Joe's Apartment (aka Joe's Apt.) is a 3:20 minute short directed by John Payson that debuted on MTV in 1992 and was later included on the 1996 VHS release, I Want My MTV. It offers a small glimpse into the offbeat world of Joe (Mark Rosenthal), a twentysomething New Yorker who shares his apartment with legions of talking, singing cockroaches. Joe is remarkably tolerant of his six-legged roomers, who in return do their best to support Joe through his daily challenges - all the same, living with a roach infestation (especially roaches who can answer you back) does tend put a cramp in one's lifestyle. Here, we see what happens when Joe brings home his first date in months (a nameless girl played by Arija Bareikis) and the roaches get a little too carried away in trying to make their evening enchanted. Joe's date eventually gets wise to the apartment's bug problem and scarpers, leaving the crestfallen Joe to be consoled by the roaches, who assure him that, while love might come and go, the one thing he can always be sure of in life is being surrounded by roach-infested walls.
The cockroach is yet another creature that blurs the presumed boundaries between domesticity and wilderness through its insistence on moving in a little too close for human comfort, and its public image has been molded accordingly. Insects in general tend to net very little in the way of human affection, and the roach ranks squarely toward the bottom of that largely unloved class - it is, nevertheless, a creature that warrants respect for the reason outlined in the short's introductory number: "We've been around for a hundred million years, and we'll be here long after you." And Joe's Apt. wasn't even the first animated film to attempt to show a more identifiable side to the ineradicable crawlers. The basic concept of Joe's Apt. bares some resemblance to the 1987 Japanese film Twilight of The Cockroaches, directed by Hiroaki Yoshida, which also centres around a man who allows a community of roaches to run amok around his apartment, although in his case more out of apathy than affinity. Yoshida's film carries bleaker, more apocalyptic overtones than Payson's - the roaches revere their human compatriot as a benevolent overlord, and are unable to comprehend their situation when his new girlfriend moves in and forces him to tidy up his act, which includes unleashing a whole truckload of insecticide onto their erstwhile utopia. The opposing classes are represented through a blend of live action and animation - the cockroaches are depicted as cartoon figures, anthropomorphised in a style reminiscent of the Fleischer brothers' 1941 film Mr Bug Goes To Town, and juxtaposed with three-dimensional backgrounds a la the characters in When The Wind Blows (1986). The humans, meanwhile, are flesh and blood actors, but are typically framed at such dark, monstrous angles as to ensure that our sympathies stay firmly aligned with the roaches. Payson too has his audience see the world primarily from the perspective of the roaches, starting from the opening sequence where we crawl up several flights of stairs with a pair of antennae spread out in front of us, although he forgoes the degree of visual anthropomorphism favoured by Yoshida. Gift of the gab aside, these creatures very much clock as roaches, the film's extensive insect action being conveyed through stop motion animation (either with model roaches or, where the bugs are invisible, various rustling household items) and, in some instances, actual live roaches. The film benefits from the array of fast cuts from numerous slanted angles, which keeps things moving at a lively pace and establishes the roaches as an omnipresent chaos against whom Joe, if he weren't such an obliging host, would be effectively powerless. The overall look is cheap, but charming.
Joe's Apt. plays like a humorous reimagining of the conflict in Twilight of The Cockroaches, in which the barriers of communication between man and roach have been completely obliterated and the two species co-exist with an obverse casualness. Once again, human sexuality proves to be the snake in the cockroaches' Eden, with Joe's eagerness to impress his date conflicting with his willingness to tolerate the roaches, although this is something to which the roaches seem gleefully oblivious. Watching the short as a companion piece to Yoshida's film, you can pick up on the implicit (if unconscious) rivalry between Joe's date and the roaches for Joe's affections, although it seems a stretch to conclude that the roaches' interference amounts to deliberate sabotage. The roaches are, fundamentally, innocents (even when their well-meaning imposition crosses over into full-on voyeurism, and we get to the short's most risqué joke - one of the roaches attempting to slip Joe a condom - there's a guilelessness about them), and this innocence keeps them disarming, even when it's hard to not also empathise with Joe's obvious dissatisfaction with the closing arrangement - a final contrast that, for the short's ostensibly upbeat ending, points back to the conflicting perspectives in Twilight of The Cockroaches, and how it ultimately resulted in tragedy.
Joe's Apt. received a full-blown Hollywood makeover in 1996, with Payson once again in the director's seat. The resulting feature isn't particularly well-remembered today, but it has significance for being not only MTV's first foray into theatrical film-making, but that of the now-defunct Blue Sky Studios, who became a popular CG effects house after their (legitimately excellent) work in animating the roaches. Sadly, Blue Sky seem to be the only party who actually benefited from their involvement in Joe's - Payson never directed another theatrical feature (although he did find further directorial work in television), and MTV were stuck with a deficit that was not offset until the success of Beavis and Butt-Head Do America later that same year. Joe's failure to find an audience does not surprise me - the set-up is not one that lends itself to elaboration. The events of the original short are recreated more-or-less faithfully, but the story has to be expanded to accommodate an additional 77 minutes' worth of material. So Joe (now played by Jerry O'Connell) and his date (Megan Ward) each get drawn-out backstories, we get to see how Joe acquires the apartment and comes to grips with the improbable assortment of squatters therein, and because the numerous misunderstandings between the human and cockroach factions aren't conflict enough, there's also a villain in the form of a corrupt senator who wants to tear down the apartment block and build a maximum security prison. Even with all that added detail, it's still a thin, thin premise, so the film throws in further padding involving performance artists with questionable monikers and urinal cakes (the feature film also has a greater penchant for gross-out humor than its predecessor, which was only ever going to nauseate viewers who really couldn't stand roaches to begin with).
I think it's fair to say that Joe's Apt. is the kind of scenario in which less is definitely more - the absurdity of the piece works to its favour if we're dropped directly in the middle of it, with minimal explanation. In the original short, it's not altogether clear whether these are meant to be extraordinarily talented cockroaches, or if Joe is some kind of cockroach whisperer (the feature film implies that it's the former...to my chagrin, as I would have preferred to think the latter). But in either case, it's enough for us to presume that Joe has been exposed to his roach-infested quarters for long enough that he's managed to make his peace with it. The smartest gags in the original short are the most implicit - Joe regards living with roaches as such an inescapable fact of life that his relationship with them has become totally familiar. He nonchalantly addresses them as he would any human roomie, making the standard roomie request that they clear out in preparation for the date he's planning to bring home tonight (with the more unusual detail that he bribes them by tossing raw steak onto the floor). At the same time, it's suggested that the apparent harmony between Joe and the roaches is a somewhat uneasy one - the short ends on a slightly troubling note that, while understated, casts doubt on the long-term sustainability of this interspecies "friendship". Like their counterparts in Yoshida's film, the roaches adore Joe and are confident that he will continue to provide for them, while Joe's final reaction indicates that, despite his initial stoicism, he privately yearns for something better. We thus round out with an ironic contrast between the purity of the roaches' intentions and their unwitting status as symbols of Joe's entrapment in a world of squalor and isolation (at least as far as his own species is concerned).
All of this goes entirely unspoken in the short, but the feature adaptation is required to develop this latent conflict into a more dramatic climax, one that echoes the outright warfare of Yoshida's picture and involves the use of insecticides on BOTH sides. But I can't help but feel that Joe's gesture of resignation at the end of the short carries way more potency. Unlike his movie counterpart, this Joe knows that any declaration of war on his part would be totally futile - the battle has already been won.
