Mid-century fascists, troubled hearing, repetition

These inchoate notes are my way of thinking through a film pairing that came to mind after I saw The Shape of Water earlier this year. I've been interested for a while in how the mundane tyranny of the American workplace acts as a training ground for broader political subordination. I'm writing on the hunch that these two films have something to draw out of each other, across very different genres, moments, and ideological projects.


The Apartment (1960), dir. Billy Wilder
The Shape of Water (2017), dir. Guillermo del Toro

In a film populated by bit characters reducible to their verbal quirks and tics, The Apartment's national insurance corporation personnel director Jeff Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) impresses mainly with his uncomprehending reactions--dumb puzzlement promptly flicked back into dumber insouciance. He reliably draws audience laughter after some other character expresses despondency: without fail, their utterance disappears like a dart into the placid pudding of Sheldrake's face. He's a man unafflicted by hearing.

Fred MacMurray, The Apartment

Like Michael Shannon's Col. Strickland in The Shape of Water, Sheldrake is the only character in the film he inhabits who has a nuclear family embedded in a mid-century, suburban domestic space. Gemütlichkeit renders no aid to his hearing, as a Christmas morning exchange with his children suggests:

Tommy: [Playing with a new toy rocket] Hey, Dad--why don't we put a fly in the nose cone and see if we can bring it back alive?
Sheldrake: It's a thought.
Tommy: Maybe we should send up two flies and see if they'll propagate in orbit.
Sheldrake: See if they'll what?
Tommy: Propagate--you know, multiply. Baby flies?
Sheldrake: Oh--oh!

The home would be the space of propagation, but not of talking or hearing about it. By contrast, the protagonist in each film (Elisa, Buddy) lives in a city apartment, an initially lonely space that proves conducive to elemental reinvention--for that matter, to resurrection. The single-family home doesn't lend itself to any such transformation. Strickland's spatial imagination is additive, tumescent, accelerative; when he needs a little something, a zippy new Cadillac DeVille does the trick--until it's summarily crumpled.

Michael Shannon, The Shape of Water

Sheldrake, on the other hand, just keeps fingering the same groove. In a scene near the end of the film, he and Fran (Shirley MacLaine) are back at their old haunt, a booze-and-piano-soaked Chinese restaurant, for a New Year's Eve party. The camera holds on Sheldrake seated in the booth, body twisted away from the table and from Fran as he belts out "Auld Lang Syne" with the party crowd. He turns back around to face Fran, who's unpictured but presumably just off-screen, pauses, then shouts, "Fran?" The camera pans slightly left to capture the empty space that Sheldrake was just addressing. This delay would bespeak a perceptual failure verging on psychosis if it weren't being signposted as simply a great visual gag. Still, this gap in cognition isn't just part of The Apartment's comic grammar; it's dispositive to the structure of work and intimacy the film names. We leave Sheldrake here, suspended in incomprehension, playing out his repetitions alone.

Absent Shirley MacLaine, The Apartment

....

Strickland in The Shape of Water is unable to conceive of Elisa (Sally Hawkins) as a human because of her muteness, at the same time that he fetishizes her silence. Meanwhile, his own selective hearing when it comes to her acts as a prophylactic: even as she mocks him to his face (through her friend Zelda, played by Octavia Spencer), her derision doesn't penetrate. It's only when Elisa signs to him without translation that he blows his fuse--not because of what she says ("Fuck you," as the audience is informed), but because of the potent directness of her address and his inability to make sense of it. Yet when he's later told that his stolen "asset" was taken by cleaners, he forgets the source of his earlier rage and heads straight to Zelda's home instead.

Michael Shannon absent some bits, The Shape of Water

....

Both men have a propensity for fascism, the Cold Warrior and the executive on the 27th floor. Both are afflicted with the fascist's weakness of an inability to distinguish tone--are thoroughgoing tyrants but cannot quite believe in or even register the insubordination of the apparently meek, their political or emotional torsion. Both cleave to an old story, an old routine: hubris layered with the dull fanaticism of the company man's imagination. Maimed by the Amphibian Man, Strickland regards himself as Samson, another victim of symbolic castration; he re-castrates himself in front of the horrified Zelda by tearing the putrescent re-attached fingers off his own hand, so unshakable is his faith in his own rectitude. Sheldrake, for his part, pads back into the old Chinese restaurant with Fran again and again, just as he did with his other girlfriends, and cruelly keeps as his secretary his former lover, Miss Olsen, who blows the lid off the whole game in the end.

Just as Strickland writes off Elisa because of her muteness, Sheldrake underestimates Miss Olsen, whose horn-rimmed glasses stand in for unacknowledged sight, and who speaks illicitly with other women, her replacements and betters, rather than being a mere connection point for the male executives who call into the office. In the end, Miss Olsen plies her revenge through the telecommunications technology she's meant to use on Sheldrake's behalf, penetrating with her voice that domestic space where even flies dare not propagate.

Shirley MacLaine and Edie Adams, The Apartment

....

In both films something is monetized, weaponized, or capitalized that shouldn't have been: the space of the apartment, the bodies of women, the body of the Amphibian Man as an asset to the security apparatus, either of the two keys passed back and forth between Jack Lemmon's Buddy and the company managers. The comparison with Sheldrake brings out Strickland's incapacity and inanity, and the comparison with Strickland brings out Sheldrake's brutality and inability to recognize the demands of a life. Both are ultimately abandoned--Sheldrake by both wife and mistress, Strickland by the US government. They both regard people as assets, something to keep in the back pocket. That the Amphibian Man is kidnapped from South America places The Shape of Water squarely in the heyday of US pro-fascist interventions in Latin America, triangulating the film's US-Russian Cold War geopolitics. Strickland's unblinking self-mutilation recalls Captain Vidal, Sergi López's terrifying Falangist in del Toro's earlier film Pan's Labyrinth. After being attacked with a kitchen knife by his housekeeper, who's been revealed to be a revolutionary, Vidal sews together his own sliced cheek. Regarding his face in the mirror after shaving, he flicks a straight razor across the neck of his reflection: a dare to God. When Strickland's throat is slashed at the end of The Shape of Water, he can only imagine a god has authored the act. These men's fundamental obscenity doesn't contradict their belief in a godhead: verticality is the point, whoever's at the top. Meanwhile, one of the more understated jokes in The Apartment is that the holy grail, Buddy's reward for allowing the procurement of his home, the woman he loves, and himself, is similarly an object both elevated and obscene: the key to the executive washroom on the 27th floor.