America, Plunged Into the Dark Furrows of The Sea Again: "Seconds"
In 1963, the poet James Wright published The Branch Will Not Break. As is so much of his work, the book is a chronicle of loneliness and the attempt to come to terms with the failures of his life. It's also a picturing of a post-mythical, post-industrial Midwest, a landscape of abandoned quarries and empty fields and drunken men brawling on snowy street corners that stands in for America as a whole.
One of the poems at the center of this book is "Stages on a Journey Westward." In it, Wright – or perhaps the speaker of the poem – narrates four stages in a life that pushes across the continent through an American dreamscape.
The poem starts in Ohio, where "by night now, in the bread lines my father / Prowls, I cannot find him: so far off," and continues on to Minnesota, where "In my dream, I crouched over a fire. / The only human beings between me and the Pacific Ocean / Were old Indians, who wanted to kill me." Next comes Nevada, where "Snow howls all around me, out of the abandoned prairies, / It sounds like the voices of bums and gamblers," and then finally comes the coast, in Washington.
There, at this furthest extension of the nation, and of his life,
I lie down between tombstones.
At the bottom of the cliff
America is over and done with.
America,
Plunged into the dark furrows
Of the sea again.
It's a bleak poem, and one that feels the wrenching of historical irony. Like the work of the Beats, and of fiction writers like John Cheever and Richard Yates, it explores a question fundamental to American life at the time: if we've been promised so much, told that we're citizens of a glorious nation arcing westward toward destiny in a moment of high prosperity, how the hell can we be so unhappy?
These writers all have their own answers, or at least their own descriptions. What's interesting in Wright's account is the overlapping of the personal and the national: the great movement westward – a reflection of the American search for prosperity, for reinvention, for glory – ends in a graveyard where the speaker, although not dead, lies down among the markers of death. And as he does, America itself plunges beneath the waves again.
It's a nightmare vision, one that couples the unhappiness ineradicably to the national clarion call: Go west young man!
Turn it into a horror film, and you might get Seconds, John Frankenheimer's 1966 tale of a culture that forces onto us the curse of reinvention, the doom of endlessly striving for glamour, success and wealth.
The film opens with a middle-aged banker named Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) taking a commuter train home from work in the city. A man mysteriously presses a scrap of paper holding an address into his hand. At home, we see that Arthur has become alienated in his own life. He's little more than a polite stranger to his wife (Frances Reid). His job is almost perfectly vacuous.
And he’s beset by a terrible anxiety, because an old friend of his named Charlie (Murray Hamilton) has been calling him at night. But this is impossible, because Charlie is dead.
As we move into this labyrinth, we discover the truth. There's a company out there offering a very special service: for a huge amount of money, they will fake your death and set you up with a new life, one that offers the kind of satisfactions you've never enjoyed but have always felt were the exact point of being alive. Charlie used the company, and now he's offering its services to Arthur: this is the address on the slip of paper from the opening.
Arthur accepts. The company fakes his death in a hotel fire, substituting a meticulously prepared cadaver in his place. They give him radical plastic surgery. He is rendered unrecognizable, his voice and fingerprints altered. But more than this: he is turned into a gorgeous physical specimen. He's much younger looking, his new name is Tony Wilson, and he's now played by Rock Hudson.
The company sets Tony up with a swanky pad in Malibu. He always wanted to be a painter, so they arrange that for him as well, providing an extant body of work, degrees from art schools, and a studio where he can practice his craft. He meets a beautiful girl named Nora (Salome Jens) who introduces him to bohemian California life in the form of a communal wine-making bacchanal. He even has well-off neighbors to mingle with.
But Tony is still Arthur. He is still unhappy. He falls apart at a cocktail party, getting drunk and blurting out what the company has done for him. To his horror, he finds that everyone at the party already knows about the company. They're all clients as well – the film calls them "reborns" – living their second lives. Nora is an employee of the company, provided for the purpose of using love to help ease Tony's transition into his new life.
Tony flees Malibu. He goes home, pretending to be a friend of Arthur's, and talks to his own wife, who of course doesn't recognize him. She tells him that her husband was little more than a ghost of a man. She seems more dismayed by the man he was than by the fact that he's gone. The company brings Tony back to their facility, and he declares that he’s unsatisfied and wants yet another new life. This time, he'll finally make it work.
The company tells him that, sadly, this happens in many cases. He runs into Charlie, who suffered the same disappointment. Held prisoner by the company, they are now simply waiting. At first, Tony doesn't understand what they're waiting for, but then the truth dawns. We close with Tony on the operating table again, as doctors prepare to kill him: the people who fail in their new lives don't get another chance. They are used as the cadavers to fake the deaths of new clients.
The horror here does not come from monsters or tension-laden sequences. Instead, it arises from filmic technique – the black and white cinematography from the legendary James Wong Howe is extraordinary, as is the editing by David Newhouse and Ferris Webster – and from its understanding of the psychology of society-induced alienation.
Arthur is, at the beginning, one of a faceless mass of humanity. The images of the opening sequences reinforce this, and also suggest its cause. A tennis player at Harvard – his partner was Charlie – Arthur followed the suggested path of success. He married, had a family, took a respectable job in which he made plenty of money, bought a house in the suburbs and a boat for the summer months...and found nothing but repositories of emptiness. His life has no real meaning. He has not, significantly, "followed his dreams" which were, as he reveals to the company, to be a tennis pro or a painter.
In this way, the film portrays the landscape of a certain type of American success as unremittingly gray, unrewarding, and destructive of the spirit. Human life here parallels the post-industrial descriptions James Wright gives us of the Midwest in another poem from The Branch Will Not Break:
The unwashed shadows
Of blast furnaces from Moundsville, West Virginia
Are sneaking across the pits of strip mines
To steal grapes
In heaven.
From the wreckage of meaningless economic activity – banking, in Arthur's case, and steel production in Wright's – we reach out for something better. The shadows reach out to steal grapes in heaven. Arthur gets set up as Tony in California, finally given a chance to live his best life.
In many ways, this life is representative of the so-called American Dream. Tony is wonderfully handsome. He has money and is expressing himself, doing the thing he's always wanted to do. He has a beautiful girlfriend, he has his youth, and is surrounded by hip friends in the most happening place in the country.
This last – the California location – is particularly significant. What Wright put his finger on is also alluded to here: the journey west in America is as much a personal-symbolic as it is a national-symbolic one. California was, and in many ways still is, the promised land of that expression of American culture that’s obsessed with youth and fame and celebrity. It's where you go to make it in Hollywood, where you go to get a new start, the land where everyone is young and tanned and beautiful.
It represents, in other words, the antithetical vision of American success to the one that Arthur left behind when he became Tony. There (presumably on the east coast) Arthur was an institution man, successful among the old pillars that hold up our society. Here in California, Tony is successful in the young trendy glamorous milieu that drives our culture.
And both lives are equally empty. If his old life as Arthur was spiritually devoid of meaning, his new life as Tony is based on falsity, image and the manipulation of perception. Everyone is pretending to be something they are not. They are all "reborns." They are not succeeding but attempting to escape. In Wright's words, Tony is lying "down between tombstones," ensconcing himself among the living dead.
At play here is of course a subtle but piercing attack on celebrity culture and on Hollywood itself. And this layering is given further depth by the casting choices.
The more Rock Hudson films one watches, the more one realizes that directors often gave him the chance to enact scathing rebukes of his own life on the screen. Douglas Sirk did it several times, and Frankenheimer does it here. Hudson was gay, a fact widely known in Hollywood at the same time it was suppressed publicly. Here he plays a man whose glamorous heterosexual façade is just that: beneath it he is someone else entirely. His glamorous matinee-idol looks become a comment on a society that assumes that because he's good looking he must be straight, and forces him to act that way.
This critique is seconded by the casting of John Randolph as Arthur. Randolph had been blacklisted on suspicion of communist sympathies when he refused to testify to the HUAC in 1955. Seconds was his first role in more than a decade.
We have, then, a blacklisted actor and a gay actor, both playing the same man in a story about the destructive conformity of American life. The horror in the film, that is, comes at least in part from the way that the personal – political views and sexual orientation – is vaporized by the social, here represented pressure to fit in and act all-American, either as a striving member of the capitalist economy or a good-looking straight male.
The fate of these two men (or the one man in his two lives) is identical. Neither life is worthwhile – east coast banking, west coast indulgence – because the things driving those lives are the same. In the vision of the film, the drab gray banking life is thrust on us externally, the kind of thing we do because we're told it’s what we're supposed to do, what success means. In exactly the same way, Hollywood glamour – along with the famed social excesses of California – become a thing we do because it's expected, because the company has set us up there to do it as a part of a business venture. In neither is there any room for anything other than what’s forced on us.
Thus American reinvention, the famed opportunity to be whatever you want and to become something else if you're not happy, is not a reinvention at all. It is simply a move into another guise to chase the same goals: money, happiness through possessions and jobs, glamour. On the operating table in the final scene, Tony screams that he wants to be free. He means, I think, that he wants to be free of a society that promises freedom but offers instead only iron-clad versions of the same.
"America," writes James Wright, "Plunged into the dark furrows / Of the sea again." What does all this journeying toward the promised land, all this reinvention, bring us? It brings us to the end of land, with only the dark ocean stretching limitless before us. We have run out of time, out of room to move. The dream is now behind us and we have realized it too late.
The "again" here is particularly acidic. There is a geographical sense, a physical boundary to the American expansion: the continent has arisen from the sea for a brief moment and now descends once more. But in the context of Seconds the word rings with a kind of social doom as well: again and again we will strive for what we’ve been promised, and again and again we will realize how hollow that promise has been.
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