Pamela Robertson Wojcik

On her book The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975

Cover Interview of November 07, 2010

Lastly

The Apartment Plot should help revise the dominant view of the 1950s as homogenous, suburban, white, heterosexual, marriage-obsessed, and contained.

I would hope the book might also convince people to consider this wide-ranging group of films as a genre, while recognizing the fluidity of the apartment plot, its ability to absorb and reframe new ideas about the city.

I would also hope that others would examine the apartment plot in different contexts, different nations. Sharon Marcus has written about apartment stories in British and French nineteenth century novels. Perhaps someone will write about Polish or French apartment plots in film.

And I’d like to spur conversation about the meanings of the urban—how we view the urban, what counts among urban experience, and what philosophy of urbanism motivates us—and about the importance of space—in terms of genre, certainly, but also in terms of how space shapes identity, opportunity, and experience.

As much as anything, I hope The Apartment Plot will make you watch some of the movies and novels I write about—and engage the urban fantasy.

media studies / sexuality / ideology / gender / race / 20th century / urbanism / social mobility / film / popular culture /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009