Seconds

(John Frankenheimer, USA, 1966)

Seconds is a film that has attracted (even from its director) broad, general and ultimately unhelpful theme-labels: alienation, consumer culture, mid-life crisis, the soulless materialism of the modern world, a cult of Eternal Youth, suburbia, the Lonely Crowd, the American Dream/Nightmare …

If not this theme-bag, it calls up a mood-board – paranoia, dread, hallucination, unease – onto which (it is implied or assumed) director John Frankenheimer threw a bunch of fancy, showy, very mid 1960s techniques and tricks: everything from wide-angle lenses to Jerry Goldsmith’s strident, disquietingly unresolved musical harmonics.

For the director himself (who died 2002), what Seconds (and indeed his entire œuvre) was “all about” was “the individual trying to find himself in society and trying to maintain his individuality in a mechanised world” – the “indomitability of the human spirit” expressed in a “fight against regimentation”. However, in the same breath, his general statement of life philosophy – “You have to live your life the way it is. You can change it but you can’t change who you are or what you’ve done” – raises the complications posed to that dream of a Sovereign Self, complications which Seconds so devastatingly dramatises.

As Jean-Pierre Coursodon noted in the early 1980s, Frankenheimer’s films tend to restate “once more what his films had been stating for years: the fundamental inadequacy of the individual in his or any other environment” (my emphasis). All – past memories, present bromides, future hopes – is illusion, as Seconds so often reminds us.

More interesting (and to the point) than affixing such theme or mood tags is to grasp the film’s intricate meshing of form to content. More than the Dissatisfied Self, Seconds probes what it is to be ill at ease in one’s own skin. Everything that is startlingly material about Seconds starts from there.

If there’s any movie that shows how cinema actively figures the human body – how it explores, reshapes, re-invents it – it’s Seconds. The degree of inventiveness on this level, from shot to shot and moment to moment, is astounding. From what distance to shoot a body (always either up too close or back too far), in what degree of light or darkness, in which particular relation to other bodies, in which particular regime of visibility, constituted in what kind of montage of shots, how actors are to perform with their trunk and limbs … Frankenheimer truly works all the possibilities, and not just for the sake of some fleeting surface jazziness.

A specific cut is indelible, and endlessly suggestive: from the pen that a hand is about to put to a page, to the first surgical excision a blade makes in a body on the operating table … Tools for body writing, as Michel de Certeau once mused.

Just look at the opening scene (after Saul Bass’ equally inventive credit sequence, entirely coherent in its experimentation with everything that follows it – “We broke apart, distorted and reconstituted the human face to symbolically set the stage for what was to come”): a camera harnessed to a body that is deliberately deframed in a disconcerting way, as this figure moves through a crowded train station. The ‘character’ scarcely exists, and won’t be seen again in the story: he’s merely the vehicle that inserts an address (handwritten on a piece of paper) into the hand of the bewildered Everyman protagonist, Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph).

Then it’s into the cold domestic-marital situation of Arthur and Emily (Frances Reid) – who later underlines, in pained dialogue, the evident non-communication and lack of sexual intimacy (she attempts it, in vain) that characterise their stale union. More arresting than the general ambience of this suburban (Scarsdale) household, however, is how Frankenheimer and brilliant cinematographer James Wong Howe keep subdividing and exaggerating the bodily details: sweat from pores, lighting on faces that is too bright or too dark (and often switching its lighting scheme from cut to cut on the same face in variously angled close-ups), people flat on their backs in bed and staring vacantly into the blank off-space above them as they engage in non-reciprocal conversation (Chantal Akerman could have been inspired by this!).

The play of elements here is summed up in an earlier montage set during a train ride: the shots flick between a view forward and a view backward (as if from facing seats, although it’s only a single character’s POV), in violation of every filmmaking manual’s law of ‘maintaining consistent screen direction’.

Is this just stylistic exaggeration, fussy ornamentation? I side with Jean-Baptiste Thoret’s version, when he grasps (in his book 26 Seconds) that, in the face of traumatic American realities of the ‘60s such as the Kennedy assassination – and the felt obligation to somehow represent them – “the codes are cracking” here in Seconds and some related works of the same time and place, like Arthur Penn’s Mickey One (1965). And those cracks start with the scarred, wrinkled skin of the human creature.

Seconds is a forceful film, inaugurating a type of go-for-broke movie that has become modish in our time: relentless, often cyclical, ‘in your face’, shocking, ‘unsubtle’, the camera glued to bodies that lurch forward or strive to break the frame rectangle, ‘delirious’, slipping from mundanity to dream-vision in a thunderingly amplified heartbeat, with an emphasis on the grotesque … Today, via the transition-point of Żulawski’s Possession (1981), that’s the cinema of Gaspar Noé, Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani, or Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024) – antecedents that owe a great deal to Frankenheimer’s breakthrough/breakdown.

Back to the premise and its elementary unfolding (it’s notable that so many criticised the film in its day for having a “slight”, anecdotal screenplay – which is actually very faithful to a certain, slender literary form of science-fiction, certainly as practiced by Seconds’ source novelist, David Ely). Randolph is the modern Babbitt figure (derived from Sinclair Lewis’ 1922 novel) familiar from much contemporary American film, fiction and theatre – and a clear precursor to the retroactive Mad Men malaise of the 2000s. A banker whose daughter has grown up and left the nest, whose only daily dream is of his (unseen) boat, Randolph has, effectively, nothing – and his niggling sense of spiritual emptiness, of being stuck in a perpetual rut, is precisely what the Old Man, an unnerving composite of Will Rogers, Mark Twain and Colonel Sanders (superbly incarnated by Will Geer, later of The Waltons prime-Americana fame), will relentlessly expose in his presence. (The monologue is superbly crafted by Lewis John Carlino – who, apparently, disapproved of the deliberately overwrought style that Frankenheimer brought to the project, ideally preferring a low-key accumulation of quietly Kafkaesque, hyperreal detail. The screenwriter was wrong!)

In this culture, any hope for happiness hinges solely on the possibility of a Second Chance: rebirth, a New Self, with all murky, drab traces of the past erased. In American culture specifically, this tradition runs from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) right through to TV series including Mad Men and Scorsese-Jagger’s short-lived Vinyl (2016). Seconds literalises the idea: in your next life here on earth, you become Rock Hudson – who fills this part terrifically. (Although Frankenheimer seemed to want to downplay the suggestion, there is an enormously rich queer thread in this story – see Mark Rappaport’s Rock Hudson’s Home Movies [1992] and an essay by Rebecca Bell-Metereau – that ranges from the scenes of male ‘cruising’, through a House of Cards-style buddy-buddy backstory, to the phobia of touching women and solemn, coded talk of an ‘unturned key’ – not to mention a gruesome prophecy of the actor’s AIDS-related death in 1985.)

Let’s note, in passing, the dexterity with which Seconds flies over what some commentators regard as rank ‘implausibilities’ of plot. (Ho hum.) By concentrating on the face and its cosmetic surgery during the transformation-operation, the film deftly avoids the larger, logical question of the whole body: is a little toning-up exercise all it takes to transform old Wilson into the more youthful, virile Hudson? Frankenheimer emphasises the ‘magical thinking’ aspect of the premise (as much SF writing does), and thus zooms past such niggling matters. It’s part of what he takes from Hitchcock, preparing the ground for De Palma and other narrative-quick-change masters.

Seconds wears its references on its sleeve: Orson Welles’ The Trial (1962), German Expressionist Caligarism (the distorted set design of the hallucination-intoxication rape scene – although, we are subsequently assured, nothing bad really happened there!), Carol Reed, Hitchcock, George Stevens and William Wyler for the mise en scène moves … Its line of subsequent influence is also clear: Roman Polanski’s The Tenant (1976), in particular, would seem to spring directly from Frankenheimer’s stark image of a completely bandaged man with a gaping black-hole for a mouth. As already noted, Seconds has subsequently been mulched as prime referent into the ‘cinema of excess’ intertextual soup of The Substance – in which even the memorable detail of multiple, dividing eyeballs within a socket comes straight from Saul Bass’ opening distortions.

So, what life does Arthur get once he transitions into Antiochus? Malibu affluence (the house was the director’s own: apparently, according to Bertrand Tavernier, he liked to show off his showbiz/ex-Wonder Boy lifestyle), too much free time, a pathetic stab at painting. A relationship (with Salome Jens as Nora) is, unbeknownst to him, stage-managed, appropriately kicking off in a setting that recalls the tortured-romantic scenes of Jean Renoir’s The Woman on the Beach (1947). Yet when the camera moves in on the kissing and touching between the members of this Perfect Couple, the body-images are no less disturbing than in the opening scenes … And, ultimately, Arthur’s stab at a Third Chance will lead only to his body being prepared for a handy garbage-pile of corpses (the historic trauma of the Holocaust breaks the surface here).

In his 1963 essay “Preface to Transgression”, Michel Foucault marked a historic moment in philosophy (and Western culture in general) that is close to Seconds’ sense of social-personal crack-up: while the post-Nietzschean acceptance of God’s Death inaugurated a salutary unleashing of an inner, sovereign experience for the Self – and thus, every kind of limit-transgression becomes possible and realisable – we must nonetheless now face “the emptiness of those excesses where everything is spent and found wanting”.

Is there any better way to describe Antiochus Wilson’s fast bum-out on the playing field of Dionysius, confronting his own pathetic failure to instantly ‘become’ the artist he apparently once dreamed of being, taking the Road of Excess (booze, wine-vat orgy) so far and so badly that he slips into ‘naughty boy’ disclosures of his past before an audience of (as we come to realise) fellow Seconds? (Take note: they are all men, a striking inversion of the societal Beauty Myth thought only or mainly to have women in its grip.)

In fact, the Esalen-modeled milieu of ‘human potentials’ growth (also depicted and duly satirised in Paul Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice [1969]) proves to be just as rigid (and maybe even more so) in its conformity than the suburbia our wan hero left behind: the horror of being exactly like every other self and body is even clearer and more determining when in the nude! The creepy, invasive, aquarium-like, entirely physical fashion in which this group-grope proceeds ends up recalling the “gooble gobble one of us” wedding spectacle in Tod Browning’s classic Freaks (1932).

For me, the most remarkable image of the film arose from the shredding of a realised but unused scene: Antiochus, at some point, made it to a beach for a reunion with the young grandchild from his previous life. Now, in the montage, it’s the last thing that he ‘sees’ in his mind’s eye, as his existence goes down the drain. Unmoored in this way, however, the distant image – warped and blended back, in its last moments, into Bass’ special effects procedures – refers to nothing stable or real; it’s just another projection in the long line of such simulacra we have seen throughout.

It is an intriguing (and exasperating) business to look back, in the 21st century, on some of the bad crits that Seconds received in its day, even from the best critics. Few of them were able to see or grasp what was really striking and innovative in it. Stephen Farber (still active at The Hollywood Reporter and elsewhere in 2024), in an essentially positive Film Quarterly review of 1967, sourly regarded Bass’ contribution in the same way later critics automatically decried woozy, handheld camerawork in the Lars von Trier or Dardennes vein: “A word of caution: The titles are played against Saul Bass’ design of monstrous distortions of eyes, noses, mouths ears – a crude vulgarisation of all that the movie examines with subtlety and intelligence. It would be smart to arrive two minutes late.” No, it wouldn’t.

When Jean-André Fieschi (whose work I revere) caught the film at Cannes in May 1966, he approached the (to him) non-auteur Frankenheimer as the “laborious illustrator” of good or bad script material, and Seconds (French release title L’Operation diabolique!) as merely a genial narrative “anecdote” (thin script, once again) which is “amplified here and there by some outrageous effects” that frequently amount to “lamentable redundancies” (Cahiers du cinéma, no. 179, June 1966, p. 43). Fieschi concludes by grouping it (in a comparative gesture that can seem odd to us today, but surely made good sense to him at the time) with two tricky, stylish thrillers, Edward Dmytryk’s Mirage (1965) and Philip Dunne’s Blindfold (1966) – all of them (to him) “scriptwriters’ films” which he sarcastically describes as populist “open works” because their paucity of form paradoxically leads to an unintended freeing of the spectator’s imagination!

Retrospective accounts sometimes fare no better with Frankenheimer; the spectre of the director’s prodigious TV years looms large over the evaluation as a ‘problem’, just as it does for contemporaries including Sidney Lumet, Martin Ritt and Robert Mulligan (Jacques Lourcelles also throws into that grouping Ralph Nelson and Alan Pakula) – hence the non-auteur status. Richard Corliss drives in this nail during his career survey for Roud’s 1980 Critical Dictionary: there, poor John is called everything from a “talented journeyman”, “artisan” and “craftsman” to a “technocrat”, “time-and-motion specialist” (!) and “super automaton” (!!) – thereby aligned with the Babbitt-banker type that Arthur represents in Seconds. Filmmakers, beware the interpretive power of self-allegory, witting or unwitting!

In fact, however, that type of allegorical reading can be today turned around to the distinct advantage of Seconds: in a cast that includes not a few performers seriously disadvantaged, once upon a time, by the Hollywood Blacklist (Randolph, Geer, Corey – all given a second chance by their very liberal-minded director), the business of ‘naming names’ becomes central to the ultimate, conspiratorial machinations of the Seconds ‘studio’ … and don’t all those harsh, burning lights of the operating room resemble the overbearing equipment of the cinema-producing Apparatus? Not to mention all the scenes, identities and illusions fabricated along the way …

In terms of Frankenheimer’s place in cinema history, Gérard Legrand comments tartly that his “significance as a symptom is undeniable” – ouch, to be reduced to that! For Stephen Bowie in Senses of Cinema he becomes, somewhat more kindly, a “key transitional figure” of USA cinema between the professionals (Mann, Boetticher) and lyricists (Ray, Fuller) of the ‘50s and the loose-limbed character-painters of the ‘70s (Altman, Cassavetes) – but, as yet, far from Pomerance & Palmer’s redemptive estimation of him (in the 2011 anthology A Little Solitaire) as “Hollywood’s most under-appreciated director”.

We do well to remember that, shortly before his death, Frankenheimer articulated this bittersweet pearl of wisdom to then-downhearted journalist-screenwriter Alex Simon: “If it makes you feel any better, I directed The Manchurian Candidate [1962], and I still need a break”. Seconds captures (again, allegorically) that sense of being ultimately dependent on a system which, in its deepest internal logic, exists to screw you over and throw you out like a piece of trash. Stars, directors, studio executives and rank-and-file staff alike all know this logic – the logic of society itself. ‘Getting a break’ is always the dream of a renewed chance – and the inevitability of another career crucifixion.

The pressure this system creates upon every individual player proceeds from both inside and outside the body simultaneously – and it is this unending agony which Seconds shows, and makes us feel, so well.

This text summarises and updates points made in my feature-length audio commentary for the Masters of Cinema DVD release of Seconds in 2015.

MORE Frankenheimer: Ronin, The Island of Dr. Moreau

© Adrian Martin August 2015 / 29 & 30 September 2024