Seconds
1966, directed by John Frankenheimer
Halfway through Seconds, Antiochus Wilson meets Nora Marcus on the Malibu beach, and she runs into the water to ask the ocean “who and what” is the man she just met. Moments later she reveals the ocean’s answer: “It told me to mind my own business.” There’s a lot to be said about these words. As we’ll learn later, her interest in him is false. She’s been planted by the same company that gave aging New York banker Arthur Hamilton his new identity as Wilson. Her words signal to him that she won’t shock him with demands for intimacy or dig into his past, but there’s something more important. The words have a double meaning.
There are many conventional ways to frame the lessons of Seconds. Its director John Frankenheimer stated that it’s about how life is the product of past experiences, of mistakes as well as triumphs. “Your past makes you what you are today. If you take away your past [as Wilson does], you don’t exist as a person.” From another point of view the movie is a nightmarish twist on The Wizard of Oz, a story of someone who comes home after searching for something out of reach. The protagonist is older than Dorothy though, and he comes home too late to resume his earlier life. Seconds works fine on those levels, but describing the movie that way doesn’t capture the specific and relentless comment it makes on the world it was born into – a comment that Nora hints at in the word “business”.
Seconds is a dystopia where commerce reigns supreme, to the exclusion of essential human values. As a banker, Arthur Hamilton is both a full participant in this dystopia and a victim of it. In the waiting room near the end, he tells his college friend Charlie how he had wasted his life chasing “the things I was told were important, that I was supposed to want. Things! Not people or meaning, just things.” The new life he pursues is no less of a mirage than the happiness he had hoped those material things would bring. Up until the end, when he’s strapped into a gurney and realizes what’s happening, he still hopes to achieve this impossible new life.
As a rule it’s the protagonist’s arc that defines a story, but Seconds is exceptional. Arthur Hamilton and his reborn self Antiochus “Tony” Wilson are passive throughout. Variations of his story have been told many times, usually reaching some epiphany or self-awareness, so that his arc is nothing especially new. The opposing force, a shadowy firm known only as “the Company”, makes a stronger impression. Hamilton is a void, a recognizable modern everyman driven by his wants. He requires little characterization, which is one reason the transition between the two actors is so seamless. The Company, on the other hand, is fully characterized. Far from being some generic capitalist bogeyman, it’s a precise dissection of the ways business operates when unfettered by social constraints. Even six decades later, the Company’s practices look disturbingly familiar.
First of all, the Company relies on word-of-mouth marketing. Arthur Hamilton was referred by his college buddy Charlie Evans, and he is told that he’ll continue to receive service only if he refers someone else. While there’s nothing necessarily wrong with a business benefiting from its reputation, what we see here is economic pressure being used to enlist customers to recruit new clients. It corrupts the sacred bond of friendship, coercing people to taint trusted relationships with sales pitches for an enterprise they don’t even work for. Word-of-mouth is also a convenient option for fraudulent businesses that don’t wish to expose their practices to open public scrutiny.
Second, the Company uses lies and psychological tricks to manipulate its customers, forcing them to yield the upper hand in the business-client relationship. Hamilton is drugged and blackmailed into signing the service contract. He is systematically humiliated, made to ride in a windowless meat truck, dressed in a meatpacker’s gown, and ignored when he asks to leave the headquarters building. All these forms of coercion are exaggerated but nonetheless recognizable enactments of the ways businesses, particularly monopolies (think of airlines, banks, or telecom companies), assert control over paying customers who would rightfully expect at least some measure of gratitude for their business.
Third, the Company puts its clients under contract. Contracts are a common feature of commerce which sometimes protect the interests of all involved parties, but too often they’re written with input only from the side with monopolistic power. When contracts are abused, they put the customer in the horrifying position of yielding legalistic power to a private entity. At the moment when Hamilton’s pen touches the signature line, the film cuts from his pen to the surgeon’s scalpel cutting his face, drawing a line of blood in place of ink. It’s a dark riff on the proverbial “signing one’s name in blood”.
Fourth, the Company whitewashes its practices with euphemisms, masking the horror of its injustices. The founder prefers to call his blackmail “a kind of insurance”. A customer about to be murdered is being taken to “the next phase”. Wilson is not allowed to talk about his past, and clients in the waiting room feel compelled to be quiet like schoolchildren under a strict teacher. Everything becomes a ghastly charade. All of this is a correlative to the sickening positivity of marketing talk or to the unspoken enforcement of cheerful conformity in a workplace. It’s a corruption of language.
Fifth, because a corporation is designed to prioritize profits, it almost inevitably corrupts any idealistic intentions its creators may have. The old man confides to Wilson that he had founded the Company to alleviate suffering and enrich people’s lives. Although he was disappointed when it failed at that mission, he persists in justifying his work, still paying lip service to his original ideals while in fact perpetuating a cycle of atrocities.
Lastly, the Company’s business model appeals to its customers’ deepest, most personal desires with the full knowledge that it can never fulfill them. It promises Arthur Hamilton a second youth, and it assigns an employee to him as a lover, but nothing it does for him is sustainable. Inevitably its customers come back dissatisfied, seeking another round like drug addicts chasing their first high. The whole setup is deeply cynical. The Company invades every aspect of its customers’ lives, down to the most intimate and sacred relationship. It’s no accident that Picasso’s 1921 painting of a mother and child hangs in Ruby’s office. Taking charge of its customers’ private lives, the Company assumes the role of a mother. The whole operation is a sick perversion of humanity.
With its total invasion of Arthur Hamilton’s body and mind, alongside the slaughterhouse scene, the surgery, and the violent ending, Seconds has the air of body horror, but there’s not too much in it that’s visually repellent. Rather it leaves a taste of disgust, and this disgust should rightfully be directed at the business practices that the Company illustrates, taking real aspects of mercantilism to fictional extremes. The point is not to demonize commerce but to show why the power of commercial interests must be limited. If someone like Arthur Hamilton, a prospective bank president, can be destroyed by runaway capitalism, imagine what it could do to someone of lesser means.
Frankenheimer may have put undue emphasis on Hamilton’s rejection of his past when he commented on the meaning of Seconds, but as a rule we should not look to the author of a work to explain it. The lesson he draws is fair enough, but it’s handled better in Antonioni’s Red Desert. Frankenheimer must have been aware, though, of the movie’s critique of unrestrained capitalism. His earlier film The Manchurian Candidate shows an antipathy to totalitarianism, and he was a friend of the liberal politician Robert F. Kennedy. If nothing else, the casting betrays a sympathy for a leftist view of economics, using at least four actors who had been blacklisted for real or suspected sympathies with the Communist Party: John Randolph (Arthur Hamilton), Will Geer (the Company’s founder), Jeff Corey (Mr. Ruby), and Nedrick Young (Henry Bushman, a guest at the Malibu house party).
All the same, we needn’t go to great lengths to separate the movie’s negative argument (against what the Company represents) from its positive argument (for holding onto accumulated experience). The two ideas come together in the operating room at the end, at the presumptive moment of Hamilton’s death, when he seems to remember a moment with his daughter on a beach. After striving in vain to leave his past behind, he finally holds onto a treasured piece of his past, while the picture of that happy moment also stands in opposition to the inhumanity that has dominated Hamilton’s world.
CONNECTIONS:
The Wizard of Oz – Protagonist pursues a dream that’s out of reach and then returns home
Vertigo – Boy in a man’s body / old man in a young man’s body; Saul Bass opening titles with focus on the eye and mouth; woman addresses the protagonist as his “mother” or “mama”; college friend initiates a nefarious plot
The Red Desert – Idea that a person’s life is the result of all past experiences
The Passenger – A man embarks on a new identity after a faked death but ends up disappointed
Veronika Voss – Murderous businesspersons selling impossible hopes in exchange for victims’ estates
Blade Runner – Dystopia ruled by private enterprise in the virtual absence of government
The Cook the Thief His Wife and Her Lover – Dystopia ruled by private enterprise in the virtual absence of government
Matchstick Men – Argument that the marketing and selling of an illusory better life is a kind of crime
Get Out – Surgery gives old people new life in a young body