Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Apartment
1960 · Billy Wilder · The Apartment on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Count the rows of desks behind Lemmon in the office. (staging)
Alexandre Trauner built a forced-perspective floor where furniture shrinks toward the back and shorter actors sit at the far desks. Joseph LaShelle keeps Baxter one small figure in the wide frame.
Payoff: The company is built to look endless, so Baxter's smallness inside it is a fact of the set.
Watch the apartment key change hands. (setting)
The key travels from executive to executive on a schedule Baxter keeps like an appointment book. Nobody explains the arrangement out loud. The object carries the whole deal each time it moves.
Payoff: You are trusted to read an arrangement of sex, ambition and shame off a piece of hardware. In the reading: mark. The reading calls the key a mark: an object you read through a habit the film has trained into you.
Notice who stands in the center of every two-shot. (camera)
Wilder puts Sheldrake in the middle of the frame and pushes Baxter to the margin of institutional space. The arrangement repeats in offices, corridors, elevators and bars.
Payoff: Rank gets stated by position in the frame long before anyone says who outranks whom.
Watch Lemmon's body when he is being agreeable. (performance)
Lemmon plays Baxter's abasement for laughs without letting go of his dignity: the bowler hat, the bench in the park, the yes said one beat too fast. Comedy and hurt share a gesture.
Payoff: You can see complicity and victimhood at the same time, which is exactly where the film puts him.
Listen for how wistful the music is under the jokes. (sound)
Adolph Deutsch scores the comedy with melancholy rather than satire, so the film signals from the first minutes that something is genuinely at stake beneath the office gags.
Payoff: The score tells you how to take the laughs before the story gives you a reason.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Nothing important here gets said out loud. Watch the objects that pass between people, starting with the apartment key.