Oxford, November 2024.
Evening. A strange building on St Giles. Rusted mirror, a porcelain sink. These days, I make sure there’s an escape route from every party. And I sneak into the bathroom when I feel like I might cry.
Here’s what’s funny: tears never come naturally to me. Instead, I press my hands to my mouth and make this awful yodeling noise that sounds like a cat with its tail being pulled. It’s embarrassing. I’m not easily embarrassed, but hearing the noise makes me want to curl in on myself.
Sooner or later, I start to feel like a bad actress. My small whimpers dissolve into laughter. It’s difficult to bawl for too long without feeling ridiculous. I rest my head against a porcelain wall, my shoulders hunched, my knees bare in the ugly fluorescent light.
Outside, the vague murmur of laughter runs on. I close my eyes and focus on the pulse of my breathing. I think of Sugar Kane, the husky echo as she sobs into the microphone. Or I think of Fran Kubelik, appraising the jagged fissure across her powder mirror. I like it that way, she says. It makes me look the way I feel.
Billy Wilder is the director whose stories I carry with me if I need to cry in the bathroom.
*
Wilder’s characters are never quite real—or perhaps they are just unreal enough that we could laugh without discomfort at their miseries. Their injuries and humiliations are, shamelessly, modes of entertainment. After all, these films are comedies. The cinematic unreality of Wilder’s characterization is enhanced by how dazzlingly laughable his characters are.
The lawyers, the musicians. The femmes fatales. The politicians and the madmen. The clowns. The losers, the drunkards, the absent-minded, the unloved. The antiheroes, whether it be greedy, single-minded Chuck Tatum, indolent Joe Gillis, or sullen, rugged J.J. Sefton, are dubious mixtures of corruption and decency. His dynamic duos—Animal and Harry Shapiro in Stalag 17 (1953), Josephine and Daphne in Some Like It Hot (1959), Harry Hinkle and Whiplash Willie from The Fortune Cookie (1966)—steal the show. His girls, whether it be the precocious Ariane Chavasse or the flighty Scarlett Hazeltine, are equal amounts maddening and endearing. Consider the women of Wilder’s creation, and you’ve tasted the gold—the ruthless Phyllis Dietrichson; the formidable yet vulnerable Christine Helm; sulky Lorraine Minosa or haughty Fräulein Ingeborg; innocuous Sugar Kane or doleful Fran Kubelik or the magnetic Norma Desmond. Beneath his skepticism and contempt, Wilder is full of heart. Nobody heartless could elicit such warmth, such unadulterated hilarity from an audience. And no one who doesn’t love human beings could possibly want, so badly, to make them laugh.
These characters carry with them an inherent childishness, an imperfection, a rueful melancholy just cozy enough to masquerade as humor. They are ludicrous, yet outrageously charming. It is crucial that we find their behaviors inane, their decisions irrational, their miseries laughable. Every blink, every little smile is governed by a wistful absurdity that slowly but surely softens our hearts. These absurd people give Wilder the opportunity to exercise his talent for capturing indignity and embarrassment, sadness and loss—for capturing despair and making it funny.
In an essay for the Criterion Collection titled “How to Have Fun,” Sam Wasson calls Wilder’s camera “amoral”—an instrument only to serve pleasure and entertainment. You don’t reach any new revelations when rewatching a Wilder movie, Wasson argues. Its joys are incandescent and instantaneously accessible.
But what of tenderness? I find my heart growing more tender each time I rewatch The Apartment (1960) or One, Two, Three (1961). When the gags no longer bring a jab of delighted surprise, they bring a touch of fondness instead. I laugh, still. But sometimes I laugh to keep my heart from aching, to keep myself from noticing that this story is sad. The jokes are still funny when you notice the crumpled napkins, the sleeve smudged with mascara, the layer of ripped nylon hiding the bruises. Sometimes, they’re even funnier.
In his comedies, Wilder offers us a portal through which we see our own clownishness—we, the wonderful people who sit out there in the dark. The spotlight illuminates our reflections, staring back at ourselves in an eternal echo of tenderness and mockery. Our delusions, our shames.
Snot. Smeared eyeliner. Lipstick running from the corner of our mouths, like a clown’s. The close-up is what our face looks like in the bathroom mirror.
*
Laughter is the medicine to misery, and there’s no film that makes me laugh like Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three (1961). Sick with a fever during a pandemic winter, I rewatched the film with my laptop pulled against my chest, listening to the rattling coughs in a tiny infirmary shared by two other students—and I smiled again.
Set mostly in a twenty-four-hour span in a fractured Berlin, where capitalism and communism clash and spark conflict, One, Two, Three is a political comedy. Wilder’s artistry knows no bounds. His humor soaks right through the screenplay, sharp as a splash of vinegar in a cup of tea. Sour, acrid. The film revolves around the ambitions of Coca-Cola sales executive McNamara (James Cagney), who stands in for a corporation seeking expansion beyond the Iron Curtain: “Napoleon blew it, Hitler blew it, but Coca-Cola’s gonna pull it off!” American capitalism lies at the heart of this film, but nobody escapes Wilder’s satire: bumbling Russian ambassadors, clueless American heiresses, hot-blooded young communists, a company of German workers still carrying memories of the Third Reich. Witticism after witticism is nothing short of delectable: “I wouldn’t touch the Russians with a ten-foot pole. And I don’t want anything to do with the Poles either.”
Lighthearted jokes are an inch away from gruesome. “The plane is due four-thirty,” Hazeltine (Howard St. John) announces. “Unless those damn Commies shoot it down!” During Otto Piffl’s torture, the East German police keep him from sleeping by playing the American pop-song “Itsy-Bitsy Teeny-Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini”, eventually driving him delirious enough to answer to every accusation. Russian ambassador Peripetchikoff contemplates what should happen to his family should he defect: “They will line them up against the wall and shoot them! My wife, and my mother-in-law, and my sister-in-law, and my brother-in-law—” Pause. “Comrades, let’s do it!” Wilder’s dialogue drips with such wit that, if you wrenched the screenplay like a dishrag, sheer, stinging hilarity would splatter over your fingers like a hearty squeeze of lemon juice. He channels the fears, the timidity, the ironies, and the confusions into humor. He turns the essence of his comedy into the most brilliant antidote and the sharpest weapon.
Tiny jabs at the city’s history are rich with mockery, whether it be McNamara’s jests—“Schlemmer, you’re back in the SS. Smaller salary!”—or Fritz’s remark upon arriving at the Grand Hotel Potemkin: “It used to be the Great Hotel Göring, and before that, it was the Great Hotel Bismarck.” The knife-sharp subtlety is in every detail: the workers all stand upon a superior’s entry because they have not yet unlearned their commands under the Nazi regime; a poster of Khrushchev slides down to reveal the older poster of Stalin taped-up behind it. Wilder trusted the audience to recognize the things unsaid. Most of all, he trusted them to laugh when the punchline came.
Upon rounds of rewatching it is the farcical couple, Otto and Scarlett, who chip away at the defenses around my heart. They are the soul of One, Two, Three, not least because of their absurdity. It is easy to mistake the characters’ naivety—Otto’s socialist aggression or Scarlett’s bourgeois ignorance—as moments of comic relief. Their marriage is the butt of the joke, the product of a topsy-turvy world where left-wing radicals can fall in love with the daughters of Coca-Cola tycoons. But Otto and Scarlett are the only characters who demonstrate fear, bewilderment, horror, tenderness. They are the only characters whose emotions we never mistake as anything but sincere. The only moment of disharmony occurs upon Otto’s horrified proclamation that he no longer wants to bring children into a world so corrupt. “Don’t you ever scare me like that again,” says a sobbing Scarlett in Otto’s arms, while he apologizes over and over. They hold each other, and for a moment, her distress is almost more than an object of ridicule.
They are the heart of this story. Perhaps McNamara, with his seething ambition and slowly crumbling family life, grows to see this, too. Perhaps that’s why he helps the clumsy couple orchestrate an incredulously happy ending. Perhaps that’s why there is hope.
One, Two, Three pulsates with sheer creative momentum. Its pacing accelerates until the utterly hilarious finale leaves your head spinning, your heart reeling, your lungs breathless from laughter. The narrative’s dynamic vitality mirrors the fire of its characters, who bark orders, snap commands, and move with a frenzied urgency that leaves small hurricanes in their wake. There’s a desperation, of course, in this race between the communists and the capitalists. To slow down would be to confront the hollowness of our own actions, our own lives—so we must speed up.
After all, when social ideals and norms confuse us, when the world has gone and passed us by, when we’ve encountered too many lost weekends and the bleakness becomes too much to bear, what can we do but laugh? If we cannot laugh at the hollowness of a governing system, at the ideologies that fall short into corruption, then how can we go on? If we cannot laugh at the absurdity of a divided Berlin, poke fun at the caricatures of torture—if we cannot laugh at the hopelessness of our political debris—then how can we possibly go on living?
We must have a good time, Wilder knows. We must tilt our heads back and laugh because only when we laugh do we dare to look darkness in the eye. What else is there to do? Cry?
Sometimes, Wilder reminds us, they’re the same thing.
*
There’s nothing pretty about heartbreak. But Wilder manages to find it anyway: in the fumes of a cigarette, a single spotlight illuminating a mournful face.
In this vein, Some Like It Hot excels in portraying how hilarity is inseparable from distress. What terrible luck Joe and Jerry have! Destitute, starving, hunted by mobsters—and on top of that, they are terribly incompetent at pretending to be women. It’s funny to watch two men tottering around in a pair of high-heels as they run for their lives. It’s funny to watch these characters lie, cheat, pretend, do anything to escape the dirty mundanity of their lives. Gender is a performance. So is status and wealth. The hilarious moments emerge out of desperate lies and failed shams.
For Sugar (Marilyn Monroe), too, the world is a rollercoaster. Sugar’s sensuality comes from a permanent sense of misfortune. Her dark eyes are a world of woe as she hitches up a slinky black dress to reveal the flask of bourbon sloppily strapped to her thigh. She’s adorable precisely because she’s so bad at everything: at staying sober, at judging men, at not getting her heart broken. “Story of my life,” she says, wide-eyed, a headful of rumpled blond hair always slightly out of place. “I always get the fuzzy end of the lollipop.”
And so Wilder makes us laugh at these characters’ distress. We laugh with stomach, heart, and soul; we laugh so much that we forget ourselves. This is a world where tenderness can only exist in the most absurd and nonsensical of situations. “Nobody’s perfect,” says Osgood (Joe E. Brown). Of all the inane things that could happen, Osgood Fielding III looks as if marrying Daphne—even when she’s unexpectedly, sometimes, Jerry—would make him the happiest person in the world. And it makes me so happy, in that moment, just to look at him.
Sugar is the star of this debacle. Upon being left behind by the fake billionaire, the return of her misery culminates in an astonishing performance on the bandstand. She sits on the piano with her legs dangling, like a little child. “I mean to care for no one,” she whispers huskily, “because I’m through with love.” The mirror-ball turns languidly as it sends tiny droplets of light dancing across the walls, the floor. She pulls a black shred of silk taut in her hands. The lights darken for a moment when she ducks her head, the harsh glitter of tears brimming. Self-pitying, crestfallen, and farcical, she makes a bold-faced performance of misery by granting a defiance to her most pitiful gestures. Sugar’s vulnerability makes her ridiculous. But she evokes a harrowing pathos by pulling together what’s left of her dignity, by leaning her trembling body towards the microphone, by demonstrating that there is something fundamentally lovable about her vulnerability.
The whole scene is both absurd and absurdly cathartic. I am sad, her eyes say, and I won’t pretend to be otherwise. Sugar softens our shell-hard hearts by perpetually wearing her own on her sleeve. We love her precisely for her shameless sorrow, for her clownish sincerity. She’s a mess. But Wilder makes sure that we know she’s still beautiful for it.
Perhaps, at my most ridiculous, I am also lovable.
*
Everyone gets their heart broken, right? Everyone meets a saxophone player or two.
Sometimes, that’s how things are.
Sometimes you end up sitting on the bathroom floor with your face buried in the soft wool of your scarf—because that’s just the way it crumbles, cookie-wise.
*
The Apartment (1960) is a love story between a man and his flat. Or rather, it’s a love story between a man and his own loneliness. His ordinary life packed into four walls. His hopes lifted, then crushed. Hello, my loneliness. This time can we be friends?
Beneath the wit of the love story, the film’s wistful core is sublime. Even as the comedy is wrapped up, the hint of melancholy persists like a milky tendril of sweetness in black coffee. It is a testament to Wilder’s genius that he was able to conjure such a rueful fantasy—to imagine a comedy so wholesome yet so elegiacally lonely.
C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) has lent his apartment out alongside his soul to his superiors. He has a crush on the elevator girl, but she loves someone else. The closest he ever comes to the girl is being mistaken for the one who trifled with her feelings, and being punched in the teeth for it. Curled-up on the floor, a dopey smile on his face, blood dribbling from the corner of his mouth: “Don’t worry, doc. It doesn’t hurt one bit.” In the face of a broken heart, perhaps we are all clowns.
Enter Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), the elevator girl with a cracked powder-mirror in her pocket. With short dark hair and a tomboyish grin, Fran is a walking bundle of trouble full of delightful one-liners: “When you’re in love with a married man, you shouldn’t wear mascara.” In her sardonic humor, we see the charisma of a witty woman who holds her own. Yet she wears her misery, her indignity, with the helplessness of a little girl. The ugliness of heartbreak is the image of Fran sitting before Jeff D. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), the philandering personnel director who pays Fran’s salary while mollifying her with flirtations and hollow promises of marriage: long trails of mascara caked down her cheeks, a hundred-dollar bill pinched between her fingers, a ghastly grin twisted on her mouth. “I laughed so much,” she says, “I’d like to have died.”
Baxter’s misery is laughable. Ridiculous. The same goes for Fran’s childlike sullenness. Baxter savors being known as a scoundrel to his neighbors, knowing that there’s more pride in being a scoundrel than a loner. The same scornful humor trembles in Fran’s sobbing laughter as she confronts Sheldrake: “That’s me. The happy idiot, a million laughs.” The apartment’s dim light illuminates both at their most unkempt, their most forlorn.
The Apartment finds laughter in the bitter moments of self-pity. The laughter seeps like a coffee-stain into the emptiness between words, the desolate spaces that we dare not confront. We see Fran’s hand slowly reach for a bottle of sleeping pills only in the bathroom mirror’s reflection—as if the camera hesitates to confront the image; as if she dares not stop to think. The hollowness lingers in the smallest gesture: Baxter removing the razor from the bathroom sink before allowing Fran to brush her teeth. The film’s most heartbreaking line—Fran, huddled in Baxter’s bathrobe on the bed, biting the words: “I don’t like myself very much, anyways.”
It isn’t easy to love the version of yourself who eats alone at midnight, who has only the mumbling TV for company, who doesn’t know how to say no to a career that gnaws you away in slow bites. Baxter’s despair is quiet. It’s disgustingly mundane. His apartment is a single bubble of light bobbing amidst millions on the dark sea of New York City. It isn’t easy to keep that light on.
Perfume and park benches and streetlights. Disappointment, cigarette smoke. Poisoned humanity and dashed dreams. Wilder’s palette is vivid, erratic. Yet how could we call him cold? Cynical, even? Wilder has shown us the lives of the frivolous, the foolish, the mediocre, and the vulnerable, without superiority and without judgment. That man’s heart is as soft as the pulp of an apple soaked in gin. He has never deprived any buffoon of a happy ending.
Two minutes away from the film’s end, we follow a running Fran, her hair tousled with joy, as she hurtles towards the apartment. She has realized at last that she is loved. As she leaps up the stairs and bursts onto the landing, there is a bang.
For a moment, there is only fear: blind, breathless. We feel Fran’s fear as if it were our own. She bangs on the door, frantic—gasping with relief when Baxter opens it, holding a bubbling bottle of champagne. Light spills out. This is a comedy, after all. But for a few seconds Wilder reminds us just how close we are to a mundane desolation, one that lurks inside each of us: in the bathroom mirror, in the empty apartment before we turn on the lights. What if the door didn’t open? What if? Perhaps every romantic comedy is just a hair’s breadth away from becoming a story about death. From a gunshot, a razor’s edge.
Are you okay? Do you still want to be here? These are such difficult questions. It hurts to ask them, and it hurts to hear the answers. Perhaps it’s easier to strain spaghetti through a tennis racket and eat in silence, playing gin and rummy to waste the hours. It’s easier to hide all sharp things from the bathroom sink. It’s easier to ask: “How’s your knee?” We don’t always have the words for loneliness. This is the world we live in, where we do our best to look away from each other’s scars.
As Fran and Baxter stand together amidst the cardboard boxes, the air is touched not with the sensuality of new love but a tired, bruised tenderness, the warmth of another human being’s presence. They had already seen each other rumpled, lost, undignified. Here are two people who have taken off their masks and witnessed each other’s fragility. The darkness is here, even in the corner of this warm room. It breathes. We are only ever a hair’s breadth away from despair.
At the movie’s ending, Fran sits on a couch with Baxter with a deck of poker cards. I reach out and trace the edge of my thumb along her contour. I feel just how small they are, how laughable and fragile. I’m going to go away from them, now. The credits will start rolling soon. I want to protect them so much. I want to bubble-wrap them in a black-and-white world and make sure that the future—with all its sharp edges—never hurts them.
Take care, I think. Stay soft. Keep laughing. Go far, go safely. Be brave.
Shut up and deal.
*
Here, in the bathroom, I pull the scarf that I was nuzzling away from my face. I stand up and turn on the tap. The cold water splashes tiny rivulets down the mirror, clouding its surface. I see the girl reflected there. She’s laughable. Ridiculous. I almost want to reach out and run a finger along the shape of her cheek, her mouth.
Take care, I want to say. Stay soft. Keep laughing. Go far, go safely. Be brave.
Nobody’s perfect.