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

Abstract

Modernism has long been thought to sit uneasily with domesticity, favouring instead the public spaces and anonymous encounters of a city-sphere marked by technological innovation and the all-too-visible hand of capitalism. In her clever and persuasive new book, The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945–1955, Pamela Robertson Wojcik puts popular culture's case for domestic urbanity as an imagined alternative to the gendered ideology of separate spheres otherwise considered representative of modern US culture in the postwar period. Concentrating on those mid-century decades regularly associated with the rising political stakes of the nuclear family and the impact of suburbanization, Wojcik identifies a sustained cycle of apartment films that plot alternative possibilities for urban living centred around the figures of the bachelor, the single woman and the newly married couple. Few of these plots are strikingly original; in fact, one of the points of Wojcik's book is that the generic quality of these stories, and their reiteration in television sitcoms and lifestyle magazines from Playboy to Ebony indicates the centrality of a ‘philosophy of urbanism’ (p. 39) to mid-century vernacular modernism.