‘The Apartment’: The lost art of the little details 65 years later

Posted On September 7, 2025September 7, 2025

When you really love a film – truly, madly, love it for life – you love everything about it.

You love the soundtrack, the poster, the production stories. You might even muse about the characters on an idle Tuesday, peering through the coffee steam rising from the mug on your desk, and wonder aloud to the alarm of your colleagues on Zoom, ‘I reckon the Dude probably would’ve turned out to be a good father’. This is what makes art culture. This is how it reverberates through society once the buzz has died down.

In the 1960 classic The Apartment, there’s one little detail I’ve never stopped thinking about ever since I first saw it. Jack Lemmon, in one of the great acting performances, stumbles around his kitchen, flustered, and drains his spaghetti through a tennis racket. Now, any time I use a colander, which is most days, I’m reminded of The Apartment and what a great movie it is.

In some ways, this little quirk represents one of the great pinnacles of art’s purpose: to extend its influence beyond your time with it and achieve life-affirming transcendence, embellishing your days even in absentia.

The spaghetti incident is by no means pivotal, quite the opposite, but that’s why it is so charming. Someone has thought and cared and fussed about their creation enough, in a deeply human sense, to say, ‘Well, he shouldn’t just drain the pasta’. These days, you often get the sense that such intricacies are dismissed and the focus instead is on something grander, like an allegory or marketing ploy.

The actual characters in these ‘surreal’ romps are far more boring as a result. They’re just the actors doing something daring.

There’s none of that with The Apartment. The depth that you can derive from the film comes from delightful little details that give it a sense of completeness. I, like anyone else who has seen it, can picture Fran and Baxter now in their little flat, living a life beyond the plot. It’s a pleasant ponderance to revisit.

I don’t feel the same about The Substance. Of course, they’re apples and oranges, one being a cosy romcom and the other a startling body horror. But that being said, I should still be able to recall the characters and their humanising quirks or the details that give it, well, substance. Instead, all that I am left with is the same heavy-handed allegory that I departed the cinema having discerned as intended.

There’s no real intention to how a tennis racket being used as a sieve might be interpreted. It’s just a loving flourish that makes poor old Baxter feel deeply real, and a comical quip that makes me think about this fictional fellow every time I cook. Therein lies the secret to great art, and that secret is being increasingly lost as a greater sense of cynicism creeps into the cash-strapped creative process at all levels.

The tennis racket skit is not a grand surrealist flourish or some wild set-piece, which is how it might be presented today, with the pace of film changing to draw attention to the obscenity. It’s just a tiny fleck of character that unspools in a throwaway fashion, in the best possible way, that adds untold nuance and depth. It makes Baxter a friend, in a fashion, rather than ‘the famous actor doing something daft’.

These days, there seems to be a lot of films that attempt to be smart and turn out silly, forgetting the vital joy. Billy Wilder’s The Apartment is a film that attempts to be silly, made with joy, that turns out smart. To quote Baxter on the matter, as I often do in my own damp apartment, I guess “that’s the way it crumbles, cookie-wise.”

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