The Cynic Who Believed

Nobody wrote a poisoned line like Wilder. An émigré who fled the Nazis and learned English partly from the radio, he brought a European's mordant eye to American optimism and never stopped puncturing it. His characters scheme, cheat, and sell themselves: the insurance man who plots a murder for a woman and a payout in Double Indemnity; the faded silent star and the kept screenwriter rotting together in Sunset Boulevard; the reporter who prolongs a man's entrapment to milk the story in Ace in the Hole; the junior executive lending his apartment to adulterous bosses for a promotion in The Apartment. The dialogue is so sharp, the worldview so unillusioned, that Wilder is routinely filed under "cynic" — the great Hollywood sourpuss who thought everyone was on the take.

But watch where the films actually land, and the cynicism turns out to be a disguise. The Apartment ends with its hero throwing away the promotion and choosing decency; Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard are punishing precisely because they believe their characters had a better path and chose the worse one. Wilder's acid is not the acid of a man who thinks people are worthless — it is the acid of a man who is disappointed, which is a thing only an idealist can be. You cannot be bitter about human corruption unless you started out believing in human decency; the bitterness is the believing, turned inside out by the evidence. His cynics are moralists who have been hurt, and his films keep arriving, against the grain of their own wit, at the possibility of grace: a kind word, a refused bribe, a "shut up and deal."

This double nature is what lets him move so freely between noir and comedy, which look like opposites and are, in his hands, the same instrument. Some Like It Hot and The Apartment run on exactly the worldview of the noirs — everyone's working an angle, the system is rigged, romance is a transaction — but where the noir lets the angle damn its schemer, the comedy lets a sucker's stubborn decency win out. The acid dialogue is identical; only the ending's mercy changes. Wilder understood that comedy and noir are two verdicts on the same human material, and he reserved the right to deliver either, because he genuinely wasn't sure which we deserved.

His inheritance is the entire tradition of the smart, cynical-surfaced, secretly-moral American picture — every film that earns its sentiment by first refusing it, that lets the wisecrack carry the feeling so the feeling won't seem cheap. The Coen brothers' indifferent universe owes him; so does every screenwriter who learned that the way to say something sincere in Hollywood is to wrap it in something sharp enough that it doesn't sound like a greeting card. Wilder spent forty years pretending not to believe in people, and never once stopped. The cynicism was just the armor on the sentiment, worn by a man who had seen enough of the twentieth century to know better, and somehow didn't.

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The line: Double Indemnity → Sunset Boulevard → Ace in the Hole → Witness for the Prosecution → Some Like It Hot → The Apartment

This line crosses:

• The Shadow That Outlived the Light — Wilder is an émigré of that diaspora, and Double Indemnity is the film where German Expressionist lighting became American film noir.
• The Ventriloquists — the Coens inherit his exact double game: a corrupt, mordant genre surface over a moralist's quarrel with an indifferent world.

Read through: Cameron Crowe, Conversations with Wilder · Ed Sikov, On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder.

A note on the argument: Wilder's mordant dialogue, émigré background, and movement between noir and comedy are documented record. The framing of the cynicism as disappointed idealism — noir and comedy as two verdicts on the same material — is this essay's reading.