Monday, April 27, 2020

An Apple a Day. . .


. . . keeps the humanity away.

Perhaps the most righteous episode from a show that was as righteous, beautiful, funny, and brilliant as any cartoon show ever was. Here, Matt Groening takes down 21st-century capitalism, Steve Jobs, iPhonies, Twitter Twits, and YouToobers.

Futurama, from July 2010: "Attack of the Killer Ap!"

Friday, April 24, 2020

Never Saw It Coming

Even the greatest of TV shows give us too much information ~ sound and visual; and certainly story. Strange, considering we don't require background for most characters going in. The locations are normally familiar to us. So is what might be called the "moral architecture" of the show: we grasp in terms of style and meaning where it will go, and where it will not. The best episodes in the best series, usually by miracle, seem to contain these presumptions almost as distraction, using them to deepen and complicate the mysteries already at the heart of the matter.

For the first 20 minutes of its 48-minute length, "Counter Gambit" (an episode of The Rockford Files from the middle of its initial season) gives us nothing but false information. Two ex-cons with sudden new freedom hire private investigator (and ex-con) Jim Rockford to find a missing girl and her $250,000 of missing pearls. They expect Rockford to locate the girl, soften her up, get the lay of her apartment, then grab the loot. The only question seems to be whether the P.I. will return honor among thieves, or turn the necklace over to the cops. . .

Not exactly. The story begins way past middle and only after wrap-up can we understand what's really happened. "Counter Gambit" -- originally premiering for NBC on January 24, 1975, written by Howard Berk and Juanita Bartlett, directed by the fine actor Jackie Cooper -- is one of the great con episodes in TV history. Secretly dense and complicated, it feels like it was set up by the Rockford crew in about six seconds, the story was shot out of the trees, and no one saw it coming. It is perfect.

So many nice turns. Ford Raines as Manny Tolan. The wonderful Noah Berry Jr. twice briefly. M. Emmet Walsh as a particularly sweaty "insurance investigator." Garner throughout. Mary Frann luscious and seven years away from becoming Newhart's Joanna Loudon. And Stuart Margolin's first meaningful appearance as Angel Martin. (Margolin had directed a previous Rockford episode.) Not yet the corrupt and sniveling Angel we all love, "Counter Gambit"'s Angel is more endearing and smarter. (The scene inside the 1970s porn house is one of the funniest in the series.)

Eddie Fontaine steals it as Moss Williams.

Saturday, April 18, 2020

None But the Lonely Heart

Stewart: Doggone it, C.K. Dexter Haven! . . . Either I'm gonna sock you or you're gonna sock me!
Grant: Shall we toss a coin?
Both men love Hepburn. One she has destroyed, to the point of collapse and alcohol sickness. The other has just met her, in full swoon. It is the midnight before her wedding to another man -- a third -- and the new kid on the block, drunk from pre-nuptial champagne, has come to awaken the broken ex-husband. Does the ex- still love her? Can I get his nod to make an appeal before she ties the knot with the loathsome betrothed?

Cary Grant and James Stewart were both in their middle-30s during production of The Philadelphia Story (1940). Both were at the top of their different Hollywood worlds and the scene embodies their very different powers and greatness. And how greater was Grant. . . Stewart here is what he often was in the 30s and 40s: brittle, emotionally thin, reedy, righteous, rather humorless, self-centered, a terrier. He yaps and tries to dominate the seven minutes. (In his other scenes with Grant as well.) Self-absorption, which Grant absorbs; Stewart performing throughout as the Talented Unappreciated Writer Seething with Wisdom. While Grant listens and watches, the most humanizing and generous-hearted screen presence in movie history – still, (by being still) he cannot help but expose the callowness of the Stewart character; and of the actor. James Stewart on screen is always only about James Stewart. (Brought to a brutal and tortured zenith, or nadir, by Hitchcock in Vertigo.)

While the other man. . . .

He listens to Stewart with a faint smile, and a deep hurt in his eyes, as if, somewhere, he knows so much better than Stewart, about all that. About Tracy and moonlight and women and being taken and blackmail and the power of words. At one point he says, regarding the blackmailer (this blackmailer), "The world's his oyster with an 'r' in every month." "Hey, that's not bad. When did I say that?" says Stewart. "You didn't. I did. Sorry. . ." And he never will. For Grant has the remoteness of a man who's crossed some lonely terrain of experience, of loss and gain, of nearness to death which leaves him isolated from the mass of others; a remoteness which can spot a dirty dealer, or a true heart, from distance, on sight. He is never not sorrowful in the picture, while bringing the only moments of joy into this thin, joyless romp -- a picture firmly in the minor key of Stewart in conception; elevated by Grant's broken ardor whenever he appears. His physical grace and attraction are immense, yet he uses his powers to put others at ease, to naturalize things, to relinquish control and power.

Within eighteen months, across 1939 and '40, Cary Grant appeared as "husband" in six pictures: In Name Only (sorrowful and trapped), His Girl Friday (complete control), My Favorite Wife (goofy and manipulated), Philadelphia Story (deeply hurt), Penny Serenade (a heart-broken failure), Suspicion (very dashing and very weak)  -- six men as different from each other as are the seasons, all men in love, Grant's love coming at us slowly, like a slow dark wave. Yet always isolated, in perfect, isolated darkness, outside the world. . .

Thursday, April 16, 2020

Size Does Matter


"In the big lie, there is always a certain force of credibility, because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily, and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying."
~ Adolf Hitler

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Bernie Sanders, Revolutionary


The Saker:
Finally the SOB shows his true face, the face of an ultimate fake.  His appeal to identity politics also shows where his REAL values are, and that sure ain’t Socialism!
In the past, Bernie already showed his true face when he endorsed Hillary or when he backed the Israeli murderous attack on Lebanon (which, glory be to God, resulted in the “Divine Victory” of Hezbollah and arguably one of the worst defeats in modern military history for the Zionist entity).
I don’t like Trump any more than Bernie does, but I also realize that Trump is probably the main reason why we did not have a major war involving the USA (yet?), whereas Hillary and Biden are the ultimate pseudo-liberal war-mongers.  I can understand somebody hating Trump and voting for a real pro-peace candidate, but being anti-Trump and pro-Biden makes exactly *zero* sense. Yet Bernie Sanders is exactly that, proving his total hypocrisy which is now simply undeniable.
The entire debacle shows that what the USA needs is not a different, putatively better, president, but what the US State Department calls “regime change."
I am not a Socialist, but I do know Socialism and I have always felt offended when US Americans referred to Bernie, or even Obama, as “Socialists." This is utterly ridiculous and has no connection to reality.  There are NO real Socialists (of whatever variety) amongst US politicians and only a terminally brainwashed population can mistake folks like Obama or Bernie for “Socialists." Heck, some US Americans even believe that government bailouts of major corporations are also evidence that the US government is “Socialist”!  The lack of political education of most US Americans is nothing short of amazing.
Now you know why Socialism (nevermind Marxism or Dialectical Materialism) is never taught in the USA, not even at a college level (and when it is, it is mostly fake; Michael Parenti would be a pretty good teacher, but he is one guy in a huge system, so nobody hears his voice).
Okay so now we know that the pseudo-liberal pseudo-Left has now fully endorsed Biden. This just goes to prove that the entire Dem Party is, and has been for a very long time, a tool in the hands of the Deep State.
I would like to note that Trump succeeded in getting elected against the wishes of the folks who ran the Republican Party. This would be impossible in the Democratic Party, which just goes to prove that while both parties are corrupt to the bone, there is still some real diversity in the GOP. But the Dem Party truly walks in lockstep, hopefully towards its own death.
For the time being though, let us all rejoice in the fall of Bernie, the shyster and scumbag who tried to pretend that he was a Socialist while, in reality, being a safety valve for the Dem Party, a warmongering Zionist and a tool of the US Deep State. Bernie will go down in history as the ultimate fake.

Monday, April 13, 2020

Journalist!


Four contemporary Zolas (Marjorie Cohn, Chris Hedges, Daniel Ellsberg, Aaron Maté) speak to the one-year anniversary of the arrest and imprisonment and torture of Julian Assange, the greatest journalist of our morally-depraved time.

But Émile Zola actually had some influence. . .

Saturday, April 11, 2020

Diana Redux


Johnstone's new essay on our current worldwide nightmare.
Very clever people naturally want to find motives behind whatever happens. At one time such people might have been theologians, who explained the extremely mysterious ways in which God carries out His cosmic plan. A flood, a plague, an earthquake? There had to be a reason for it, a motivation in human terms. The All-Powerful was punishing his sinful flock and reminding them of who was boss.
Today, quite a number of alternative media commentators are ready to believe in the absolute power not of God but of Mammon, of the powers of Wall Street and its partners in politics, the media and the military. In this view, nothing major happens that hasn’t been planned by earthly powers for their own selfish interest.
Mammon is wrecking the economy so a few oligarchs will own everything. Or else Mammon created the hoax Coronavirus 19 in order to lock us all up and deprive us of what little is left of our freedom. Or finally Mammon is using a virus in order to have a pretext to vaccinate us all with secret substances and turn us all into zombies.
Is this credible? In one sense, it is. We know that Mammon is unscrupulous, morally capable of all crimes. But things do happen that Mammon did not plan, such as earthquakes, floods and plagues. Dislike of our ruling class combined with dislike of being locked up leads to the equation: They are simply using this (fake) crisis in order to lock us up!
But what for? To whom is there any advantage in locking down the population? For the pleasure of telling themselves, “Aha, we’ve got them where we want them, all stuck at home!” Is this intended to suppress popular revolt? What popular revolt? Why repress people who aren’t doing anything that needs to be repressed?
What is the use of locking up a population – and I think especially of the United States – that is disunited, disorganized, profoundly confused by generations of ideological indoctrination telling them that their country is “the best” in every way, and thus unable to formulate coherent demands on a system that exploits them ruthlessly? Do you need to lock up your faithful Labrador so he won’t bite you?
If anything, the trauma of this situation might actually awaken a somnolent population to the vital need for basic transformation of society. The notion that this lockdown threatens to be permanent is totally unrealistic, against all evidence from previous lockdowns. On the contrary, prolonged confinement is most likely to lead to explosions. The question is, can these explosions be constructive.
The rest at the always valuable Consortium News.

Thursday, April 9, 2020

Light in the Darkness


"As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it."
-- Simone Weil

The greatest political memoir of our time: Diana Johnstone's Circle in the Darkness:
When individuals are bunched into groups assigned intrinsic qualities — from victimhood to racism — normal human ties of mutual concern, shared purpose, comprehension and compassion are severed. In a grotesque development, new gender identities are invented, whose ‘cause’ overshadows the real problems of genuinely disadvantaged people. Economic issues are forgotten as groups mobilize solely to police attitudes. Billionaires prosper more than ever before, while down below people bicker over safe spaces and toilet use.
The countries of the Western world are in a state of schizophrenic overconfidence and self-doubt. Their leaders persist in proclaiming ‘our values’ as the model for the rest of humanity, while their own people are increasingly divided and disillusioned. 
The 18th century was the century of the liberated mind. The 19th century was the century of Great Men. The 20th century was the century of the common man. And the 21st century looks like it may become a negation of all of them. The century of nobody at all.
Irrationality and censorship restore chains to thought. Great Men are only statues to be demolished. The common man, once hailed as the hero of a radiant future, has been degraded to a superfluous nuisance, probably racist and homophobic. Ordinary folks have been reassigned from the glorious concept of ‘the people’ to their derogatory redefinition under the rubric of populism and Trump deplorables.
People are reduced to ‘consumers,’ while being told that by consuming, they are destroying the planet. Identity Politics has not only turned people against each other by group, but its late manifestation, Vegan speciesism, even turns people against people altogether, for being an overprivileged life form.
What will our future be? Currently we live in a dystopia of deceit.  But the failure of our leaders to deal adequately with a health crisis and their hostility to an economic system that serves people rather than the wealth of elites are marking the Western world as a massive failure. Will realization of this failure cause the people to revolt as the Yellow Vests have, or will it break the people and further diminish them?
The ePub can be found here.

Tuesday, April 7, 2020

This is Only a Test


Pepe Escobar:
As much as Covid-19 is a circuit breaker, a time bomb and an actual weapon of mass destruction (WMD), a fierce debate is raging worldwide on the wisdom of mass quarantine applied to entire cities, states and nations.
Those against it argue Planet Lockdown not only is not stopping the spread of Covid-19 but also has landed the global economy into a cryogenic state – with unforeseen, dire consequences. Thus quarantine should apply essentially to the population with the greatest risk of death: the elderly.
With Planet Lockdown transfixed by heart-breaking reports from the Covid-19 frontline, there’s no question this is an incendiary assertion.
In parallel, a total corporate media takeover is implying that if the numbers do not substantially go down, Planet Lockdown – an euphemism for house arrest – remains, indefinitely.
Michael Levitt, 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry and Stanford biophysicist, was spot on when he calculated that China would get through the worst of Covid-19 way before throngs of health experts believed, and that “What we need is to control the panic”.
Let’s cross this over with some facts and dissident opinion, in the interest of fostering an informed debate.
The report Covid-19 – Navigating the Uncharted was co-authored by Dr. Anthony Fauci – the White House face of the fight –, H. Clifford Lane, and CDC director Robert R. Redfield. So it comes from the heart of the U.S. healthcare establishment.
The report explicitly states, “the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.”
On March 19, four days before Downing Street ordered the British lockdown, Covid-19 was downgraded from the status of “High Consequence Infectious Disease.”
John Lee, recently retired professor of pathology and former NHS consultant pathologist, has recently argued that, “the world’s 18,944 coronavirus deaths represent 0.14 per cent of the total. These figures might shoot up but they are, right now, lower than other infectious diseases that we live with (such as flu).”
He recommends, “a degree of social distancing should be maintained for a while, especially for the elderly and the immune-suppressed. But when drastic measures are introduced, they should be based on clear evidence. In the case of Covid-19, the evidence is not clear.”
That’s essentially the same point developed by a Russian military intel analyst.
No less than 22 scientists – see here and here – have expanded on their doubts about the Western strategy.
Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, Professor Emeritus of Medical Microbiology at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, has provoked immense controversy with his open letter to Chancellor Merkel, stressing the “truly unforeseeable consequences of the drastic containment measures which are currently being applied in large parts of Europe.”
Even New York governor Andrew Cuomo admitted on the record about the error of quarantining elderly people with illnesses alongside the fit young population.
The absolutely key issue is how the West was caught completely unprepared for the spread of Covid-19 – even after being provided a head start of two months by China, and having the time to study different successful strategies applied across Asia.
There are no secrets for the success of the South Korean model.
South Korea was producing test kits already in early January, and by March was testing 100,000 people a day, after establishing strict control of the whole population – to Western cries of “no protection of private life”. That was before the West embarked on Planet Lockdown mode.
South Korea was all about testing early, often and safely – in tandem with quick, thorough contact tracing, isolation and surveillance.
Covid-19 carriers are monitored with the help of video-surveillance cameras, credit card purchases, smartphone records. Add to it SMS sent to everyone when a new case is detected near them or their place of work. Those in self-isolation need an app to be constantly monitored; non-compliance means a fine to the equivalent of $2,800.

The rest of Escobar's terrifying and extensive analysis.

Wednesday, April 1, 2020

Do You Miss New York?


"My name is C.C. Baxter -- C. for Calvin, C. for Clifford.
However, most people call me Bud."
-- Jack Lemmon

No one in Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960) calls him "Bud."

Sixty years after its release (it would go on to win Best Picture Oscar for 1960), The Apartment seems an object found on a distant planet; or perhaps from the bottom of the sea. Who are these people? These voices? This way of dress and directness, this way of relating and falling in love?

We all know the story: C.C. Baxter wants to be the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and throughout most of The Apartment seems ready to do most anything to achieve it. Along the way he falls in love with a lost, pretty elevator operator played by Shirley MacLaine -- who's being used for sex by the Head of Personnel, Jeff Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), a man who also happens to be C.C. Baxter's boss. The girl's heart is broken, she attempts suicide (in Baxter's apartment), and Bud is forced to choose between love and his ambition.

Sixty years later, who notices the plot? For the real story of the movie is the time in which it was made; and most astonishingly, the city in which it is set: round and round we turn and beyond the Wilder narrative is the other narrative: Manhattan in 1960 still drifts with the Sweet Smell of Success, and her most characteristic quality is the remote and private air of a lady who has traversed some lonely terrain of experience, which leaves her isolated from the mass of others. In this collective vision -- the nights come low onto the steep and lonely city, with its pallid heavy facades up on stony inclines, and arches and great dark courtyards and outer stairways on unknown buildings. New York then was still saying goodbye to the impression that once some single power had had the place in grip, had given it an emotional and architectural unity and splendor now lost and forgotten.

They say decades don't start on time. The Sixties sure did, on January 2nd (the day after the movie's story ends).



It begins (after the credits, where we're first introduced to Baxter's apartment front and Adolph Deutsch's immortal theme) with a float over Manhattan island, less architecturally congested and vertical than it became. A narrator tells us it is November 1959 and the population of New York City is over 8-million people. We learn of the narrator's workplace (Consolidated Life Insurance, home to over 30,000 employees), his job (salaryman), and his apartment (West 60s, half-a-block from Central Park, $85 per-month rent!). It is Jack Lemmon's voice and we should listen carefully, because once we're filled in with the background details, we never hear from the narrator again. (Good job, Wilder.)

It is a movie made almost entirely of interiors. Literally, the title refers to the space within which C.C. Baxter's willing corruption takes place. (It also refers to Wilder's belief in the terminal "apartness" of Modernist life.) Baxter's agreed to basically allow his bachelor pad to be turned into a brothel -- only the customers are his married bosses and the ladies are Consolidated Life co-workers. We see why no one calls him "Bud". . .



In the conversation on the landing, Doc and Baxter watch each other as if watching a movie screen, forever separate from whom they're talking to and what they're hearing. Joe Dobisch's desperate call for cheap sex (so cheap he demands the taxi change back from the wonderful Joyce Jameson) occurs in a telephone booth which could be on the dark side of the moon, as much as it is just off a crowded and smoky bar. For Wilder, no one is anybody's true "Bud" in 1959 New York City. Yet we've seen the movie's first "object of light": the dissolve on the fading television signal, to the glow of Baxter's heating blanket control-knob. What are these objects: love, luck, faith, holiness, fate, God? Perhaps all things not-Modernist. Whatever they are for Wilder, they follow Bud and Fran around: angels of protection. They surround Baxter as he falls asleep in Central Park.


In the elevator on the ride up to glory.


Fran's boutonnière near his heart, for luck.


Later at The Rickshaw: ceiling lamps, the candle -- and the daiquiri (which seems to be made of the same substance that blew-up the world at the end of Kiss Me Deadly).


Christmas Eve and all is bright.


To 1960.


The Apartment -- as we can sense from the first scene in Sheldrake's office -- has no point-of-view regarding American-specific capitalism, corporatism, or patriarchy. Consolidated Life may just as well be the Kremlin, NASA, IBM, or Krupp Industries. For Wilder, evidently all power systems are the same. (In 1960!) One needs only to look at The Bad Sleep Well from the same year. 'Though mostly buried beneath Kurosawa's stale updating of yet another Shakespeare play (this one Hamlet), The Bad Sleep Well is a direct attack on post-war zaibatsu structure, ethos, and dominance of 1950s Japanese society. Unlike Baxter, whose sole motivation throughout The Apartment is a mealy and vague sort of professional ambition, Toshiro Mifune as Kurosawa protagonist Nishi burns with a vengeance against all things corporate. Unfortunately, most of this heat is redirected by Kurosawa (by Toho?) into channels of Freudian irrelevance.

Before we meet Jeff Sheldrake, let's take a look at the workplace architecture of Consolidated Life (and New York City in general): elevator operators (and starters!); hat and coat racks long as football fields; cigarettes and water coolers; zero security: workers overwhelmed by Modernism as Wilder and photographer Joseph LaShelle diminish them under long vistas of oscillation: corridors, angles, fluorescents, endless desks, and vanishing points which pre-Kubricks Kubrick for theoretical coldness. And like Kubrick, a mere aesthetic abstraction untethered to any interesting vision of society or power.


Edie Adams. What a likable and talented gal -- she and Ernie Kovacs must've made a wonderful couple. Here, Wilder turns her into a bitter Modernist clown, right down to those ugly glasses. Being Mr. Sheldrake's gatekeeper (and ex-lover), she nastily waves Baxter into the inner sanctum.

And what a sinister hothouse it is. Most sinister being the man behind the desk, Fred MacMurray, in amazingly thick eye-makeup. (How did this monster get the TV role of uber-dad Steve Douglass?) Four hand-chairs match the strange painting at the back of four love-seats, matching the four users of the Baxter apartment, with some African-cum-Modernist print on the adjacent wall, also of four male heads. There's a wood-carving of a stronger naked man holding a weaker naked man over his head. "I sorta wondered what you look like, Baxter." Indeed. An appropriate setting because the scene is a flat-out seduction, rape-wise, to the point of the victim finally cumming with his hand-held nose-spray.



Fran leaves the Consolidated coldness, into the warm embrace of autumn New York. Before the city came down with Zagat's disease, she was honeycombed with hidden places, like tuning forks, vibrating with mystery: profoundly sophisticated with a deep acceptance of magic; places with a warm imagination and a gift that can lead to marvelous paths of coming to know someone else well. The movie seems to know the secret: that New York was sad before it was busy -- that it was a kind of inverted garden, with all the flowers blooming down beneath the ground. Like crystal notes or sparkling water, New York was still the potent formula of city lights, early death, and sounds at night. The Rickshaw is such a spot (is it Wilder's nod to Susan Alexander's nightclub?), embracing emotions the culture no longer has any use for. The heart turns over and produces a sorrow. Hardly any places are left to do that. . .

She enters, and this is different. There's an element of tenderness in Sheldrake's voice, and something veiled and remote in his eyes that Fran has never seen there before. He really is in love with her.



At the end of the scene, does Wilder "pull his gimp string," in the famous words of the ever-sour Manny Farber? -- by inserting a shot of Edie Adams as Jeff and Fran leave. Does Wilder pull it tighter by moving the movie's theme from major to minor key, as if embracing a suffering, wounded heart? Too bad, Manny. A beautiful and deeply-felt moment.

The Consolidated Life Christmas Eve Party, on the cusp of the 60s, wonderfully violating every sexual harassment rule imaginable.



Yet even during the party, the city beyond the windows is ominous, de-populated -- comparable to the mood of a landscape just before something awful is about to happen, or just after, one cannot tell. The grim buildings form a cemetery of Modernist tombs.

*
And so, in a rather unmotivated turn of events, Miss Kubelik attempts suicide in C.C. Baxter's apartment, after being abandoned there by Sheldrake on his way home for Christmas. (And after giving Fran $100 for her time.) Bud and Doc save Fran, and something in the two Consolidated employees both ache. Baxter lets his heart yield again towards her -- and his eyes, which have never left her face, which have never closed, slowly fill with tears. And his heart seems to burn and melt away in his chest.



Bud's apartment is an isolating arena of lonely experience. A sort of passageway like a sarcophagus angles through the central area. There's a strange stillness about the rooms, in their drabness and mostly rococo design. Among the Modernist prints on the walls and the Ella Fitzgerald albums, there lingers a kind of loneliness and happiness, as if it were a sunken place, and a feeling that it is good for one's heart to be there.



Cue the ominous music: enter cabbie Karl Matuschka, perfectly played by Johnny Seven. Wilder's idiotic stereotype of an "outer-borough" untermenschen truly does show him pulling the elitist gimp-string. Are Wilder's dead buildings actually walls to keep out the unwashed? (For the director, only Manhattan is New York City.) This class stupidity begins to mix with the expected smarmy cynicism, as the movie teeters.


                               Martin: "Why are you running?"
                               Anne: "Don't you know?"
                               Martin: "No."
                               Anne: "Because I am longing. . . ."
                                                                       Dreyer, Day of Wrath
As we approach denouement, there's a sense that The Apartment will end (as we expected all along) in some love cul-de-sac -- but who's to believe in it now? Coming after Buddy Boy informs Sheldrake that "the old payola won't work anymore" and quits, and after Karl the Kabman, why not just end the movie with Baxter grabbing hold of the fat new job, handing Fran off to the more than willing Sheldrake, and banging a couple hundred Consolidated Life gal Fridays?



The world of Billy Wilder's The Apartment is detached from everything we don't actually see in the movie itself: the worlds beyond Consolidated Life, beyond the island of Manhattan. Only now can we feel its longing to not be "apart" from what was soon to be born (and smothered in its crib): the feeling that the country was now part of the daily concern. One cared about it for the first time, the way you care about family or work, a good friend or the future, and that is the most exceptional of emotions.



Fran runs to Bud, as Billy Wilder ends as an unalloyed romantic. Stars are bright overhead and the buildings outline themselves on the sky. Below, the city is a black gulf. Winds blow, and limousines crawl through the night.

Outside, the first day of the 1960s was in all its glory. . .