The Great Movies: "The Apartment"

The Apartment

Billy Wilder (1960)

There’s a scene in The Apartment in which a character, the villain really, is shown at home with his children on Christmas morning. The kids are playing with some kind of toy rocket. One boy proposes sending a fly into orbit to see if it could survive the trip. Or better, yet, they could “put in two flies - and see if they'll propagate in orbit!” “Propagate?” asks the puzzled father. “Yeah – make baby flies,” clarifies his son.

Now, for purposes of moving the plot forward, all that was needed from this scene was to show that the character was tied up with family commitments and could not be elsewhere. That could have been handled very simply, perhaps by having him answer the subsequent phone call while standing next to a Christmas tree. The extra bit about the flies, though, does two things that exemplify why The Apartment is such a fantastic movie. First, and very importantly, the scene is funny. The Apartment is a comedy, and a good one (in fact, measured by the number of times it made test subject Mrs.5000 hoot out loud, it is solidly in the very funniest tier of film comedies).

But The Apartment is also a vigorous social critique, and the Christmas morning scene is important to that as well. The main character in the scene, that one whom I’m calling “the villain,” is entirely respectable in appearance, but is in reality corrupt and completely amoral in manipulating his corporate underlings and lovers for his own ends and for his own amusement. He is puzzled by his sons’ casual cruelty, but they are really just practicing on flies what their old man does to other people. So, it’s a funny scene, but a little chilling too if you are paying attention.

This is what makes The Apartment so stinking brilliant; you can pick almost any scene and unpack it like that. The comic elements are pitch perfect, but the critique of power relations in corporate culture is as profound as anything the sociologists have been able to drum up, and a good deal more eloquent.

Plot: Earnest young company man regularly loans out his well-situated apartment to the senior executives. They get a place to hook up with their mistresses, and he, in addition to getting a little spending money, is promoted quickly up the ranks at only the cost of his pride and self-esteem. When he falls for a sharp, quirky coworker and wants to use the apartment himself, things get complicated.

Visuals: A good study in the use of screen composition to convey and comment on the relationships among the characters. Some great shots of the highly regimented pre-cubicle office environment.

Dialogue: This is not a movie where brilliant people trade barbs and one-liners. The characters are more or less average Janes and Joes, so the humor is more situational. Yet, although the characters don’t know it, the dialogue really is very funny. The lead character’s unconscious mimicry of his bosses’ speech patterns is especially notable.

I can’t shut up about this one: This is a movie about illicit sex in which there is no nudity and no one talks about sex. Well, 1960. But as a grown-up, it’s nice to be trusted to be able to read between the lines. Also, it realistically recreates the tone of many office relationships, in which everyone knows what’s going on but nobody talks about it directly.

There is an important female character who is in love with the villain. In a lesser comedy, this would be inexplicable, as the villain would be forever exuding meanness and spite. In The Apartment, however, the villain is handsome, polite, charming, and confident. You can totally see why she likes him… and yet you are trusted to see through him. It’s nice.

Finally, in a movie that has aged very well in many respects, there is one social anachronism that is pretty mind-blowing. Asking his coworker out on a date, the main character reveals that he has looked in her file – it’s an insurance company – and has committed to memory her address, biographical data, social security number, and medical history. Instead of macing him on the spot, she just giggles at his flattering audacity. Fellas, don’t try this in real life.

Prognosis: Excellent. Put it on the queue.

The Monday Quiz XIII

Maps: North America


It's the same question for all five this week: What is the state or province shown in the map?

#1

#2

#3

#4

#5

Answers go in the comments section.

Weekend Edition

I: Project Updates

Subtitle That Blog!

Love! Love! Love! the great list of suggested blog subtitles/mottos that came in yesterday. There's a runoff poll of some of my favorites over to your right....


The Beard

At this point, I am basically a guy with a beard. Now we enter the boring stage, 2 to 4 weeks of unremarkable beardedness. Then comes the goatee.

Don't feel bad if you are not excited about this particular story line. Even ~I~ am bored by my beard.


The Oregon State Flag Makeover

Remember, entries are due Tuesday! Here are the rules, if you are just tuning in.


The Reading List

Michael5000 to Fingerstothebone, 1/28/08:

To the L&TM5K Vice-Dork,

The time has come for me to call on you in your capacity as blog vice-dork. I have selected the following books off the Reading List as possible "next reads": Andric, Bridge on the Drina; Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita; Greene, The End of the Affair; Kafka, The Process; Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies; Nabakov, Lolita; Rivoli, The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy; Twain, Huckleberry Finn;

My request is for you to apply your patented "Random Movie" selection method to determine which of these will be the follow-up to "The Brothers Karamazov...."

Fingerstothebone to Michael5000, 1/29/08:

And the answer is: 2. Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Glad to be of service.

McKenzieBooks.com to Michael5000, 1/30/08

We thought you'd like to know that we shipped your order on 01/30/2008. Your order has been shipped from Portland, Oregon, via U.S. Postal Service Standard Media Mail (4 - 14 business days). Item: The Master and Margarita [] by Bulgakov, Mikhail....

II: Less Long-Winded Reviews







Epileptic, by David B. [Autobiographical Graphic Novel]. A boy's life is shaped by his relationship with his severely epileptic brother and by his parents' eternal quest to find a cure for the disease by any medical, alternative, or even supernatural means available. An astonishly frank and fair memoir. Recommended.









District B-13. [French Action Film]. I checked out this movie having read that it explored issues of race and class in modern France in an entertaining but insightful way. Nope. Instead, it is just another movie dedicated to the proposition that a sufficiently fit and agile man has nothing to fear from an army of thugs with machine guns. Well filmed in the Hong Kong action style; staged and edited to resemble a shooter video game. Lots of running, jumping, and kicking. Not Very Interesting.









Gridlock, by Matt Gaffney. An accessible and entertaining overview of the conventions, controversies, and personalities of the world of crosswords. There's not much here that will be news to serious crossword people, but it would be a fun read for a casual solver who always wondered where the puzzles come from. Diverting.









I read Epileptic on a recommendation from Dan at Von Trapper Keeper. Gridlock was on Rex Parker's 2007 Holiday Shopping Guide for all things crosswordy.


III. Weekend Greetings

Happy Groundhog Day! It's not as dumb a holiday as it seems. It, and even the whole bit about the groundhog seeing its shadow, date back to medieval times. It's even got some calendrical significance: it marks the halfway point between the winter solstace and the spring equinox. Or, to put it another way, it marks the end of the darkest 1/4 of the year, at least up here in the beautiful Northern Hemisphere where L&TM5K is written and produced.

See you Monday for the Quiz.

Blog Seeks Subtitle

Gentle Readers, I have some excellent news to share. You may remember that, last week, I interviewed for a promotion that would involve exciting new professional challenges and responsibilities! Not to mention a substantial pay increase! Well, you will be happy to hear that I did not get the nod, and will happily therefore be able to continue to dedicate many happy leisure hours to the production of rantings for this online periodical.

Which brings us to our next point.

Ever since the L&TM5K started, back in 2007, it has always borne the proud motto of

My Life. Like You Care.

Recently, though, I've been wondering if the first half of that is really accurate. After all, I don't really talk about my LIFE very much; it's really more like "Stuff That Interests Me, Like You Care" or "My Gonzo Projects, Like You Care." Except, those would both stink as subtitles.

Now, I know that many of you are still busy working on your Flag of Oregon designs. But, I am now also soliciting suggestions for a new subtitle/motto for the L&TM5K. There's got to be something short and punchy, something that would capture the essential experience of the blog -- you know, the dashing wit, the bracing intellectual rigor, the ineffible PIZZAZZ of the thing. But I can't think of anything. Can you?

The Thursday Quiz XXII

The Thursday Quiz!

The Thursday Quiz is, as always, a "Is It or Isn't It" game. From the list of twelve items, your job is to determine whether each IS or ISN'T a true example of the week's category.

Treat this rule as though your life depended on it:

No research, Googling, Wikiing, or use of reference books. The Thursday
Quiz is a POP quiz. Violators will lose their power of speech.

This Week's Category is the living end!

Death in America

There are many ways to make one's exit from life's great adventure, but some are more popular than others. Of the following, some claimed more than 17,000 victims in the United States in 2004, the last year from which complete records have been published. The others are relatively rare, each resulting in fewer than 3500 deaths. Which of the following are common (ie. more than 17000 per year) causes of death in the United States?

1. Accidental Discharge of Firearms
2. Accidental Drowning
3. Accidental Falls
4. Appendicitis
5. Death of Mother in Childbirth
6. Homicide
7. Kidney Failure
8. Leukemia
9. Meningitis
10. Salmonella
11. Suicide
12. Syphilis

Submit your "final answers" -- so to speak -- by posting them in the comments.

The Great Movies: "The Apu Trilogy"

The Apu Trilogy

Satyajit Ray (1955-1960)

Here, cribbed from the Wiki, is the kind of critical praise that generally gets heaped on Pather Panchali, the first movie of the Apu Trilogy:

• Newsweek critic Jack Kroll reviewed the film as "One of the most stunning first films in movie history. Ray is a welcome jolt of flesh, blood and spirit."
• Hazel-Dawn Dumpert of LA Weekly wrote that the film was "as deeply beautiful and plainly poetic as any movie ever made. Rare and exquisite."
• Philip French of The Observer has described Pather Panchali as "one of the greatest pictures ever made."
• The Village Voice ranked the film at #12 (tied with The Godfather) in its Top 250 "Best Films of the Century" list in 1999, based on a poll of critics.
• In 2005, the film was included in Time magazine's All-Time 100 Movies list.

This is all very unfortunate. Pather Panchali, made by amateurs on a shoestring budget, certainly shows that its makers have promise; in the two subsequent movies, which are quite good, that talent will be realized. Pather Panchali judged on its own merits, however, is not "one of the greatest pictures ever made." In fact, it is manifestly not a particularly good picture at all, not by any conventional standard, and it is pretty disingenuous to claim otherwise. It is melodramatic, tedious, predictable, and, well, amateurish.

Aiming at social drama and evocation of a place and time, Pather spends almost all the screen time in a handful of rooms; you finish the movie with no concept at all of what the village it purports to depict even looks like. The characters are thin caricatures of socials types. As a student film, mind you, it would be impressive enough: A+. As a social documentary, perhaps a C. As an entertainment, it is hard to evaluate. I really have a hard time imagining the person who would find it entertaining in the normal sense.

Now, I have no problem with criticism that confuses potential with merit; everybody wants to be the first one to catch the next big thing. But when we are still trumpeting this kind of movie as "great" half a century later, something a little bit damaging starts to happen. After all, Pather Panchali is exactly the kind of movie that makes people hate "foreign films" -- it is depressing, boring, a little too clever with its symbolism, formless in its plotting yet devoid of surprises. When you recommend it as "great," anyone who watches it on that recommendation will forever distrust film criticism, and probably anything with subtitles as well.

The second movie in the series, Aparajito, is enormously stronger, and the third, Apur Sansar, is better yet. As he learns how to make movies, Ray develops a striking visual style that captures the life and feel of the films' settings. The pace is quickened, and -- especially in Apur Sansar -- the characters achieve a depth, realism, and complexity that allows us to see them as fully human. To be sure, they still would not be the first movies I would reach for if I wanted to give a bright high school sophomore his first exposure to foreign film, but these later two movies would at least be entertaining and interesting for the educated casual viewer.

Plot: A coming of age epic. We meet Apu as a baby, and in the first installment we follow his village childhood. In Aparajito, we see his adolescence and young adulthood in a larger town and eventually in Calcutta, and in the final chapter we follow the events of his early adulthood. Along the way, he has many lucky breaks and sudden turns of good fortune, but experiences a staggering degree of loss and disappointment as well.

Visuals: Clumsy, muddy, and unvarying in the first film. Increasingly sophisticated and impressive in the second and third, either of which would be worth seeing on the big screen.

Dialogue: In Bengali, with a significant loss of cultural context occurring in translation, I suspect.

Prognosis: Recommended for anybody who enjoys movies made in languages other than English. I would watch Aparajito and Apur Sansar, and then go back and watch Pather Panchali last if you are really hooked. You don't really need to see it first to appreciate the other two.

"Moral Sense" with Michael5000

A runaway trolley is heading down the tracks toward five workmen who will be killed if the trolley proceeds on its present course. You are on a footbridge over the tracks, in between the approaching trolley and the five workmen. Next to you on this footbridge is a stranger who happens to be very large. The only way to save the lives of the five workmen is to push this stranger off the bridge and onto the tracks below where his large body will stop the trolley. The stranger will die if you do this, but the five workmen will be saved.

The "Moral Sense Test" of the Cognitive
Evolution Laboratory, Harvard University

Moral puzzles like this have been of increasing interest lately not only in the field of ethics, but in neurobiology as well. Scientists watch images of brain activity in people who are pondering this kind of issue to see what they can learn about the biological basis of the human conscience.

You know me: I'm always trying to help. So, here's my contribution to the field of moral intelligence.

The boat is sinking!

There is but one life raft, and you are the only one with the maritime skills and experience to make survival on the open seas possible. Regrettably, the life raft can only hold three people and there are four of you on the sinking boat: you, and three other passengers.

Which two will you save, and which one's terrified screams, pleading, and whimpers, still somehow audible over the storm as you row away from the sinking hulk into the night, will forever afterwards haunt your sleep?

Passenger #1 - A pleasant, slightly overweight man of thirty-five, friendly, conservative, and forgetful, a construction worker for a commercial contracting company. If he survives the current crisis, he will only live two more years. During that time, he will have four girlfriends, all of whom he will unwittingly infect with a sexually transmitted disease that will render them sterile and eventually, in their old age, blind. One of the four sometimes cheats on him with another man, and will infect him with the disease; this man, who is quite promiscuous, will in turn infect an additional 31 women.

Your passenger will die (in two years, as I mentioned) by falling six stories off of scaffolding onto a busy street. He will land on and crush a small dog, the only companion of a lonely old woman, who will subsequently slip into a depression that will last until her death seven years later. A promising young athlete who sees him fall will develop a post-traumatic disorder and lose his interest in basketball; where he would have had a stellar career, entertaining millions, commanding an enormous salary, and becoming a highly visible spokesperson on issues of social justice, he instead has a religious conversion, goes to seminary, and becomes a much loved small-town pastor, remembered for decades as a man who provided comfort, support, and guidance to three generations of parishioners. Finally, a bus driver who sees your passenger plunge to his death will, in the aftermath of the incident, decide to go back to school and study medicine; she will have a solid but undistinguished career as a urologist. She will not, therefore, be driving during a freak April blizzard two years later. In this storm, she would have lost control of her bus and plunged off of a bridge into a railyard, an accident in which she and 23 bus passengers would have perished, as well as 156 passengers on a passenger train which could not have stopped in time to avoid the fallen bus lying across the tracks.


Passenger #2 - A beautiful little girl of twelve, cheerful, polite, and sweet, an honor student and piano prodigy. If she lives, she will go on to win a prestigious youth piano competition at sixteen; the second-place contestant, unhinged by the competition, will go on a shooting rampage at his school, killing nine before turning his gun on himself. In the aftermath of this event, school districts all over the country will divert funds from classroom education to school security.

In college, your young passenger will study biochemistry; when she is 35, she will isolate a compound that will add an average of three years to the human lifespan; in two of those added years, on average, people will be active and in good health, but in the third year, must people will be confined to their bed and beset by fatigue and mild chronic pain. Her first husband will die after two years of marriage in a car accident; afterwards, she will go through many brief and unsatisfying relationships without ever really feeling "in love" again. She will be unintentionally cold and aloof towards her daughter, who reminds her of her late husband; however, her heart will be broken again when the daughter, at age 16, runs away with a banker in his 40s and refuses to reestablish contact thereafter. Famous as a scientist for her great breakthrough, she will nevertheless gradually lose the respect of her peers when she fails to produce any further work of significance; most members of the general public will assume she died long ago. She will live to be 96, spending her final three decades battling poverty, alcoholism, and increasing ill health.


Passenger #3 - A leering, arrogant man of 60, argumentative, condescending, and openly racist, who describes himself as a "soldier of fortune." He is, in fact, a hired killer; he has committed more than twenty murders for money, in addition to six which he has committed for his own enjoyment. If he lives, he will commit one more murder, after which he will be caught, tried, and sentenced to death. In prison, he will be successfully treated for acute schizophrenia, find religion, and become sincerely repentant and remorseful for the pain he has caused; after three years, he will be executed.

That one man he will murder if he survives the current crisis is one of the world's preeminent brain surgeons, who at the time of his potential murder is scheduled to remove a tumor from the brain of an Eastern European dictator. Without the operation, the dictator will die, and therefore will not implement a plan of ethnic cleansing in which 450,000 will be relocated and impoverished and 32,000 will die; among the dead will be a little boy who would otherwise have grown to be the universally-recognized greatest painter of the century, twin sisters who would have won the Eurovision Song Contest at age 17, and a young man who would have eventually lead a successful campaign to have the World Cup held every three years, instead of every four.

Who do you save? Discuss.

(Or don't.)