In the Flesh: Seconds

John Frankenheimer’s sly, audacious Seconds begins its game of bait and switch the moment you read its title. More, you think. Yes, but of the same. In the time-tested words of Buckaroo Banzai, “Wherever you go, there you are.” That’s the conflict at the crux of the film: the paradoxical desire to escape the self. Frankenheimer illustrates his point with crushingly intimate and yet totally alienated camerawork, clinging like a second skin to hapless banker Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) as the man wanders like a revenant through his quiet suburban life. We’re close enough to see Hamilton’s flop sweat and nervous tics, so close that from our alienating low angle he fills the screen, the world around him just random slashes of abstract shapes and shades. During distance shots we’re presented either with Hamilton’s slumped back and shoulders or intense visual distortions, as during the Last Year at Marienbad-inspired “dream” sequence.

For a moment, after his fantastical surgical transformation into Antiochus “Tony” Wilson (Rock Hudson), the camera retreats. We watch in much more conventional cinematic language as he learns to use his new body — toning unfamiliar muscles, reacquainting himself with speech and fine motor skills. But as Hamilton is reborn, he awakens slowly to the realization that he hasn’t gotten away from anything. The camera creeps in close again. He’s only changed the figurative wallpaper. The knowledge that Hudson, a gay man, was at the time closeted in the public eye textures his already engrossing performance with a quiet but all-consuming sense of anxiety. His wife Emily (Frances Reed) speaks frankly of the death of their marriage’s physical intimacy, his slow pulling away from her over the years, his long silences and emotional distance. Even the Company’s blackmail tactics recall compulsory heterosexuality. The parallels practically write themselves. How many men struggled like Arthur did through decades of playing pretend with their teeth gritted, hearts slowly shriveling away to nothing in their breasts?

The old man (Will Geer, grandpa Walton himself) can spin his mysterious Company’s product however he likes, as a cure for emptiness, a bulwark against the concept of unhappiness itself, but in his choices of front (a laundry, a meat packing plant) are hints of its true nature. He is in the business of manufacturing desire, of feeding demand he creates and enforces artificially, lording over a revolving door of misery which exists by his own admission solely to feed itself. “You can’t imagine the financial burden,” he laments, referring to the company’s size by the time he found out the services it offered didn’t work. He’s selling a protracted and exhausting form of suicide, a product in denial at every step.  When you run from consciousness, from experience of life, what your subconscious mind desires is not freedom, or not purely freedom, but obliteration.