Day 18. The Apartment

The Apartment (1960) is a light dramatic comedy about killing yourself. Metaphorically, for the most part. Because Christmas is placed so close to New Year's, hope of new life necessitates destroying the one that isn't even happy at the most wonderful time of the year.

For C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) ascending the corporate ladder means giving up his New York apartment to his bosses multiple times per week, so they can have alone time with women who aren't their wives. He works at an insurance firm called Consolidated Life, the name being a joke on how his social life is suffocated by his job. C.C.'s contributions do get him promoted, but the demands to use his place don't stop, and when he protests, the guilt and speeches of ingratitude happen. He concedes. It is, after all, an honour just being exploited.

Billy Wilder's Oscar winner is a proto-hipster movie, incorporating pop references to TV's The Untouchables, as well as Grand Hotel and The Music Man. When C.C. falls for his building's elevator operator Fran (Shirley MacLaine), she's a needed change, a fun, self-described "broken" escape. The Apartment is the Silver Linings Playbook of its era, and though it means less to me, not risking dislodging Lemmon's leading man as the force of stability, it deals on its own terms with reawakening through sexual attraction. 

The central moment occurs at the firm's Christmas Eve party, as C.C., drunk and newly promoted, boasts to Fran to look at all his shit. Unimpressed by his display of capitalist bravado, even when he models his fifteen-dollar bowler hat, she eyes him with a disappointment that says he initially seemed more interesting. C.C. realizes that he's stuck, and as The Smiths song goes, "In the days when you were hopelessly poor, I just liked you more." 

C.C. goes to a bar, depressed, and picks up a single lady. Fran, meanwhile, late night December 24th, heads to C.C.'s empty apartment where she ODs on sleeping pills. Both seek a rebirth. Fran wants to stop being a social plaything for C.C.'s deceitful boss (Fred MacMurray). C.C. wants the social freedom to live.

The Apartment concludes on New Year's Eve, bringing with it the uncertain potential for new life. 

The Apartment and The Meaning of Christmas

A lot of these Christmas movies view the holiday through a lens of despair. The Apartment isn't depressing in tone, but melancholy invades its subjects. If you're not celebrating, it's the time to figure out why. #ChristmasMovieScholarship101

Tomorrow: The Ref