The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975 - Hardcover

Pamela Wojcik

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822347520 ISBN 13: 9780822347521

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2010

Synopsis

Rethinking films including Pillow Talk, Rear Window, and The Seven Year Itch, Pamela Robertson Wojcik examines the popularity of the "apartment plot" from the baby boom years into the 1970s. Wojcik's term for narratives in which the apartment figures as a central device, the apartment plot was not only central to the era's films; it also surfaced repeatedly in TV shows, Broadway plays, literature, and comic strips, from The Honeymooners and The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Subways are for Sleeping, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and Apartment 3G. By identifying the apartment plot as a film genre, she reveals affinities between movies generally viewed as belonging to such distinct genres as film noir, romantic comedy and melodrama. Wojcik analyzes the apartment plot as part of a mid-twentieth-century urban discourse, showing how it offers a vision of home centred on values of community, visibility, contact, mobility, impermanence and porousness that contrasts with views of home as private, stable and family-based. She suggests that the apartment plot presents a philosophy of urbanism related to the theories of Jane Jacobs and Henri Lefebvre. Urban apartments were important spaces for negotiating gender, sexuality, race and class in mid-twentieth-century America. The Apartment Plot illuminates and explains their significance to postwar popular culture.

About this title

Review:

"The Apartment Plot is an imaginative, thoroughly researched, closely observed, accomplished interdisciplinary work on the mid-century 'apartment plot' in American film and, to a lesser but important degree, TV, design, print, and sociology. It is a lively and engaging book that both breaks new ground and renovates existing critical edifices." --oPatricia White, co-author of The Film Experience: An Introduction

"The Apartment Plot is a lively and fascinating read. I was convinced every step of the way by Pamela Robertson Wojcik's arguments about the apartment plot, including how it works as a genre as well as a cycle, how it makes concrete and sometimes problematizes an urban philosophy, and how it represents alternative ideological perspectives on post-war adult life otherwise obscured by all the attention to suburban living. This remarkable book offers a necessary corrective to many dominant and simplistic assumptions about post-war American life." --Steven Cohan, author of Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical

From the Back Cover:

""The Apartment Plot" is an imaginative, thoroughly researched, closely observed, accomplished interdisciplinary work on the midcentury 'apartment plot' in American film and, to a lesser but important degree, TV, design, print, and sociology. It is a lively and engaging book that both breaks new ground and renovates existing critical edifices."--Patricia White, co-author of "The Film Experience: An Introduction"

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0822347520
• ISBN 13: 9780822347521
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 328