The Apartment Plot

Pamela Robertson Wojcik

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Cinema History and Criticism Cinema and Media Studies Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis

Abstract

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...

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References

1990The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society 1987Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York 1982The Meaning of the Built Environment: A Nonverbal Communication Approach 1993Window shopping: cinema and the postmodern 1989Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era 1999At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space 1985The Invisible Flâneuse. Women and the Literature of Modernity 1992Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film.

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