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

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.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations  vii Preface  ix Introduction: A Philosophy of Urbanism  1 1. A Primer in Urbanism: Rear Window's Archetypal Apartment Plot  47 2. "We Like Our Apartment": The Playboy Indoors  88 3. The Great Reprieve: Modernity, Femininity, and the Apartment  139 4. The Suburbs in the City: The Housewife and the Apartment  180 5. Movin' On Up: The African American Apartment  220 Epilogue: A New Philosophy for a New Century  267 Notes  279 Bibliography  289 Index  303

About the Author :
Pamela Robertson Wojcik is Associate Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theater and Director of the Gender Studies Program at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna, also published by Duke University Press, and the editor of Movie Acting: The Film Reader.

Review :
"The Apartment Plot is a lively and fascinating read. I was convinced every step of the way by Pamela Robertson Wojcik's arguments about the apartment plot, including how it works as a genre as well as a cycle, how it makes concrete and sometimes problematizes an urban philosophy, and how it represents alternative ideological perspectives on post-war adult life otherwise obscured by all the attention to suburban living. This remarkable book offers a necessary corrective to many dominant and simplistic assumptions about post-war American life." - Steven Cohan, author of Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical "The Apartment Plot is an imaginative, thoroughly researched, closely observed, accomplished interdisciplinary work on the mid-century 'apartment plot' in American film and, to a lesser but important degree, TV, design, print, and sociology. It is a lively and engaging book that both breaks new ground and renovates existing critical edifices." - Patricia White, co-author of The Film Experience: An Introduction "Pamela Robertson Wojcik's intriguing book takes an original approach to Hollywood cinema. Her subject is the apartment as setting, which, in films of the post-war decades, she claims, became a space where "a philosophy of urbanism" could be dramatized...Wojcik argues persuasively that the "apartment plot" imbues films with recurrent themes that transcend genre and director." - Alexander Jacoby, Times Literary Supplement "Most impressive is this book's mastery of the critical landscape surrounding the more commented-upon films. While laying out for the reader the terrain of auteur-based and film noir genre-focused studies of, for example, the Hitchcockian thriller, Wojcik reads against this grain to unfold the wider issues revealed when one considers Rear Window in its relationship to other 'apartment plots' of the period." - Scope, February 2012