SECONDS ***1/2
John Frankenheimer
1966
IDEA: A man dissatisfied with his life undergoes an arcane procedure that grants him a new identity.
BLURB: Rock Hudson isn’t comfortable as Rock Hudson. In Seconds, the closeted actor plays a man alienated from the identity that has literally been constructed for him by a company that specializes in giving people new lives. The perils of conformity, the folly of reinvention, and the debasing, predatory logics of consumer culture are all accounted for here, but what is most inescapable throughout the film is this extra-textual layer, fraying outward into a nightmare of dissociation. Rock Hudson is not Rock Hudson. James Wong Howe’s ingeniously warped frames, alternately deliquescent and stubbornly solid in their claustrophobic close-ups, capture the visceral unease of a man circumscribed by social and institutional structures in which he can never belong. The juxtaposition of Hudson’s matinee idol image with the film’s off-balanced mise-en-scène tacitly draws out the actor/character’s queerness, pinning him like a specimen under wide-angle lenses, his clean-cut Hollywood persona generating a tension with the destabilizing force of the imagery that denies the assimilation of his difference. We come to read his sulky, discontented character not just as a misguided customer exploited by the market, but as an outsider to the very systems that are meant to situate and sustain him, a body whose iconicity has replaced its identity. Certainly this subtext, this star-text, is only amenable to the film in hindsight, but what it does is merely reinforce the uncanny horror of Seconds, embossing what is already so subversive about this exhilarating, disturbing vision of a culture – the very one that produced it – that makes its business serving up bodies as signs and commodities, useful only as long as they play the part.
BLURB: Rock Hudson isn’t comfortable as Rock Hudson. In Seconds, the closeted actor plays a man alienated from the identity that has literally been constructed for him by a company that specializes in giving people new lives. The perils of conformity, the folly of reinvention, and the debasing, predatory logics of consumer culture are all accounted for here, but what is most inescapable throughout the film is this extra-textual layer, fraying outward into a nightmare of dissociation. Rock Hudson is not Rock Hudson. James Wong Howe’s ingeniously warped frames, alternately deliquescent and stubbornly solid in their claustrophobic close-ups, capture the visceral unease of a man circumscribed by social and institutional structures in which he can never belong. The juxtaposition of Hudson’s matinee idol image with the film’s off-balanced mise-en-scène tacitly draws out the actor/character’s queerness, pinning him like a specimen under wide-angle lenses, his clean-cut Hollywood persona generating a tension with the destabilizing force of the imagery that denies the assimilation of his difference. We come to read his sulky, discontented character not just as a misguided customer exploited by the market, but as an outsider to the very systems that are meant to situate and sustain him, a body whose iconicity has replaced its identity. Certainly this subtext, this star-text, is only amenable to the film in hindsight, but what it does is merely reinforce the uncanny horror of Seconds, embossing what is already so subversive about this exhilarating, disturbing vision of a culture – the very one that produced it – that makes its business serving up bodies as signs and commodities, useful only as long as they play the part.
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