Seconds
College is a time for experimentation. When I experimented, it was with movies. I challenged myself a lot in those five years, and it’s only gone into stranger directions in the years since. I was 19, and in my freshman year, when I went to go see John Frankenheimer’s “Seconds” at the University theatre. I was familiar with the director’s name because of- shudder- “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” and star Rock Hudson from the Doris Day romantic comedies I had seen with my mother. I was not ready for “Seconds.” A lifetime later, I finally am.
“Seconds” is one of the most surreal movies I think any major studio has ever put out. This was a Paramount release, four years after Frankenheimer made his paranoid masterpiece in “The Manchurian Candidate.” Even in the ’60s, I cannot imagine a large audience connecting with this striking vision. To truly appreciate it, it helps to have some living, some struggles, some anxiety coming into the experience with you. I had some of that when I watched it in 1996, and the film certainly left an impression (I don’t think I’d seen it since 1996, though I’ve had the Criterion release for many years), but this is a film more resonate when you’re middle-aged, and can connect with that feeling of uncertainty about the direction your life the main character experiences here. That is what I did not really get out of the movie as a college student. It is crystal clear watching it now.
I forgot how far into “Seconds” it is when we first see Rock Hudson. The film begins with Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph), a banker who is met on the train home with a mysterious man who hands him an address. When he gets home, we sense a lack of comfort between Arthur and his wife, and not just because of the curiosity he feels about the address he received earlier, or a phone call he has gotten at home from a former tennis partner he thought was dead. There’s something genuinely not happy about his life. The next day, he leaves from work to the address he was given, and he’s taken to a building where he starts down a wormhole to another life, that of becoming a painter named Antiochus Wilson, and looking like Rock Hudson, in a community of other people like him who have been afforded the chance for a new life, the one they always wanted.
The thing that left such an impression on me in 1996 was the weird style of the film, not the thematic implications of the screenplay, adapted from a novel by David Ely, by Lewis John Carlino. The titles by the legendary Saul Bass, which have distorted images of a human face, put you in a sense of uncertainty almost immediately, especially when coupled by a Jerry Goldsmith score that vibrates with anxiety and suspense. Bass’s titles set up the unusual visual style Frankenheimer deploys throughout the rest of his film with the legendary cinematographer James Wong Howe. That they shot the film in black-and-white is an important part of why “Seconds” works so well; the whole idea in the film doesn’t feel real enough to be seen in color. One of the things they do with the camera is use a rig to have it on their actors as they are walking, giving us the perspective of those characters on a more personal, visceral level. It’s a technique you’ll recognize from many a Spike Lee joint, and probably inspired Darren Aronofsky’s “Requiem for a Dream,” and the way it’s used here, it adds to the sense of paranoia in Arthur/Antiochus’s story, both in the life he is leaving behind, and the life he’s being thrust into. Even during something like a wine-making party in the middle of the film, or a party Antiochus hosts after he has finally seemed to acclimate to his life, there’s something unsettling we feel in this life. He’s not comfortable, leading to a finale as sinister as any the ’60s came up with.
In a way, “Seconds” would make a fascinating companion piece with Mike Nichols’s “The Graduate,” which came out a year later. That sounds like a strange double feature, but if you think about the films on a thematic level, it makes all sorts of sense. “The Graduate” has a college student who is bombarded with adults telling him what type of life he needs to go after to be successful (and funnily enough, Murray Hamilton- the mayor in “Jaws”- plays a key role in both films). Now consider “Seconds.” At its heart, it is about a middle-aged man who, after going after the life he was told would give him happiness and stability, is afforded the chance to live a life he always wanted. The dark irony of “Seconds” is how unhappy Antiochus is in THAT life (not even looking like Rock Hudson can equate to happiness, and the way Hudson plays the role is a fascinating study in breaking down one’s own persona); by the end, he has returned to the company that gave him his second chance, and hopes to try again because he realized just how little control he had over that second chance. Free will is eliminated from his equation, and he hopes he can reclaim it, like Benjamin Braddock did at the end of “The Graduate.” Unfortunately, like many people figure out when they get to that point in their life, it’s not as simple as taking back our free will when we’ve spent so much time in the system. The outside world won’t make it easy, especially if we take what we’ve been given for granted. As someone whose been in the system for almost as long as I was old when I first watched “Seconds,” and who’s long hoped to break away from that system, I understand that more than I did a lifetime ago.
