8.4 Screening: Seconds

 8.4 Screening: Seconds

Arthur undergoes his rebirth

Frankenheimer had a gift for capturing the zeitgeist, and in the first two installments of his paranoia trilogy, he had already taken on some of postwar America’s most emotionally charged topics: brainwashing, commie bashing, and political assassination in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), about a man hypnotically programmed to kill, and then nuclear dread, Cold War anxiety, and neofascist skullduggery in Seven Days in May (1964), about a military plot to seize the American government. Seconds cuts even closer to the bone, exposing the precariousness of the American dream through a vertiginous blend of genre elements: horror, noir, and science fiction collide with suspense worthy of Hitchcock, outrageousness worthy of Kafka, and an acid critique of American capitalism.

Every shot and scene unfolds with the inexorable (il)logic of a nightmare—but a lucid nightmare, since Frankenheimer’s fierce intelligence is at work along with his filmmaking skills. He told an interviewer that he wanted to adapt David Ely’s eponymous 1963 novel because “all of today’s literature and films about escapism are just rubbish, [since] you cannot and should not ever try to escape from what you are.” Seconds was his outcry “against ‘the Dream,’ the belief that all you need to do in life is to be financially successful.” He saw the film as “a matter-of-fact yet horrifying portrait of big business that will do anything for anybody, provided you are willing to pay for it.” It expressed his contempt for “all this nonsense in society that we must be forever young, this accent on youth in advertising and thinking.”

The attack on advertising was particularly relevant less than a decade after Vance Packard’s best seller The Hidden Persuaders skewered the original Mad Men for their amoral manipulation of American consumers. An early clue to the Company’s sinister nature is its shifty way of inducing Arthur to sign up. Instead of inveigling him with Faustian rewards of sex, glamour, and fulfillment, the Company stresses the emptiness of his current life, making him gaze into its vacant, lusterless eyes until he’ll do anything to look away.

Few movies have indicted consumer culture with such withering scorn. Frankenheimer was a thorough­going liberal in his politics, incidentally, and in Seconds he found excellent parts for three gifted actors who had endured much hardship in the Hollywood blacklist years: Jeff Corey as a Company executive named Mr. Ruby, Will Geer as the unnamed Company chief, and Randolph as Arthur, his first Hollywood role after the studios banished him in 1955.

Seconds is no mere problem picture or message movie, though. It’s less a polemic(written attack) than a punch to the sociopolitical solar plexus. It’s also a powerfully constructed work of art, darting with icy precision among a wealth of narrative, thematic, and cinematic ideas. Its unifying image is the human face, first seen behind the titles in huge, distorted close-ups that echo the swirling eye that opens Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), also a product of Saul Bass’s genius. Filmed by Bass himself, these shots provide a brooding foundation for James Wong Howe’s cinematography in the rest of the film, which is astonishing throughout, charged with the dark-toned intensity that made him a legendary camera artist.

 Disorienting close-ups reappear in the first scene, where a man from the Company stalks Arthur through Grand Central Terminal, slipping him a secret address just before his train pulls out of the station. A few scenes (and surgeries) later, Arthur emerges from his bandages with his fine-looking Tony features, still lacerated, stitched, and scarred from the ordeal they have undergone. The imagery comes full circle when the story culminates in one of the most excruciatingly intense close-up sequences ever filmed, recording the unhappy destiny of a man who has allowed himself to be literally defaced.

- David Serritt, "Seconds: Reborn Again," Criterion - Link Here

Please watch Seconds,  read Paul Schrader’s “Notes on Film Noir”  Download Paul Schrader’s “Notes on Film Noir”(1971) and read Vincent LoBrutto's  "The Surreal Images of Seconds." (Links to an external site.) The only other sources you may use and/or quote in this assignment is our textbook James Naremore's Film Noir A Very Short Introduction and module materials. Include these  sources on your Works Cited page. Citation formatting can be found on easybib (Links to an external site.). If you need to review instructions for taking screenshots please review Module 0.

Please cite any quotes using footnotes or MLA formatted citation with a separate Works Cited page. You can find a comprehensive resource for formatting at the Purdue Owl Writing site (Links to an external site.) online.

Considering our framing, discussion, and viewing of 7 films so far this semester choose 1 to compare and contrast with our class screening of John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966).

In your discussion investigate both films in light of at least 2 of the following conditions proposed by Schrader:

War and Post-War Disillusionment

Post-War Realism

The German Influence

The Hard-Boiled Tradition

 

Films we've looked at in this class so far

Gun Crazy (1950)

Double Indemnity (1944)

The Public Enemy (1931) - proto-noir and pre-war, per our in class discussion

Detour (1945)

Le Jour Se Leve (Daybreak) (1939) - arguably more difficult being French, and pre-war, but possible

Mildred Pierce (1945)

Out of the Past (1947)

 

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