The Apartment Plot

Front matter

THE APARTMENT

PAMELA ROBERTSON WOJCIK

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Chapter 5. Movin’ On Up: The African American Apartment 220 Epilogue: A New Philosophy for a New Century Notes 279

Bibliography 289 Index 303

ILLUSTRATIONS

Plates (between pages 50 and 51)

PLATE 1. New Yorker cover, 31 July 1954

PLATE 2. Image from The Fantastic Four

PLATE 3. Image from Daredevil

PLATE 4. Frame grab, Pillow Talk

PLATE $. Frame grab, Pillow Talk

PLATE 6. Frame grab, That Funny Feeling PLATE 7. Frame grab, That Funny Feeling PLATE 8. Frame grab, That Funny Feeling PLATE 9. Frame grab, The Boys in the Band PLATE 10. Frame grab, The Boys in the Band PLATE 11. Frame grab, That Funny Feeling PLATE 12. Frame grab, How to Marry a Millionaire PLATE 13. Frame grab, Cactus Flower

PLATE 14. Frame grab, Cactus Flower

PLATE 15. Frame grab, Designing Woman PLATE 16. Frame grab, Under the Yum Yum Tree PLATE 17. Frame grab, Under the Yum Yum Tree PLATES 18.1 and 18.2. Frame grabs, Barefoot in the Park PLATE 19. Frame grab, Rosemary’s Baby

PLATE 20. Frame grab, For Love of Ivy

PLATES 21.1 and 21.2. Frame grabs, Claudine

Figures

1. Architectural rendering of Rear Window courtyard 2. Frame grab, Rear Window 52 3. Frame grab, Rosemary’s Baby 52

Vill LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

4. Frame grab, Rear Window 79

s. Frame grab, Barefoot in the Park 79

6. Frame grab, Breakfast at Tiffany’s 80

7-1 and 7.2. Frame grab, Pushover 82

8. Frame grab, Pillow Talk 83

9. Frame grab, Rear Window 84

10. Frontispiece for “Playboy’s Penthouse Apartment,” October 1956 11.1 and 11.2. Excerpts from “Playboy’s Progress” 102-3 12. Excerpt from “The Playboy Coloring Book” 104 13.1 and 13.2. Claude Smith cartoon from Playboy 106 14. Image from Batman 108

15. Frame grab, The Boys in the Band 136

16. European press pack for Any Wednesday, retitled Bachelor Girl Apartment 140

17. Frame grab, Breakfast at Tiffany’s 141

18. Image from Apartment 3-G 150

19. Frame grab, Klute 173

20. Frame grab, Sex and the Single Girl 178

21. Press kit image, Diary of a Mad Housewife 181

22. Frame grab, Barefoot in the Park 194

23. Frame grab, Wait Until Dark 209

24. Frame grab, The Jeffersons 221

25. Frame grab, A Raisin in the Sun 238

26. Frame grab, No Way Out 251

27.1 and 27.2. Frame grabs, No Way Out 254

28. Frame grab, A Patch of Blue 255

Preface

Some years ago, more than I care to count, when I was not quite thirty years old, I got my first academic job, in Australia at the University of Newcastle. As part of the laborious paperwork required to secure a residential permit to live and work in Australia, I had to obtain a document from the sheriff of Chicago stating that, to the best of his knowledge, I was not a criminal (an ironic requirement fora nation founded as a penal colony). In order to obtain this document, I had to provide the sheriff with a list of my addresses from the previous ten years. A history of my twenties, this produced, not surprisingly, a history of apartments. Mine was a long list, but probably not an unusual one. My apartments included a two-bedroom in Earl’s Court, London, which I shared with four roommates during a semester’s study abroad my junior year. This was a very bohemian apartment. Here, I kept my clothing in the kitchen cupboard (where the mice lived), experimented with black hair dye, and got avant-garde haircuts at the Vidal Sassoon school. From the bathroom window, we could hear announcements from the tube station below, as well as the shouts of rioting soccer fans returning home from a game. After graduating Wellesley College, I moved into a single-family home on Magazine Street in Central Square, Cambridge, owned by a friend of my sister’s. My sister and I each rented a room, and shared space in the kitchen and bathroom. I was a paralegal and she was in law school. We went to aerobics class together and cooked curries. Eventually, the owner married and had two children, while still renting out rooms, adding to the boarding-house effect. When I moved away from Cambridge to go to graduate school at the University of Chicago, my first apartment was a shabby one-bedroom apartment in Hyde Park assigned to me by the university. This was like a return to dorm life, and a regression.

xX PREFACE

I shared it with a library student who enjoyed listening to music on the radio and watching football games on Tv, at the same time. After that, I moved to a two-bedroom in a gorgeous courtyard building I shared with a fellow female English graduate student. After house sitting at a condo for a faculty member who spent half of every year in New Jersey, I finally moved into my first solo apartment, a large one-bedroom in a building where a former boyfriend had lived before he moved to the East Coast. My best friend moved into the same building, across the courtyard. This was great fun, until one night I watched a sometimes boyfriend of mine sneak over to her apartment after leaving mine. Eventually, I moved to the North Side, swapping apartments with another graduate student, taking her tiny studio in posh Lincoln Park. My last Chicago apartment was a one-bedroom in Lakeview in a building much favored by single women because it was close to public transportation and in the heart of Boys’ Town, a gay neighborhood that was always lively and safe—a model for Jane Jacobs’s ideals of urbanism.

Once I got to Australia, I added two more apartments. The first was a furnished flat in a prefab building. The second was a much more romantic apartment —a twisted warren of oddly shaped rooms in a rambling beach house. From my bedroom window, I could see and hear the ocean, dotted with tankers and surfers. While living in that apartment, but visiting Chicago, I fell in love with my now husband. He visited me in my Australian flat a few times, adding to its romance. Returning to Chicago, and working at the Chicago International Film Festival, we lived in his condo, the basement duplex in an attractive brick three-flat in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village. Shortly after we got married, and after I started working at the University of Notre Dame, we moved to a single-family home a few blocks away. Or, rather, we moved to a three-flat and rented two apartments to tenants until we could afford to convert it to a single-family home. One tenant was a single woman and medical student, the other a gay male writer and friend. As they each moved on to new phases of their lives, and their own home ownership, we took over their space, converting the three-flat to a single-family home. The conversion was completed just before the arrival of our second child.

I begin with this history because my movements are typical, I think, of the movements that many of us make from shared apartments to solo apartments to “living together” to home ownership, with these moves often but not always reflecting changes in status—including not only marital status, but also career and financial status. My movements also

PREFACE xi reverse the conversion process begun when apartments were introduced to America, when four-story row houses, like mine, were viewed as too inefficient and costly and were, therefore, often turned into apartments.

Long before I lived in apartments, I envisioned my future through images of apartments, especially those I’d seen on Tv or in movies. As a young girl, I imagined my life as a single woman as some mishmash of Mary Richards’s, or, more likely, Rhoda’s apartment, in The Mary Tyler Moore show, and the somewhat more glamorous high-rise Manhattan apartment inhabited by Ann Marie in That Girl. (Following the logic of the shows, either scenario led to dating Ted Bessel.) In due course, I figured I’d have a fancier career girl apartment, like one of the Doris Day apartments in a Rock&Doris movie. And eventually, I’d settle into a Bob Newhart building, where I’d wear chic maxi dresses and have charming and affable neighbors dropping in at all times. Though I never lived in my imagined apartment—to this day, I’ve never lived in a high-rise, and my apartments never really got past the bohemian phase—I still inhabited spaces that I read through the fantasy of urban living I’d formed through those representations.

This book is about that urban fantasy, or what I am calling here a “philosophy of urbanism.” It is about the apartment as an imagined space, and a genre. It is about the way in which representing the apartment — in film, novels, comic strips, and more— functions as a way of imagining the urban, and of imagining identities as produced and shaped by the urban. It is neither a history of apartments, nor a book about architecture. At the same time, however, the apartment is always described in relation to historical discourses— discourses on family, gender, sex, race, class, space, urbanism—that shape the philosophy of urbanism and the apartment as urban habitat.

This book began its journey as a different sort of musing. Watching That Funny Feeling one day, I was struck by its similarity to Pillow Talk. I began thinking about many different kinds of apartment plots—such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Rear Window, Wait Until Dark, and The Boys in the Band—and started seeing links between them. I called Ken Wissoker at Duke —who has his own deep history of apartments —and asked him, “Is this an idea?” Happily, Ken said yes, and I thank him for the opportunity to publish this with Duke. (But, if you think it isn’t an idea, or if the execution of the idea is problematic, the blame is solely mine.) As I began researching and writing the book, numerous friends and family helped and encouraged me. Steven Cohan, Don Crafton, Kyle and Jeffrey Neal, xil PREFACE

Jacob Smith, Keir Keightley, Oliver Gaycken, and Chris Sieving all provided material and suggestions. Thanks to all of them for Tivo-ing “apartment,” sending bachelor pad music, and digging up obscure videos. Over the years, I presented portions of this book at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the Chicago Film Seminar, the Critical Feminist Division of the Cultural Studies Association, the University of Illinois Conference on Humanities and the Family, and the University of Notre Dame. My thanks go to audiences at those events, whose questions helped me sharpen my thinking, and who often reminded me of movies I’d forgotten or provided references I did not know. Mary Squillace, Jonathan Retartha, and Mary Hannan were student research assistants at Notre Dame and spent numerous hours reading Mademoiselle, Playboy, the New Yorker, and other magazines, as well as tracking down academic articles and books. I am grateful to them for their keen eyes and hard work. Javi Zubizarretta helped with permissions and copyediting. Christina Ries and Jackie Wyatt provided administrative support that made the process of preparing the manuscript much easier. Lisa Blye, Lindsey Madden, Carli McKenney, and Barb Elliott provided the absolutely essential aid of babysitting — my deep thanks to them for giving me time and space to write. Una Moon created the architectural rendering of the Rear Window courtyard, and I thank her for her time and her assiduousness. Christoph Niemann graciously agreed to design a cover image for me; thanks to him for his imaginative capture of the philosophy of urbanism. Courtney Berger provided crucial support and lines of communication at the Press. Gerry Lemmon was my tour guide at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and Kristine Harris and Robert Polito accompanied me for that informative visit.

Thanks to the University of Notre Dame and the Department of Film, Tv and Theater for giving me leave and the resources necessary to research the book. The Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts provided absolutely critical financial support. Without their help, this book would not have been published. In particular, they provided key funds for some of the volume’s images.

Many friends read and commented on this project in draft. Thanks to Virginia Wright Wexman, Jennifer Peterson, David Boyd, Susan Ohmer, Don Crafton, Peter Holland, Daniel Morgan, Terri Kapsalis, Robert Polito, Kristine Harris, and Jim Collins, all of whom improved the book through their insights. Thanks also to the anonymous readers at Duke University Press for their careful reflection on the manuscript. Students

PREFACE xiii in the courses Gender and Space; Cinema, Gender and Space; and the Hitchcock Seminar, all between 2006 and 2009, read and commented on various chapters. Thanks especially to Barbara Green, who, more than any other friend, lived this project with me. Her insight and attention to the project always improved it. I’m honored to have her friendship and scholarly consideration.

Rick Wojcik deserves special mention for his deep involvement in this project. My thanks to him for watching so many apartment plots, reading sections of the book, and listening to me talk about apartments — and kvetch about the work —as well as providing suggestions for comic references, LPs, and more. Just as important, my thanks for living the urban life with me. I look forward to one day retiring to a high-rise with him, becoming Bob and Emily as octogenarians. Finally, this book is dedicated to Samantha and Ned Wojcik, who helped me rediscover the ballet of the good city sidewalk from the ground up. I wish them both many apartments.

INTRODUCTION A Philosophy of Urbanism

The history of American houses shows how Americans

have tried to embody social issues in domestic architecture,

and how they have tried, at the same time, to use this imagery to escape a social reality that is always more complex and

diverse than the symbols constructed to capture it. —GWENDOLYN WRIGHT, Building the Dream: A Social

History of Housing in America

If Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) is the quintessential fifties film about the last gasps of old Hollywood, in the persona of Gloria Swanson’s character, Norma Desmond, and her fellow silent-era “waxworks”—most notably Buster Keaton and Erich von Stroheim—it is also very much a film about the New Hollywood that emerged after the 1948 Paramount Decision. As the film venomously looks back to the then largely forgotten silent era, it looks forward to the blockbuster epics of Cecil B. DeMille, himself a potential waxwork who nonetheless thrived in fifties Hollywood. In the film, DeMille plays himself as a director who recalls his past with Swanson/Desmond, but has continued working, making the transition into sound and beyond. DeMille’s scenes in the film, shot on Stage 18 on the Paramount Lot, where he actually was filming the biblical epic Samson and Delilah, point toward one tendency in fifties cinema—large-scale epics intended to compete with tv. Of course, Sunset Boulevard itself points toward a darker, more cynical tendency in fifties films, reflected in fifties noir, social problem films, revisionist westerns, and dark comedies. But while these various strands of fifties films are often noted by scholars, Sunset Boulevard also points toward another trend, one generally overlooked in accounts of the period, that I will call “the apartment plot.”

In Sunset Boulevard, William Holden’s character, Joe Gillis—a downon-his-heels writer trapped in a loveless “arrangement” with the forgotten fifty-year-old Desmond—begins to overcome his writer’s block and gain new hope in his personal and professional life through his relationship with Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson)—a pretty young script reader at Paramount who has hopes of being a writer. Taking a small flashback about a schoolteacher from one of Gillis’s early scripts, Dark Windows—a 1940s-style psychological thriller about a murderous psychopath—Betty convinces him to turn it into a new script. While Betty initially envisions a realist social problem film about the scarcity and difficulty of work for teachers, Gillis advises her: “Don’t make it too dreary. How about this for a situation? She teaches daytime, he teaches at night, right? They don’t even know each other, but they share the same room. It’s cheaper that way. As a matter of fact, they sleep in the same bed. In shifts, of course.” Betty, sharing perhaps our uncertainty, asks,

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“Are you kidding? Because I think it’s good.” “So do I,” answers Gillis, and their project begins.

This contrived plot, which is all the detail we are ever given about the Untitled Love Story that Joe and Betty write, might be seen as a parodic twist on the warped shared-house plot that shapes Sunset Boulevard; as Joe leaves his apartment, and the independence it represents, to enter the macabre mansion on Sunset Boulevard. At the same time, the script echoes or apes a variety of texts, including the charming romantic comedy The More the Merrier (Stevens, 1943), in which due to a wartime housing shortage Jean Arthur shares her one-bedroom Washington, D.C., apartment with both Charles Coburn and Joel McCrea; ultimately — with Coburn’s stage-managing — engaging in a quickie romance and wartime wedding to McCrea. Alternately, with its emphasis on concealed identities, and ships-that-pass-in-the-night, Untitled Love Story reiterates elements of The Shop around the Corner (Lubitsch, 1940), in which two shop clerks fall in love via a Lonely Hearts Club without realizing that they work side by side. I would suggest, however, that the plot of Untitled Love Story captures perfectly and presciently the general premise of many fifties films, in which romance is organized around apartment living, including, of course, Wilder’s own films The Seven Year Itch (1955) and The Apartment

(1960). Whether a prophetic reference to his own work or simply a coincidence, this précis for a script provides an apt point of entry to the dominance and centrality of the apartment plot from the “long fifties” (1945 to 1964) and into the seventies.”

What I am calling “the apartment plot” is any narrative in which the apartment figures as a central device. This means that the apartment is more than setting; it motivates or shapes the narrative in some key way. By apartment, I mean a private rental unit in a built-to-purpose apartment building, or conversion. Apartment buildings might include high-rise buildings with or without doormen, walk-ups, converted brownstones, or other styles. The apartment is distinguished from ownership properties such as condominiums and town-homes. The apartment is also distinct from other kinds of rental properties, such as tenements. Whereas apartments tend to be marked by having individual plumbing and are viewed as working or middle class, tenements often have shared bathrooms and are culturally marked as lower working class. Apartments are also distinct from public housing projects, in being privately owned and operated, rather than government funded or otherwise subsidized. Apartments, in this study, are also differentiated from rooms in boardinghouses and from collective spaces such as dormitories. While there are apartment hotels, for the most part I distinguish between apartments and hotels because they offer different degrees of transience and different amenities.’ The apartment plot dominates romantic comedy of the period but also appears in thrillers, horror films, noir, realist films, musicals, and melodrama, and in numerous other media. The apartment plot comprises various and often overlapping subplots, including plots in which lovers encounter one another within a single apartment house or live in neighboring apartment buildings; plots in which voyeurism, eavesdropping and intrusion are key; plots that focus on single working women in their apartments; plots in which married or suburban men temporarily inhabit apartments in order to access “bachelor” status; and plots in which aspects of everyday life are played out and informed by the chance encounters and urban access afforded by apartment living. Most, but not all, examples of the apartment plot are set in New York. Most, but not all, revolve around white, middle-class characters.

Examples of the many varied films in which the apartment centrally motivates the plot include not only the obvious examples such as the Wilder films mentioned above and, of course, Rear Window (Hitchcock, 1954) but also the following: both versions of My Sister Eileen (Hall,

1942 and Quine, 1955), The Naked City (Dassin, 1948), Apartment for Peggy (Seaton, 1948), Rope (Hitchcock, 1948), My Dear Secretary (Martin, 1948), The Window (Tetzlaff, 1949), My Friend Irma (Marshall, 1949), In a Lonely Place (Ray, 1950), An American in Paris (Minnelli, 1951), The Marrying Kind (Cukor, 1952), The Moon Is Blue (Preminger, 1953), How to Marry a Millionaire (Negulesco, 1953), Dial M for Murder (Hitchcock, 1954), Pushover (Quine, 1954), It Should Happen to You (Cukor, 1954), The Bad Seed (LeRoy, 1954), Artists and Models (Tashlin, 1955), The Man With the Golden Arm (Preminger, 1955), The Delicate Delinquent (McGuire, 1957), Bell, Book and Candle (Quine, 1958), I Married a Woman (Kanter, 1958), Pillow Talk (Gordon, 1959), Bells Are Ringing (Minnelli, 1960), Lover Come Back (Mann, 1961), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Edwards, 1961), A Raisin in the Sun (Petrie, 1961), The Connection (Clarke, 1961), If a Man Answers (Levin, 1962), Boys Night Out (Gordon, 1962), Tivo for the Seesaw (Wise, 1962), Bachelor Flat (Tashlin, 1962), The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (Minnelli, 1963), Come Blow Your Horn (Yorkin, 1963), Under the Yum Yum Tree (Swift, 1963), That Funny Feeling (Thorpe, 1965), Patch of Blue (Green, 1965), Any Wednesday (Miller, 1966), Walk, Don’t Run (Walters, 1966), Barefoot in the Park (Saks, 1967), Wait Until Dark (Young, 1967), The Odd Couple (Saks, 1968), Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski, 1968), Cactus Flower (Saks, 1969), The Owl and the Pussycat (Ross, 1970), The Boys in the Band (Friedkin, 1970), Diary of a Mad Housewife (Perry, 1970), Klute (Pakula, 1971), Butterflies Are Free (Katselas, 1972), Claudine (Berry, 1974), and The Prisoner of Second Avenue (Frank, 1975). In addition to the role the apartment has in these (by no means comprehensive) examples from narrative film, it serves as vital milieu in avant-garde films such as Wavelength (Snow, 1967) and, more characteristically, in Tv shows of the period, including I Love Lucy (1951), Mr. and Mrs. North (1952), My Little Margie (1952), My Friend Irma (1952), Make Room for Daddy (1953), The Honeymooners (1955), The Jetsons (1962), Love on a Rooftop (1966), Occasional Wife (1966), Family Affair (1966), The Odd Couple (1970), The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970), Bob Newhart (1972), Diana (1973), Welcome Back Kotter (1975), The Jeffersons (1975), and One Day at a Time (1975). Not coincidentally, many of the apartment plot films are based on Broadway plays, such as Bell, Book and Candle (van Druten, 1950), The Seven Year Itch (Axelrod, 1952), Dial M for Murder (Knott, 1952), The Tender Trap (Shulman and Smith, 1954), The Bad Seed (Anderson, 1954), My Sister Eileen (Fields, 1955), The Connection (Gelber, 1960), Raisin in the Sun (Hansberry, 1960), Come Blow Your Horn (Simon, 1961), Barefoot in the Park (Simon, 1963), Any Wednesday (Resnick, 1964), The Owl and the Pussycat (Manhoff,

1964), The Odd Couple (Simon, 1965), Wait Until Dark (Knott, 1966), Play It Again Sam (Allen, 1969), Butterflies Are Free (Gershe, 1969), and The Prisoner of Second Avenue (Simon, 1971). Broadway examples also include many musicals set in mid-century New York that thematize apartment living in different ways, such as Subways Are for Sleeping (Comden and Green, 1961), Skyscraper (Van Heusen and Cahn, 1965), Wonderful Town (Comden and Green, 1953) —based on the 1942 My Sister Eileen stories—and Promises, Promises (Simon, Bacharach, and David, 1968), based on the film The Apartment. It emerges in the short-lived recorded music genre of vocal suites, notably in Gordon Jenkins’s Manhattan Tower (1946) and Complete Manhattan Tower (1956).* In literature, novels such as Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything (1958), Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1950), and Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1963); children’s books such as Harriet the Spy (Fitzhugh, 1964); and self-help and advice books such as Living Alone: A Guide for the Single Woman (Faherty, 1964) and Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl (1962) focus attention on the role of apartment living, especially but not exclusively among singles. Apartment life is also well represented in comic books and comic strips of the era, markedly in Apartment 3-G (Dallis and Kotzky), which began syndication in 1961.°

Rather than an incidental setting, the apartment, this book argues, functions as a particularly privileged site for representing an important alternative to dominant discourses of and about America in the mid-twentieth century, and as a key signifier of an emerging singles discourse. The apartment plot offers a vision of home — centered on values of community, visibility, contact, density, friendship, mobility, impermanence, and porousness—in sharp contrast to more traditional views of home as private, stable, and family based. The apartment is key, of course, to the imaginary of single and queer life, but it also offers alternative visions of urban married life and child rearing. Along with sex and gender, representations of the apartment negotiate issues of class and race. The unique characteristics of the apartment, as site and plot, bring to the fore a range of human relations—not just heterosexual pairings, but also lived relationships with roommates, servants, neighbors, merchants, doormen, and bartenders—that often cross class lines and touch on marginalized communities. The apartment plot can also serve as a focal point fora host of other city spaces —bars, taxis, offices, hotels—that highlight the way in which the apartment plot blurs distinctions between public and private, work and home, masculine and feminine, inside and outside.

The Apartment as Genre

Thus far, I have been referring to the apartment plot, rather than the apartment genre. In part, I use the term plot to capture the force of the apartment as a narrative device rather than as mere setting. Plot also makes sense insofar as many of these films involve elaborate plots and stratagems that relate to the apartment — plots to conceal the identity of an apartment’s “owner,” plots to borrow or steal an apartment in order to assume an identity, plots to conceal the use of an apartment for extramarital affairs, plots to commit and conceal murder inside the space of the apartment, and so on. Moreover, I want to maintain a sense of the mobility of the apartment plot, that is, its appearance in numerous established genres, such as romantic comedy, thrillers, film noir, and horror.

Nonetheless, as the following chapters will show, there are certain thematic and aesthetic features that link films in the apartment plot, and these links are sufficiently consistent to be able to identify the apartment plot as a genre. Grouping together such seemingly disparate films as The Seven Year Itch, Artists and Models, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, and Rear Window within the apartment plot demonstrates affinities that are often obscured through auteurist approaches focused on Billy Wilder, Frank Tashlin, Vincente Minnelli, and Alfred Hitchcock, among others. Conversely, an emphasis on genre reveals hitherto unnoticed apartment auteurs, such as Richard Quine (director of the films Pushover; My Sister Eileen; Bell, Book and Candle; and Sex and the Single Girl [1964]) or Gene Saks (Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, Cactus Flower, and The Prisoner of Second Avenue). Moreover, by grouping together such seemingly dissimilar texts, one can see affinities between genres such as romantic comedy, melodrama, and film noir.

Film noir presents an especially important parallel to the apartment genre. Not coincidentally, perhaps, both are critical genres that were named after the fact and were invisible, perhaps, in their historical moment, recognized later not by producers or fans but by critics, who notice commonalities from some historical distance (Altman, 77-82). A key difference between the genres, however, would be that the critical invention of film noir offered a means for critics to see affinities between a group of films that encompasses a relatively small network of previously established genres — thrillers, detective films, crime films, gangster films, and so on—whereas the apartment film traverses much greater generic territory, including romantic comedies, horror films, melodrama, musicals, and film noir itself.

To a degree, then, the apartment plot may offer a notion of genre that troubles traditional definitions of genre, even more so than film noir does, insofar as it seemingly privileges setting over other generic conventions. However, the apartment plot entails more than setting: the apartment not only hosts but motivates action; it entails certain sets of relationships; it involves formal and thematic elements; it conveys ideologies of urbanism. In this light, another parallel to the apartment plot might be the road movie. The road movie, like the apartment plot, intersects with numerous established genres, including romantic comedy (It Happened One Night |Capra, 1934]), social problem films (The Grapes of Wrath [Ford, 1940]), musicals (The Wizard of Oz [Fleming, 1939]; The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert [Elliot, 1994]), buddy films (Hope and Crosby’s “Road movies”), postapocalyptic science fiction (Mad Max and Mad Max II: The Road Warrior [Miller, 1979 and 1981]), art cinema (Kings of the Road [Wenders, 1976], Weekend |Godard, 1967]), and more. Like the apartment plot, the road movie is a genre defined by aspects of the mise-en-scéne (minimally a road, usually a car, bus, or other vehicle) and thematics (travel, escape, self-discovery) that are closely related to the mise-en-scéne.

Thus, rather than dismiss its claim to generic legitimacy, I’d like to use the apartment plot to query some of our precepts about genre. First, in using space as a primary key to genre, I want to link discourses on genre more closely to discourses on cinematic spaces. Certainly, some genres have been regarded in spatial terms. The western by most accounts depends upon its location in the American West, and tends to revolve around a familiar set of places: saloons, jails, banks, and ranches. But, for the most part, genre theory has tended to assume that while some genres are spatially determined, others are not. For Thomas Schatz, for instance, the western, along with the gangster and detective film, represents a “genre of determinate space” in which are enacted “conflicts that, indigenous to the environment, reflect the physical and ideological struggle for its control” (697). Against this, Schatz pits “genres of indeterminate space,” such as musicals, romantic comedies, and melodrama. These “indeterminate” genres “have conflicts that are not indigenous to the locale but are the result of the conflict between the values, attitudes, and actions of its principal characters and the ‘civilized’ setting they inhabit” (697). Defining genre in terms of conflict, Schatz views only some genres as spatially defined insofar as the contested status of their locale generates conflict; whereas other genres introduce conflict into more or less stable settings.