Seconds
Give John Frankenheimer’s chilling masterpiece the second life it deserves
While much of American cinema chose to angle their camera eye positively towards the sixties, depicting the acid-wave utopianism of the cultural decade as the new American frontier — with films such as Easy Rider and Two-Lane Blacktop glamorising the spiritual road-trip that began with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters — revolutionary and timely filmmaker John Frankenheimer chose to focus on the more cynical side of the “hippy era”. With what is now known as his “paranoia trilogy”, Frankenheimer picked at the dark side of the swinging sixties like a scab. In The Manchurian Candidate he trained his camera on the commie-bashing hysteria that swept across America post McCarthyism, depicting a narrative that relied heavily on people’s belief in brainwashing and inherent political conspiracy; and in its spiritual sequel, Seven Days in May, he focused on the apocalyptic fear and nuclear angst that was fuelled by the Cold War. But Seconds, the crowning chapter of this inquisitional trilogy, focused on the dark side of the era’s scientific and technological advancements — specifically in plastic surgery — and the false promises of a new life that they brought. Every frame of Frankenheimer’s often-neglected masterpiece is soaked in the sour 1960s malaise that informed its predecessors, yet Seconds is able to cut even deeper into the flesh of the decade’s inherent gloss of superficiality.
Seconds introduces us to Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph), a bored, lifeless salaryman. He is a feeble milquetoast of a man who no longer shares the same bed with his wife. In fact, the most exciting parts of his day are the moments of quiet solitude he has completing a crossword puzzle on the commute home, or the uninterrupted isolation of his study. Despite the obvious dissatisfaction with this drab, quotidian lifestyle, Arthur didn’t think too much of it until he started receiving mysterious phone calls from his dead friend, persuading him to contact a mysterious company who can offer him a brand new life. Soon enough, Arthur is swept along for the wild ride. The Company has provided a fresh cadaver in order to stage his death, and thanks to the latest advancements in plastic surgery, he wakes up not as balding, slightly overweight Arthur Hamilton, but looking like Hollywood adonis Rock Hudson. Now he is modernist painter and Malibu socialite Tony Wilson, and he spends his days painting empty abstractions, walking along the beach, and attending decadent parties.
At first it all appears to be going swimmingly for him. The company not only organises him an alternate life, but a beautiful lady too, who shows an interest in him. He’s no longer a boring businessman, but a rich playboy. But, of course, we know where this is heading. Most of Seconds’ power comes from its construction as a slow-burn nightmare and the horrifying foreboding of its inevitable destination. Reflected in the eyes of those that stare into his soul is the artificial piece of meat that Arthur Hamilton now inhabits, leaving him trapped within this new artificial shell in a state of existential paralysis. It is this newfound perspective that tears apart his new existence, slowly unravelling its new construction in fatalistic certainty.
Ultimately the company’s promise of a new life is as empty as the American Dream that fuels it. Frankenheimer — like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein before him — brings a macabre viscerality to the psyche of the time through disturbed, cringe-inducing surgery scenes shot in inescapably close angles. Perhaps inspired by Georges Franju’s 1960 dreamy exploitation flick, Eyes Without a Face — another film that uses modern horror themes to explore the emptiness of plastic surgery’s promises and the lengths that people will go to for physical identity — Frankenheimer focuses on the gruesome tactility of a scalpel carving through a person’s skin. He claims on the DVD’s commentary that the depiction of Hamilton’s plastic surgery includes several shots of an actual rhinoplasty operation that resulted in the cameraman fainting.
In order to create his horrifying montage of paranoid and warped perspectives, Frankenheimer surrounded himself with some of the industry’s best. The great graphic designer, Saul Bass, master of the title sequence, perhaps best known for his work with Alfred Hitchcock, provides the perfect amuse-bouche for the complex banquet of psychological and physiognomic reconfigurations that are about to take place. Achieved through the simple — yet ingenious — manipulation of aluminium sheets upon which the photography of Bass’s long-time collaborator Art Goodman had been printed, the human face undulates and stretches across the frame. This surreal and eerie effect depicts the human body as if made of putty, able to be reworked and reshaped into any new appearance. It is the human form, reflected in a carnival’s house of mirrors, warped and unnerving in equal measure.
And the film continues in this vein of the carnivalesque. A heavily subjective depiction of a man’s descent into the silicone underworld, this retina-scorching rollercoaster ride leads us down chequered corridors that appear to move and breathe with an organic physicality, traps us within a hysterical fast-cut wine-orgy, and whips us down sterile, hospital corridors, disorientating us with its escalatingly violent and expressionistic camerawork. James Wong Howe’s warped cinematography, where light and shadows are projected from the edges of the frame in abstract trapezoids and sharp angles, is animated by the dark intensity that made him an innovative and fabled camera artist. Shot in gorgeous monochrome, darkness and light is played off against one enough in every carefully constructed frame. The film also relies heavily on claustrophobic close-ups, often with the camera harnessed to the actors, giving the impression of a distorted reality that begins to melt as it reaches the boundary of the frame. Paranoid voyeurism is displayed through fish-eye lens, interrogating Tony Wilson as much as it does the viewer. Mania slowly begins to set in, culminating in a horrifying final sequence, a frenzied montage of extreme wide-angle lens and blown-out faces.
Seconds is perhaps the ultimate cinematic expression of the very prescient idea of plastic surgery — with its implementation of a new substance, silicone, in the 60s making previously impossible surgery possible — and its promise of being able to provide a new life and identity. Frankheimer’s neo-Frankensteinian tale, engages not so much with the advanced science within the film that allows such dramatic transformations — the science is intentionally left vague, reflecting the naivety of people’s almost religious belief in plastic surgery — but more with the societal structures of commerce and consumerism fuelling the warped American Dream that upholds and promotes these twentieth century advancements. The Company itself, and its disturbing, twisted process of production and profit, is a stark metaphor for the superficiality of the sixties. Plastic surgery and its technology promised a new life, a life of one’s dreams and the unrestrained hedonism and decadence that came with it, but ultimately its masks the capitalist cycle that lies underneath. In Seconds, this cycle is given physical form in the conveyor belt of fresh cadavers that the Company has at hand.
Perhaps Frankhenheim’s greatest ability was being able to capture the zeitgeist of an era better than most directors. His masterpiece, and fitting finale to his paranoia trilogy, is a blend of body horror and corrosive sci-fi that came before Cronenberg and Carpenter. And thus, Seconds is the ultimate horror film because it explores the deep need of humanity to transform oneself, and the warped dream-factor and wish-fulfilment that comes with it. It is a wild circus ride; a cinematic exploration of the inherent carnivalesque that exists within humanity, and a nightmarish counterpoint to the decade’s naive utopianism.
