I could probably make this post very quick and easy on myself, since a few friends and I already did a fairly comprehensive job covering Seconds when we discussed it last summer on an episode of the Criterion Cast. It was a good conversation that marked the relaunch of the "main episodes" series with Scott Nye as the new host and me settling in as the de facto cohost. I recommend that you give it a listen, since we talk about a lot of aspects to the film that I don't plan to cover here.
But just posting a link to the podcast and leaving it at that would feel like cheating to me, so I've taken it upon myself to give Seconds another look, and I'm glad that I did. It's a marvelously creepy and unsettling probe into a complex of deep-seated anxieties that presumably afflict a lot of men like me - settling into middle age, creatures of habit, comfortably established in a career and situation in life that ensures that our basic needs are more than adequately met, but aware (at least in our more lucid moments) of just how fragile, tenuous and in some ways illusory our apparent achievement of success and security really is. If nothing else, the ravages of time don't merely threaten to chip away at everything we have or might still hope to accomplish - that inexorable force of decay and transition assures us with evidence all around us that the clock is ticking, and that the bottom very well might drop out much more suddenly and unexpectedly than we dare to contemplate. If given a realistic and genuine chance to hit the reset button, to at least jump back to a point in life where we look and feel 10 to 15 years younger, and freed up from some of the baggage and limitations that we've been forced to deal with due to our own choices and the expectations of others, how many of us would not at least give the offer some serious consideration?
Of course, the terms of such a deal would include turning our backs on family, friends and other relationships developed over the course of many years, as well as a renunciation of so many little pleasures and habits that define us. They're the details and connections that define us, that are easily taken for granted, but to which we will cling tenaciously once we recognize the peril. And setting aside the daunting physical obstacles that make it so difficult to pull off the kind of wholesale identity swap we see take place in Seconds, I think that the majority of us are grounded and content enough to stay with the hand that life has dealt us, however much we might enjoy the brief luxury of imagining the possibilities of being able to start all over with a physique, a reputation and a clean slate custom tailored to our specific recommendations.
But that's not the case with Arthur Hamilton, a pudgy financial executive locked into a stale marriage, a stagnant, unadventurous prosperity and a social circle that leaves him exhausted with boredom. It's clear to him as he looks at his current condition that his best days are behind him, that it's all ruin and downhill slide from this point forward. But when a persistent voice from his past - claiming to be an old friend who's been dead for a few years - keeps intruding on his consciousness with troublesome phone calls, and finally breaks through with evidence that Hamilton must take seriously, the banker is jolted out of his complacency, forced to examine the bizarre offer that I've summarized above.
A diversion from his normal commuter circuit brings Hamilton into the offices of a strange business enterprise, via a circuitous route through grimy districts freighted with ominous foreshadowing - a dry cleaner's steam press that instantly smooths out the wrinkles, a slaughterhouse assembly line that processes dozens of huge slabs of beef with grim efficiency. It's not the kind of white-collar environment of steel and granite skyscrapers or the genteel recreational spaces that constitute Hamilton's usual circuit. But somehow through all the twists and turns of a mysterious journey, he winds up in a spot not all that unfamiliar to him, sitting across from a desk, listening to a salesman make his pitch - but in circumstances that make his head spin. He's apparently come under the influence of some kind of hallucinogen. A dim memory of a disturbing encounter with a scantily dressed, terrified woman... he approached her... he embraced her as she laid on a bed... she screamed... was that him? Or just a dream? What exactly happened? and when was that?
Here he is, now in this office, talking to men in suits. They're asking him probing, personal questions, each taking a different approach. One offers him food, a particularly tasty and crisp dish of fried chicken that the rep goes on to nibble at after Hamilton nervously declines. He's rattling off the innovations and benefits of this new technological breakthrough with a brisk confidence that assumes Hamilton understands and is keeping up with the stream of assertions. Once that approach fails to seal the bargain, a kindly paternalistic old gent steps in, skillfully peeling back Hamilton's armor of doubt, suspicion and denial, asking him to sign on to a deal, a very big deal. The businessman recognizes that he's being exposed, but he's powerless to stop the process. Just what the hell is going on?
In the midst of all this disorientation, this confusing assault of emotional pressures, blurred perceptions and untrustworthy memories, Arthur Hamilton now has a decision to make. He can make a simple agreement, consent to easy terms, lend his signature to a tidy one-page contract, and embark on the adventure of a lifetime... a second lifetime... an opportunity of rare distinction, as only a select few are even given the chance to accept or reject such an offer - and most people in the world don't even know that such a possibility even exists! There's only one catch though, and it's not even as painful as the irrevocable separation that he has to endure from his wife, friends and family. Beyond all that, he has to own up to the fact that his life to this point has been a failure - an empty, pointless charade that has only left him hollow, unfulfilled and without purpose.
Despite all the wonderful, spellbinding weirdness and vivid paranoia that follows in the Rock Hudson-as-Antiochus Wilson half of the film, this is the central crisis of Seconds, that moment of profoundly stark and unblinking appraisal in which Hamilton comes to grip with the loss of his self-respect and his lack of a compelling reason to continue on in the life he's constructed for himself. I'm not really sure if John Frankenheimer's brilliant examination of bourgeois ennui and the deep struggle to find a solution was intended to be regarded as a "message" movie, but it's that element which stood out to me the most urgently in this recent revisit: the implication that no matter how precisely engineered, flawlessly executed or plausibly convincing the exterior framework may be, it can only disguise the internal rot for a finite amount of time. Eventually the facade will break down. The ugliness will rise back up to the surface, and with a vengeance, as the final act, in which Tony Wilson realizes how much he had squandered in both of his lives, and the startling conclusion, in which he's reduced to so many spare parts, of Seconds so indelibly demonstrate.
Next: Persona