The tagline for John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966) is as follows: “What Are Seconds?… The Answer May Be Too Terrifying For Words!” We’re being set up for a dose of cold war paranoia Frankenheimer had previously served in The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Seven Days in May (1964) to form what was later dubbed his Paranoia Trilogy (by whom, and when?… The answer may be too terrifying for words!) The trilogy’s capstone is also its black sheep: a critical failure, whose booing at Cannes spurred Paramount to throttle distribution, making it a box office failure in turn. And while Seconds turns the paranoia up to 11, it does so by diverting from The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May’s occupation within the US government. Seconds aren’t limited to any one milieu; they could be anywhere, around any corner…
When the film starts, they’ve already gotten to our protagonist, Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph). At night, he gets phone calls from a man claiming to be his friend Charlie (Murray Hamilton), a friend who should be dead by all accounts. The calls frighten him, giving the mundane crowd of commuters’ chatter a morbid inflection — yet they also provide what seems to be the only excitement he’s had in years.
An address slipped to Arthur by a stranger on the train to work leads Arthur to the offices of what we will only know as the Company. They give him the offer of a lifetime: the death of Arthur Hamilton, a completely new identity to live in. Arthur — husband, father, soon to be president of the bank — hesitates. Some gentle nudges from the Company’s founder, as well as some light blackmail, help him reconsider whether he has anything to lose. The fact is that his daughter has since married, and he’s long been distant from his wife. What material achievements he has are meaningless without genuine connection.
Even though the Company boasts secluded offices and a name that’s immune to word-of-mouth advertising, it’s not as if Arthur is a special case; he just happens to have a friend to give a referral. Neither are we given a moment to trace his dissatisfaction back to. Seconds’ opening scene, of Arthur on the train platform, takes place before we know about the phone calls, and just before he receives the address. James Wong Howe’s mobile camera lumbers, framing Arthur in either alien closeups of his detached gaze or in a distant worm’s-eye view that distorts his stature. The jarring changes in perspective warp the sequence’s sense of continuity, always forcing us to catch up to the present. For all we know, this is how Arthur normally experiences himself among other people.
But it’s hard to do away with the urge to diagnose. We want to understand Arthur Hamilton, and so does he. Later, in a new body, Arthur will visit his “widow,” Emily (Frances Reid), under the pretense that he was briefly a friend of her husband’s. The life he left behind is a black hole: “The last time I saw him, I did some sketches. Now I’d like to do a painting, but all I have are lines… a face.” And if having a face sounds quaint, you haven’t been watching Seconds. Before we even see John Randolph’s we’re treated to Saul and Elaine Bass’s title sequence: a series of shots focusing on one part of the face at a time before warping beyond recognition.
An attempt by Arthur and Emily to make love ends in the middle of a kiss as Arthur freezes up, his eyes opening to the tune of Jerry Goldsmith’s elegiac piano. Emily moves out of frame, leaving only Arthur’s face blown up onto the screen. The low-key lighting has him beyond pale, threatening to melt into the walls.
It seems that the problem with Arthur Hamilton was that he was too much of a face: none of the roles he played reflected his internal truth. What that is, is a mystery to Emily:
I think the thing I most remember him for were his silences. [….] Oh, he was a good man, but he lived as if he were a stranger here. I mean, he never let anything touch him. He became absorbed in things — his job, mostly [….] Always a look in his eyes, as if he were trying to say something. I don’t know what. Protest against the life he had surrendered himself to?”
Everything about this — the inaccessible past, the dissociative cinematography — screams gender dysphoria. Am I projecting? Of course I am, but as Willow Catelyn Maclay points out, the idea of trans cinema is all about projection — otherwise, as far as studio fare goes, we’re stuck with Eddie Redmayne in The Danish Girl. And even when taking a surface read, how else can you square a film about a man who undergoes therapeutically-informed plastic surgery to become Rock Hudson? As with films starring fellow closeted hollywood stars Montgomery Clift, Anthony Perkins, Tab Hunter, Charles Laughton… (and that’s just a sampling of the men) there’s an easy read to Hudson’s filmography as sublimations of his otherwise inexpressible homosexuality. That Seconds is the story of a male-to-male transsexual is the sort of black comedy only possible within a studio system that for decades to come would keep an arm’s length away from explicitly trans stories. It’s the same reason that The Matrix (1999) has been overwhelmingly labelled as a trans movie since both Wachowski sisters’ coming out to the point that in 2020 Netflix’s twitter account was using it to explain what an “egg” is. In that film’s case, repression still allows for a triumph over the gender binary, with Neo fully embodying himself as The One.
While Arthur isn’t looking to become a messiah, gaining Hudson’s body and the identity of Tony Wilson does come from a desire to no longer be subject to the world’s “code.” Tony is given the life of a semi-renowned painter living in a semi-secluded beach bungalow. Perhaps creative genius is the antidote to social pressure. The hypnotic Khigh Diegh, who was a one-scene wonder in The Manchurian Candidate as well, appears to ease Tony into his newfound freedom: “You see, you don’t have to prove anything anymore. You are accepted. You will be in your own new dimension.”
Yes, maybe masculinity will be good again. But as soon as Tony arrives at the airport, we get a taste of what’s to come: as he’s about to leave, a man recognizes him by name. Never explained, the moment makes Tony a guarded man, knowing that to leave his dimension is to enter a world that recognizes him before he can recognize himself.
Tony hardly even paints, instead spending his days wandering along the strand. Hudson’s sour turn here is incredible, the smallest turns of his lip betraying a man skeptical of his own happiness.
One day, Tony happens upon a woman huddled up with the tide: Nora Marcus (Salome Jens), the catalyst for his entrance into the world. The two instantly find kindred spirits in each other. The reason is obvious enough: Nora, tired of living as a mother and wife, left her house one day after breakfast to live as a bohemian — the same situation as Tony, without the duplicity, or the surgery. And while Tony isn’t exactly an open book, the chemistry is strong enough that she lets him come along to a festival she plans to attend the next day.
As it happens, Tony ends up reacting with even more reticence than Nora predicted. In a series of jarring edits, the bacchanal is treated with the same abject horror as Tony’s past life: even with his new body, there’s still a barrier up between him and uninhibited joy. Nora expresses the conflict as she cries out, “I’m dying, and that’s the world! The whole bloody world!” As the crowd strips down to stomp away at a vat full of grapes, Tony is pushed in with them. He struggles as if against death itself. But then, as he reaches his destination, denuded of his pretensions, he finally laughs, in a state of sublime contact with the world.
In a more palatable film — about second chances and overcoming paranoia — this scene could be the climax. Seconds is too bitter a pill to take such moments for granted. Tony’s becoming a social animal means a new milieu, a new set of expectations thrust onto him.
The next scene jumps forward to the middle of a house party hosted by Tony and Nora. Tony’s already boorishly drunk, and begins to slip out details from his former life — that he used to be a Harvard alumnus, that he could be a grandfather without even knowing it. Silently, the guests herd him into his room and pin him to the bed. A POV shot scans across the patchwork of stern faces as Tony wonders what’s gotten them so offended. The butler walks in to make the final reveal: that he was placed in a neighborhood entirely populated by seconds. The euphoria of joining the crowd in the bacchanal parallaxes into Seconds’ profound horror — of being just like everybody else.
Tony wants a life free of control, but the joke’s on him; there is always someone out there telling you who you should be. Everyone else is in on it, so they know to act like they aren’t. Paradoxically, not knowing means not knowing how to act like you don’t… Even if they’re all as dissatisfied as he is, Tony’s ignorance threatens the protective shells his neighbors have built up. He leaves in the vain hope of remaining ignorant, refusing to laugh with the world.
Interestingly enough, Frankenheimer himself thought the party scene capped off the film’s weak point: reflecting on Seconds for Gerald Pratley’s 1969 retrospective book, he said that “I think the problem with the film was that we had no second act. In other words, we didn’t make it clear why he didn’t enjoy his new life.” The Paranoia Trilogy’s leaving congress means there’s no room for the streak of liberal optimism running through its first two films; there are no heroes fighting against the system’s corruption. Within the body of Tony Wilson the system’s corruption and resistance are one and the same. Seconds’ brilliance is precisely in how its second act is taken for granted. In it, dysphoria is a fact of life.
Recent years have seen a surge in anti-trans legislation in the US, the latest of which being a complete ban on trans healthcare for minors in Florida under the eye of Ron “Florida is where woke goes to die” Desantis (and who knows what more will happen between my writing of this piece and its publishing). As Jules Gill-Peterson urgently points out in Them, this trend should not be framed in terms of “the culture war” — an unavoidable term when you spend too much time online, one that’s oh-so meaningless. The fact that teachers are often the ones being held accountable to police children’s identities makes it an issue of who is able to benefit from a public support system, and:
depriving trans people of education, healthcare, and bureaucratic standing is ultimately about depriving people of the basic resources of life. These policies will deliberately cause homelessness, forcing people to drop out of school, exposing them to over-policing and subjecting them to incarceration, and cutting off access to the formal labor market. The cost of transphobia is material.”
There always comes a time while reading through reports like this when the absurdity of it all hits — how much time and money governments are putting into eradicating a demographic comprising 1.4% of the US population. One point four percent! But the reality is that nobody is cisgender; we are all subject to identities prior to our own identifications. It’s all too easy to find articles concern-trolling over how easy it is for children to get a gender dysphoria diagnosis even if they “aren’t trans.” Never are the actual implications of this idea confronted. Trans children are being targeted by the state for the sake of upholding its fantasy of being cisgender.
The cis state still allows trans people to exist, but those who can afford to transition: “We are witnessing an attempt at the total privatization of trans life, confining it to the social realm of civil society.” Seconds sees a world where transition is strictly the domain of venture capital, a vicious cycle that cannot be bought out of. The Seconds really are behind every street corner — but as with all the best body horror, the monster’s existence is never really the point. The point is to confront what made it monstrous in the first place, and what false notions of normalcy we still believe in.
