protagonist], or pass themselves off for what they are not in a series of physical or mental closures each more squalid than the next” (Simsolo 2011, 69), the film is centered on the misadventures of a bachelor, owner of a small apartment that he lends to the managers of the company which employs him for their extramarital affairs. In exchange, the office clerk Calvin Clifford (C. C.) “Bud” Baxter (played by Jack Lemmon) is guaranteed a series of advancements in his career, physically symbolized first by a glass cubicle, then by an elegant private room on the upper floors of the corporation building and, above all, by the passkey of the managers’ washroom. The fantasy of social success drives the whole story, but in reality, the film speaks of the desires —manifest, latent, hidden— that shape people’s lives and find expression in a succession of repercussions, lies and manipulations played out on different film sets: from the open-plan office of the anonymous corporation at which the accountant works to his tiny pad, passing through an elevator (“inhabited” by the young Fran Kubelik, played by Shirley MacLaine), misunderstandings in the bar and a New Year party; and ending, finally, in that little flat. While the ending seems to be a happy one – C. C. “Buddy” Baxter is reunited with his beloved Fran –, in reality, the couple we see playing gin rummy in the final scene of the film are “two people without jobs who have lost all their illusions, rejecting every compromise, and find themselves on the margins of society. Because those who are not willing to submit to the logic of power lose any hope of climbing its ladder” (Simsolo 2011, 73). The inner lives of the protagonists are revealed through a number of everyday objects – the telephone and a Rolodex card file, a record player and a television, a fresh flower pinned on a uniform, two kinds of headgear (a trilby and a black bowler hat) and two keys, two mirrors (the broken mirror of Fran’s compact and the mirror of Baxter’s bathroom), a tennis racquet – that, in the guise of Lacanian "objets petits autres," represent the bodily fetishes of desire, illusion and disappointment. The relationship between those objects and the people is underlined, each time, by different types of interior, domestic and public, that become so many “frames” of their interiorities, surfacing from the play of reflections and allusions that brings the whole story to life. It is no coincidence that Billy Wilder, a man who knew something about the architecture of his time, and the production designer and art director Alexandre Trauner (1906-1993), trained as an artist, used a number of technical stratagems to magnify or shrink the settings in which the scenes took place, in order to emphasize their pathos. The essay unfolds through a sequence of frames, each of which connects an interior, an "objet petit autre" and the protagonists of the story, so as to present a series of revelations of their inner lives. The essay also outlines the social and historical context of the film —the post-war United States, the rise of the middle class, jobs in the service industry and white-collar workers— and its reconstruction as a film set (the open-plan office, the cubicle office, the elevator, the apartment).