‘Seconds’ (1966): A forgotten sci-fi masterpiece

Credit: Joel Productions/John Frankenheimer Productions/Gibraltar Productions. Distributed by Paramount Pictures

‘Seconds’ (1966) is a forgotten, Twilight Zone-esque masterpiece that provides a refreshingly nuanced take on desire, choice, and meaning in the modern bureaucratic world. While its overall assessment is devastatingly bleak, it retains a comforting and plausible optimism.

‘Seconds’ follows the experiences of successful, late-middle-aged businessman, Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph). Hamilton lives a life of polite alienation, plugging away as a banker. He maintains a distant but amicable relationship with his wife, Emily (Frances Reid).

This changes when he begins receiving mysterious phone calls from a college friend, Charlie (Murray Hamilton), believed to be dead. Hamilton is soon passed a note with an obscure address by a stranger, leading him to the offices of a shadowy group known as The Company, where he meets with dubious executives Mr. Ruby (Jeff Corey) and The Company’s unnamed, elderly founder (Will Geer).

The Company provides a most unusual service: for a substantial fee, it will give you the life of your dreams. The agency simulates your death and, through extensive plastic surgery and careful planning, provides you with your dream physique and career.

Hamilton takes The Company up on their offer, becoming Antiochus “Tony” Wilson (Rock Hudson), a handsome and successful modern artist. He moves to a beautiful beachside home in Malibu and begins to live what he had imagined would be the life of his dreams, attending wild Dionysian orgies with beautiful Nora Marcus (Salome Jens) and throwing swanky parties.

Nevertheless, Hamilton struggles to get his footing in his new life, finding himself as alienated and confused as a modern artist in Malibu as he had been as a banker in Scarsdale. After a trip back to New York to retrace his steps and determine the cause of his persistent dissatisfaction, he returns to The Company to request yet another “rebirth” in a new life, feeling that he’s finally ready to take advantage of a fresh start.

As it turns out, The Company is willing to grant that request for a price that Hamilton/Wilson is unwilling to pay, and it becomes clear that this visit to The Company will be his last.

‘Seconds’ resists easy analysis. Made in 1966 during the peak of the hippy era, it offers an exemplary critique of the counterculture without lapsing into unreflective reactionaryism.

To an inattentive viewer, Hamilton/Wilson’s wistful trip back to Scarsdale might be seen as an argument in favor of bourgeois respectability over bohemian indulgence. But this isn’t the case. While the scene nicely hits the notes of faint nostalgia that Hamilton/Wilson is bound to feel, his final desire is not to return to the life he left. Seeing Hamilton now as Wilson, Emily speaks candidly of her late husband, painting a picture of his confused desperation and ennui. While her stark appraisal pains him, he knows she’s right.

At the same time, the film hardly brandishes a vision of the bohemian life over that of the strait-laced business square: Hamilton/Wilson wants out. Replacing banking reports with sex and alcohol hasn’t solved his problems.

To the extent that the film poses a critique of either the straight or bohemian world, it’s done by way of the broader point that both reflect the same underlying consumer logic. The film makes its central argument in a monologue Hamilton/Wilson delivers to Charlie during his final visit to The Company. The antidote to modern alienation isn’t a new form of hedonism or hip title; it’s relationships, choice, and meaning—things that take time to cultivate and can’t be turned over ready-made for a fee.

This insight is where the film’s optimism is most readily discernible. As Slavoj Zizek notes in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, ‘Seconds’ is at least in part about the way that our desires can trick us. We can’t always trust what we think we want. As Zizek observes, the ideological inversions (in a Marxian sense) of consumer capitalism exacerbate that underlying human tendency.

No doubt that Zizek is on the mark there, but the viewer has the sense that Hamilton/Wilson has had a real breakthrough. He might actually make it on his next rebirth. In the world of ‘Seconds,’ increased clarity is possible even if attenuated.

Yet, this is also where the film is at its bleakest. Hamilton/Wilson has reached his conclusion almost too sincerely. The Company is willing to grant him a new life if he provides a recommendation for a client to take his place. The executive in charge of his case reasonably makes the argument that The Company’s business model would fail otherwise: how else could such a business get clients if not through word-of-mouth referrals?

It’s revealed that Charlie had referred Hamilton/Wilson to the company after the failure of his own first rebirth. Charlie then finds himself waiting in a surreal purgatory until Wilson’s case is resolved. Hamilton/Wilson faces the same fate.

He refuses. The business model of The Company is fundamentally flawed, and the person he refers to the company will be left with little choice but to participate. The Company is dodgy. When Hamilton first gets to its offices, it drugs him and stages a scene making it look as though he’s raped a woman. It’s easier to leave an alienated life behind when you know you can’t go back.

‘Seconds’ is a cynical film, but it’s characteristically nuanced in its cynicism. The Company is shadowy and dishonest, but as the elderly founder explains in a pivotal scene, he’d initially set out to offer genuine help to people in pain. By the time he’d realized The Company’s disappointingly high failure rate, it already taken on enough financial commitments that it couldn’t change what it did. Maybe the next generation of executives at The Company will do better. This self-serving deceit has enough plausible deniability that it rules out writing off even the coldest of executives as simply being evil.

The world of ‘Seconds’ is one of people enmeshed in a system that gives them a fraction of a shot at doing good while convincing themselves they have no choice but to be unimaginably cruel. And the film holds out the distant chance that maybe they really will do some good and really don’t have a choice. So they go on.

Or at least all of them except Hamilton/Wilson do. He’s the only character in ‘Seconds’’ who refuses to collaborate with the system. Faced with his refusal to offer a new client as a stand-in, the company sees no solution but to turn him into a cadaver to stand in for another rebirth. He is put to a clinical death by the same plastic surgeon who’d previously given him Rock Hudson’s handsome face.

The point is clear: the system of commodity consumerism is based on flawed assumptions that compound alienation and misery. To participate in that system will likely entail fostering further misery in others as well as compromising your own happiness. Not to participate is to leave the larger system with no use for you but to be cadaverous fodder for its senseless functioning.

Yet, even then, ‘Seconds’ nuances this harsh conclusion with a striking final image. As the surgeon’s drill enters his skull, Hamilton/Wilson imagines himself on a beach with a dog circling him as he walks with a little girl on his shoulders. The system is murderous and misguided, but there is room for beauty even in alienated, inhuman conditions.