Film Essay: The Apartment and the #MeToo Lens

This is my fourth essay that I've written for the Brattle Theater and like the others, I appreciate the shape that it has taken and the ways I have improved my writing (with hefty help from the editor--thank you, Jessie!) when discussing films. If you want to see those previous ones, then you can check them out:
      In this essay, I take a look at The Apartment (1960) and explore how we make sense of it through a modern lens.  While we often watch and think about films in the context in which they were made, does that mean we should continue to encourage the watching of them and if we do, how much of that critical lens should e frontloaded into the viewing?  These are questions I'm clearly grappling with in this essay and things I found challenging in revisiting this film.  

      Trailer title of the film The Apartment
      Media source: Wikimedia
      "In 1960, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment garnered kind words from the New York Times(“gleeful, tender and even sentimental”) and Time (“funniest film made in Hollywood since Some Like It Hot” ). It was nominated for ten Oscars and won five. In 2015, this beloved film received an A+ from IndieWire, while The Guardian called it “absolutely brilliant.” Yet as I rewatched it, the film’s dark humor has transitioned into an almost-gallows humor, often uncomfortable in the implications as they reflect where we are today – which is to say, the film encapsulates a criticism of modern society that we seem to have only amplified."

      Read the rest of the essay over at the Brattle's Film Notes blog and let me know what you think.  



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