From the bachelor pad that Jack Lemmon's C. C. Baxter loans out to his superiors in Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960) to the crumbling tenement in a dystopian Taipei in Tsai Ming-liang's The Hole (1998), the apartment in films and television series is often more than just a setting: it can motivate or shape the narrative in key ways. Such works belong to a critical genre identified by Pamela Robertson Wojcik as the apartment plot, which comprises specific thematic, visual, and narrative conventions that explore modern urbanism's various forms and possibilities. In The Apartment Complex a diverse group of international scholars discuss the apartment plot in a global context, examining films made both within and beyond the Hollywood studios. The contributors consider the apartment plot's intersections with film noir, horror, comedy, and the musical, addressing how different national or historical contexts modify the apartment plot and how the genre's framework allows us to rethink the work of auteurs and identify productive connections and tensions between otherwise disparate texts.
Contributors. Steven Cohan, Michael DeAngelis, Veronica Fitzpatrick, Annamarie Jagose, Paula J. Massood, Joe McElhaney, Merrill Schleier, Lee Wallace, Pamela Robertson Wojcik
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: What Makes the Apartment Complex?
- 1. Palaces of Pleasure and Deceit among the Clouds: The Depression-Era Cinematic Penthouse Plot
- 2. From Walter Neff to C. C. Baxter: Billy Wilder’s Apartment Plots
- 3. Alain Resnais, Tsai Ming-liang, and the Apartment Plot Musical
- 4. Movement and Stasis in Fassbinder’s Apartment Plot
- 5. Housework, Sex Work: Feminist Ambivalence at 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
- 6. Home’s Invasion: Repulsion and the Horror of Apartments
- 7. Reattachment Theory: Gay Marriage and the Apartment Plot
- 8. “We Don’t Need to Dream No More. We Got Real Estate”: The Wire, Urban Development, and the Racial Boundaries of the American Dream
- Bibliography
- Contributors
- Index
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