The Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve Structure The Apartment (1960)

The Apartment runs from early December to midnight on December 31. The film's emotional spine is calibrated to two specific evenings — Christmas Eve, which is the midpoint and the location of Fran's overdose, and New Year's Eve, which is the climax and the location of Baxter's refusal of the apartment key. The two holidays are not decoration. They are structural devices that organize the film's argument about loneliness, ritual, and the possibility of starting over.

Christmas Eve as the midpoint trap

Christmas Eve is Beat 17 through Beat 20 — roughly the 52nd through 70th minute of a 125-minute film. The placement is deliberate: Christmas Eve is the midpoint, and the midpoint is where the instrumental approach reaches its terminal failure.

The Christmas Eve sequence is one of the most elaborately cross-cut in Wilder's career. The film tracks three locations simultaneously:

• Mr. Sheldrake's house in White Plains, where the family is in the middle of a domestic bit about catching flies for a science project (introduced via beat 21)^b21
• The bar where Baxter is drinking with Margie MacDougall^b17
• Baxter's apartment, where Sheldrake gives Fran a hundred-dollar bill as a Christmas present and leaves to catch his train^b17

The intercutting forces the audience to experience two kinds of Christmas Eve loneliness simultaneously — Baxter's comic (the Margie pickup, the body-donation gag, "everybody else does") and Fran's lethal (the hundred-dollar bill, the empty apartment, the sleeping pills). The two strands collide in beat 19 when Baxter finds Fran unconscious on his bed.^b19

"Christmas Eve is when American films are supposed to deliver redemption. The Apartment delivers a near-suicide. The placement is deliberate — Wilder is using the holiday's emotional charge against itself. The audience comes to Christmas expecting reconciliation and gets a stomach pump." — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (2001)

The hundred-dollar bill is the Christmas Eve image. Sheldrake hands Fran the cash with the suggestion she buy something nice at Bergdorf's, checks his watch, and leaves to catch his commuter train back to his wife and children.^b17 The transaction reduces the affair to its actuarial reality: this is what your time has been worth to me.

Christmas as the season of corporate ritual

Before the overdose, Christmas in the film is the office-party season. Beat 15 — the Consolidated Life Christmas party on the 19th floor — is the social-corporate event where the firm performs its own family-likeness.^b15 Switchboard operators dance with executives. Mr. Sheldrake puts on a Santa beard.¹ Miss Olsen drinks too much and tells Fran the truth.^b16

The Christmas party sequence is the structural center of the film's office politics. It is the moment when the firm's ostensible communality is exposed as the cover under which the affairs proceed. The mistletoe and the cocktails are theater for the assembly-line system Miss Olsen will name in her speech to Fran.

"The Christmas party is where the corporate fiction breaks down. For one evening the office pretends to be a family, and during that pretense, the truth — that the personnel director runs an assembly line of secretaries — gets spoken aloud." — Cameron Crowe, Conversations with Wilder (1999) (book, not available online)

The cracked compact passes from Sheldrake to Baxter to Fran during the same evening. By the end of the party, Fran has seen herself in the broken mirror and recognized the apartment as Baxter's.^{b14 b16} The corporate Christmas has produced its own destabilization.

The recovery week as a held breath

Between Christmas Eve (beat 19) and New Year's Eve (beat 35), the film slows down. Beats 22 through 31 take place inside Baxter's apartment over what is roughly five days — Christmas Day, the 26th, the 27th, the 28th, and the 29th.² The pace is domestic and unforced. Fran cleans, washes Baxter's socks, strains spaghetti through a tennis racket.^b28 Baxter cooks. They play gin rummy.^b24 Mrs. Dreyfuss brings noodle soup.^b23

This is the only stretch of the film where the apartment is functioning as a home rather than as an extension of the office. The recovery is taking place in the same physical space that Baxter has spent the first half of the film evicting himself from. The reclamation is not declarative. Wilder does not have anyone announce that the apartment has changed. He just shows two people living there for five days.

The week culminates in beat 31 with the Robinson Crusoe speech and Karl Matuschka's punch. Fran returns to her sister and brother-in-law's apartment.^b31 The held breath ends.

New Year's Eve as the climax

New Year's Eve is beats 35 through 40 — the last twenty-five minutes of the film. The structural symmetry is exact:

• Christmas Eve (Beat 19): Sheldrake takes Fran to Baxter's apartment; Fran nearly dies there
• New Year's Eve (Beat 35): Sheldrake demands the apartment for another date with Fran; Baxter refuses

The refusal in beat 36 is the climactic test of the post-midpoint approach. Baxter says no, drops the executive washroom key on Sheldrake's desk, names the new approach in Yiddish ("I've decided to become a mensch — a human being"), and walks out.^b36 See Mensch (the word's role in the film).

The use of New Year's Eve is a structural inversion of Christmas Eve. Christmas is the holiday of family, hearth, and reunion — the values Sheldrake has weaponized against Fran by going home to White Plains. New Year's Eve is the holiday of starting over, the calendar's fresh page, the resolution. By placing the climax there, Wilder is staking the film's bet on the possibility of beginning again — a possibility he refuses to make sentimental.

"Wilder is using the calendar deliberately. Christmas Eve breaks people; New Year's Eve gives them a chance to begin again. The Apartment is the rare American film that earns its New Year's Eve climax — not by promising transformation but by showing the protagonist actually do the thing the holiday is supposed to commemorate. Baxter starts over. He just doesn't know what comes next." — Sarah Kozloff, Bright Lights Film Journal (2010)

Midnight as the structural hinge

The transition from old year to new in beat 39 is the structural hinge. At the New Year's Eve party, Sheldrake unconsciously quotes Baxter's "That's the way it crumbles, cookiewise" (which Baxter said to Fran in beat 25 during the recovery week). Fran hears the phrase, recognizes it as Baxter's, and understands that Baxter quit his job to protect her. She runs.^{b25 b38 b39}

Sheldrake calls "Happy New Year, Fran" as she is already leaving.^b39 The midnight transition coincides with Fran's choice. The old year — the year of the affair, the apartment, the assembly line — ends as she walks out. The new year — whatever it will be — begins as she runs to Baxter's door.

The auld-lang-syne sentimentality is offscreen. What we see is a woman running through the streets of New York at midnight, knocking on a door, and saying nothing about the calendar.

The closing image is anti-holiday

The closing image — Baxter and Fran playing gin rummy on New Year's Eve — refuses both Christmas and New Year's iconography. There is no kiss at midnight. There is no champagne. There is no embrace. Fran says "Shut up and deal" and they play cards.^b40 See "Shut up and deal" (the closing line).

The refusal is structural. Wilder has spent two hours setting up a pair of holidays freighted with cultural expectation, and he ends the film in a domestic posture so deliberately small that it overrides both. The new equilibrium is two people playing a game in the apartment they have reclaimed. The calendar is irrelevant. What matters is that the apartment is finally a home.