Apartment Plot

Pamela Robertson Wojcik is Associate Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theater and Director of the Gender Studies Program at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna, also published by Duke University Press, and the editor of Movie Acting: The Film Reader.

• List of Illustrations  viiPreface  ixIntroduction: A Philosophy of Urbanism  11. A Primer in Urbanism: Rear Window's Archetypal Apartment Plot  472. "We Like Our Apartment": The Playboy Indoors  883. The Great Reprieve: Modernity, Femininity, and the Apartment  1394. The Suburbs in the City: The Housewife and the Apartment  1805. Movin' On Up: The African American Apartment  220Epilogue: A New Philosophy for a New Century  267Notes  279Bibliography  289Index  303

“Exhaustively researched and brimming with insightful observations, The Apartment Plot is a gift for those intent on studying the architecture that amps the plotline.” - Michael Dalton (M/C Reviews) “Pamela Robertson Wojcik's intriguing book takes an original approach to Hollywood cinema. Her subject is the apartment as setting, which, in films of the post-war decades, she claims, became a space where ‘a philosophy of urbanism’ could be dramatized ‘at a time when the meaning and status of urban living were undergoing a sea change.’ Wojcik argues persuasively that the ‘apartment plot’ imbues films with recurrent themes that transcend genre and director.” - Alexander Jacoby (TLS) “With her volume Wojcik deftly connects the apartment plot to social history. She also offers dozens of close readings of films-readings that often contradict (or at the very least complicate) conventional wisdom about those films. . . . Wojcik offers an almost encyclopedic account of apartment-centered films, such that any postwar film and media scholar will find Wojcik’s careful analysis useful.” - Kathy M. Newman (American Quarterly) “Wojcik . . .succeeds in demonstrating the value of focusing on the apartment, and mise-en-scÈne more generally, as a heuristic device. Doing so enables her to explore continuities between an otherwise diverse body of films, revealing how cinema both represents and participates in the production of discourses about urban architectures and experiences. As such, the volume makes a valuable contribution to our understandings of the relations among cinematic representations, architecture, and everyday life.” - Hilary Radner (Journal of American History) “Wojcik’s insightful analysis, supported by thorough research, contrasts privacy and community, sight and sound, urban and suburban, married and single life, white and African American neighborhoods, and upper- and lower-class milieus. . . . Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.” - S. R. Kozloff (Choice) “Working with an admirably wide range of additional materials, including periodical and advice literature, advertising, fiction, television, music, building blueprints, and comics . . . Wojcik balances her many disciplines carefully. The book’s overall argument for the ‘apartment story’ as a distinct and important genre, and Wojcik’s embedding of her case studies in migration trends, cultural and social concerns, and shifting ideas about the city and its alternatives is a fresh and convincing addition to studies of postwar media.” - Miriam G. Reumann (Sixties)