Apartment Plot

Rethinking films including Pillow Talk, Rear Window, and The Seven Year Itch, Pamela Robertson Wojcik examines the popularity of the "apartment plot" from the baby boom years into the 1970s. Wojcik's term for narratives in which the apartment figures as a central device, the apartment plot was not only central to the era's films; it also surfaced repeatedly in TV shows, Broadway plays, literature, and comic strips, from The Honeymooners and The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Subways are for Sleeping, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and Apartment 3G. By identifying the apartment plot as a film genre, she reveals affinities between movies generally viewed as belonging to such distinct genres as film noir, romantic comedy and melodrama. Wojcik analyzes the apartment plot as part of a mid-twentieth-century urban discourse, showing how it offers a vision of home centred on values of community, visibility, contact, mobility, impermanence and porousness that contrasts with views of home as private, stable and family-based. She 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. The Apartment Plot illuminates and explains their significance to postwar popular culture.