Love v. Empowerment: "The Apartment"

People know in the abstract how language reflects the world around them, but they often don't realize the depth of the connection between the two.

Take a simple example like the words used to describe what people do with any excess savings they might be able to accumulate. For much of the Twentieth Century, the phrase we used for this was "money management." According to the Google Ngram viewer, which charts the appearances of words in printed material, the phrase "money management" came into use in the years after the First World War, and its frequency of use continued to increase throughout the century. On its own, this may or may not tell us an extraordinary amount – as that Oscar Wilde for our age, Homer Simpson, once noted, "You can come up with statistics to prove anything. Forty percent of all people know that" – but there is one interesting element about the use of the phrase: it begins to rapidly tail off sometime around the year 2000.

Was this because people had somehow stopped saving money in that year? Nope. It was because the phrase had begun to be replaced by a different one in our lexicon: "wealth management." Why the shift? I'm no lexicographer, but two possibilities suggest themselves. The first has to do with sales. If you're a company that makes its money by handling other people's money, advertising what you do as "wealth management" instead of "money management" makes a lot of sense, because it will help convince people that if they entrust their savings to you, you're going to make them wealthy.

Secondly, my sense is that the shift also has to do with a shift in values and perception. In the past several decades, there has been a rapid infiltration into our society of the idea of the defining moral value of wealth. It's difficult to put an exact date on this shift, but one thinks of the way the presentation of the Gordon Gecko character in Wall Street (1987) with his famous admonition that "greed is good," differs from that of similar characters in our own time, up to and including the hucksters and flim-flam artists who make up so much of our own technocratic overlord class and who are the focus of a spurt of new television shows, from Inventing Anna to The Dropout to WeCrashed. While these characters may be the targets of a kind of mockery for their specific actions, their obsession with becoming obscenely rich is generally taken as a societal given.

Which is to say that these days, the accumulation of wealth, along with the accumulation of celebrity, is not just a goal for many young people, but an expectation. A fascinating poll conducted by an outfit called "Magnify Money" in 2019 (which claims that it wants "to empower consumers with the information and the confidence they need to make wise financial choices" and offers an array of free tools on its website, all in exchange, of course, for nothing more or less than access to your data) notes that 66% of Millennials believe they will be wealthy someday, compared with 49% of Gen X members, and 25% of Baby Boomers. The comparative numbers don't seem to me to say much – most Baby Boomers are at the age where they already have a pretty good handle on whether or not they're eventually going to hit it big – but the 66% number is pretty impressive. Given this belief, it seems clear that folks would want to refer to their own personal approaches as "wealth management" instead of "money management" if for no other reason than to reassure themselves that they're on their way to the promised land.

Or consider the word "empowerment," which the Magnify Money folks use in their ad copy, and which was virtually unheard of in our culture before the past thirty years, according to its Ngram.

"Empowerment" is one of those words which is so ubiquitous in our culture that is has begun to lose any specific definitional meaning and instead has become almost akin to a religious invocation, not pointing directly to any particular idea so much as gesticulating broadly and vaguely in the realm of belief itself. The etymology of the word is pretty straightforward: it's a noun indicating that one has come into possession of power, or has the ability to do so. Where the cultural miasma surrounding empowerment begins, however, is in a slightly different area.

This is because the idea of empowerment in our culture relies on another, precedential idea, which is that the things that ail us in our world do so because we are not powerful enough. Put differently, contemporary American culture tends to see every problem on the personal level as an issue of people being disempowered, and thus the remedy to everything that bothers us is to seek power of one sort of another.

This is an important idea, not only in the abstract, but also because it has the perverse effect of making virtually every problem worse.

And one of the best ways to understand the reasons for this is to try to understand the ways that American culture from earlier periods worked through the problems that afflict people, and suggested remedies for those problems.

The Apartment, from 1960, is one of the greatest achievements of one of the greatest filmmakers that Hollywood ever produced, Billy Wilder, whose gravestone, as I've probably mentioned before in these pages, and will almost certainly mention again, bears the slogan of nearly everyone who finds themselves in this godforsaken profession: "I'm a writer, but then nobody's perfect."

The film also speaks directly to the idea of empowerment. It tells the story of a man named C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon), who is a low-level employee at an insurance agency in New York City. He is at the same time ambitious and trod-upon by his superiors, and the dramatic working-out of these twin conditions comes through the apartment that gives the film its name. This belongs to C.C., but he has begun letting his superiors at the company use it for their extra-marital assignations. In return, they put him up for promotion, which is great for his career prospects; unfortunately, it also has the effect of rendering him prey to their hormonal whims, and many is the night that he has to stay away from his own home because it's being used as a love nest by one or another of the men higher up in the hierarchy than he.

The second, and equally interesting, character in the story is Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), an elevator operator at the building where C.C. works, upon whom he has a crush. Fran is independent-minded – when an executive on her elevator gets handsy at the beginning of the film, she calls him out on it and explains that if it happens again, she'll close the elevator doors on him unexpectedly, perhaps severing a rather important appendage – and yet despite this independence she's also stuck in her own dilemma: she's in love with a married man with whom she's been having an affair. This one Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) who also happens to be high above C.C. in the company hierarchy.

From this triangle, the film works its magic. C.C.'s apartment-users recommend him for promotion; this brings him to the attention of Sheldrake, who promotes C.C. on the condition that he let Sheldrake use the apartment; this becomes the place where Sheldrake agonizingly breaks Fran's heart as C.C. is falling in love with her.

The despair caused by these events is quite real. Fran eventually tries to commit suicide in C.C.'s bed after Sheldrake has left the apartment one night. C.C. saves her life and admits that he too once nearly committed suicide over a broken heart, only to accidentally shoot himself in the knee instead. And Sheldrake's power over both characters is strong: even after the suicide attempt, Fran still loves him, and he holds C.C.'s entire professional and economic future in his hands.

At the end, C.C. and Fran triumph because of that most materially insignificant and yet spiritually vast force: love. C.C. has long loved Fran; now she realizes that she loves him too. He quits his job, and gives up his apartment; she leaves Sheldrake. At the end, very much like the Tramp and the Gamin in Modern Times, to which The Apartment bears a great number of similarities, the lovers are left without worldly prospects and yet are blissfully happy.

It's an extraordinary film, and one you should immediately sit down and watch again if you haven't seen it in a while. But why did I say above that it's about empowerment?

Well, to put it in a way that screenwriters of its time might have enjoyed, it's about empowerment exactly because it's not about empowerment at all, to such an extent that it's precisely empowerment that becomes the problem.

As a way into this, consider what the story the movie tells is not.

Although it features as its main antagonist a terrible and personally abusive boss in Mr. Sheldrake, it's not about either of our main characters gaining power over that boss. In a different version of this story, C.C. might find himself promoted above Sheldrake, or Fran might find herself suddenly becoming the first female executive at the corporation, and they would then give Sheldrake his comeuppance by firing him or making him go run the elevator.

The Apartment, however, eschews these options. C.C. quits his job, as does Fran. Neither tries to get Sheldrake in trouble. There is no poison note from C.C. to Sheldrake's superiors alerting them to Sheldrake's abuses. And while it's true that Sheldrake's wife is eventually informed about his infidelities, this news comes from one of his other ex-lovers, not Fran. Significantly, we don't get the idea that Sheldrake is ruined at the end. He does mention that he's getting divorced, but we don't get the sense that this is devastating to him; instead, it seems like he's just going to keep on making money and having his affairs.

Beneath this, the film also presents power itself – that unavoidable root of "empowerment" – as a problem in human affairs, rather than a solution to them. Which is to say that, at base, C.C.'s problems stem from his rather underhanded attempts to climb the corporate pyramid. It is this quest for advancement, this naked desire for more power, that has made him alienated from his own home and denigrated by his superiors, who have turned his domestic space into their playroom.

Fran, too, suffers from power. In her case, it is the interpersonal power that Sheldrake wields over her, continually promising her that he's going to leave his wife, while having no intention of doing so. In each case, then – one character pursuing power, and the other having it wielded against her – it is the character's relative position vis-a-vis the people around them that is the source of their woe. And what is power but a vision of a world in which humans relate to each other in hierarchical ways?

Over and against this vision, The Apartment presents another. In the conception of the film, human life is not best, or most helpfully, understood as a system in which some people have power and others don't and the point is to improve one's relative position in that system. Instead, the film presents our existence on this planet as deeply complex, and frequently terrifying. It posits a world in which most, if not all, humane, actualized people suffer; this is one of the points of Fran's suicide attempt and the C.C.'s story about his similar attempt. And the solution? To attempt to open yourself to other people, to make yourself more human, rather than more powerful.

There are some thematic ways in which this is presented – the corporate setting, the way the film works through the relationships Sheldrake has with both characters – but it's also very directly stated. At one point in the film, C.C.'s neighbor, a Jewish doctor, tells him that the point of life is to become "a mensch," which he describes as nothing more or less than "a human being." The doctor has diagnosed C.C.’s spiritual predicament and limned it with a phrase. He is not yet a fully human being.

C.C. is so completely convinced by this that, at the end of the film, he declares it will now be his goal. A more clear statement of belief about the nature of the world and our existence in it is hardly imaginable. The aim is not to become powerful. It is to become more fully human. And how does one do this? By finding connection with the people around us. By falling in love.

A final thing to note here is that the film also manages to diagnose the problem with a world focused on empowerment; it understands the reason that, as I mentioned earlier, a focus on personal power tends to make everything around it worse, rather than better.

Power does not exist in a vacuum. It is relative. Power, in other words, is necessarily and by definition power over, for if it has nothing to control it is not power at all. Thus it entails a hierarchical vision of the world of human relations, one in which there is only enough room on each rung of the ladder for one person. If you subscribe to a world bounded by empowerment, you either have more or less power than every single person around you.

And so the quest for this empowerment is ultimately atomizing. It severs us from one another, creates in us a feeling that we are by necessity either above or below other people. The Apartment sees this clearly. The result of C.C.'s attempt at empowering himself through leveraging the use of his apartment is that he is left alone, standing in the street in the rain. The result of Sheldrake's power over Fran is virtually identical: she is atomized, cut off from the world, totally at his mercy.

Neither character can escape through empowerment. The only way out is through connection, through the friendly card game between the two new lovers that ends the movie and provides Fran with her famous last line: "Shut up and deal!" This card game is, of course, symbolic in itself, an ironic substitution for all the empowerment games – the striving for personal success, the use of sex as domination – that have pervaded the rest of the film.

But those are gone now, and what remains is to be a human being. For in the end, it is love, not power, that conquers all.

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If you’d like to read more of my writing, my dystopic noir novel “The Committers” is now available in paperback and e-book format here. Read the first chapter for free here. My book on the 1969 cult classic film Mr. Freedom will also be available soon for on Amazon and elsewhere.