"Seconds" and the semiotics of Rock Hudson

Seconds was not a hit when it was first released in the fall of 1966, but I recall interest in the movie being kind of high in my house­hold at the time, when I was sev­en. My par­ents were not what one would nowadays call cinephiles, but they did, as they used to say, like movies, and they kept up with them to a cer­tain extent. My mom, like, I sup­pose, many women of her gen­er­a­tion (she was a couple months shy of 28 at the time of the film’s release), was an admirer of Rock Hudson. She also enjoyed, to an extent, hor­ror movies (it was at her behest that I had seen my first hor­ror pic­ture, The Haunting, a little pri­or to 1966, on the tele­vi­sion, on an even­ing when my dad was work­ing and she did­n’t want to watch alone). Seconds, then, was a movie that intrigued my mom and a lot of friends her age because a) it was an unusu­al pic­ture, a dis­turb­ing pic­ture, but also a “mod­ern” pic­ture, a pic­ture about what was hap­pen­ing “now;” and b) because its cent­ral con­ceit had an old per­son who hated his life under­go­ing a seem­ingly mira­cu­lous trans­form­a­tion into, well, Rock Hudson.

In a sense that con­ceit seemed almost a joke, and in the DVD sup­ple­ments I’ve looked at on Criterion’s excel­lent new edi­tion of John Frankenheimer’s pic­ture, both Frankenheimer’s wid­ow Evans Frankenheimer and the movie’s female lead Salome Jens dis­cuss the pains taken to make the trans­form­a­tion as cred­ible as pos­sible, how when Hudson first appears in the film he’s still got the white hair of John Randolph, and con­vin­cing plastic sur­gery scars and so on. He only becomes dre­am­boat Rock after the scars have healed and his char­ac­ter under­goes extens­ive phys­ic­al ther­apy and train­ing (acted out by the fit Hudson in baggy sweat shirt and pants). 

But it seemed like a joke, or a poten­tial joke, for dif­fer­ent reas­ons that it might to the con­tem­por­ary cinephile or quasi-cinephile who’s swal­lowed a lot of the con­ven­tion­al wis­dom on Hudson, as in the mul­tiple com­ment­ors on Dana Stevens’ sol­id Slate con­sid­er­a­tion of the film who want us to make sure they are aware that Hudson was­n’t much of an act­or. Considerations of Hudson’s act­ing abil­ity (which know-somethingish types will forever con­tin­ue to under­ate any­way) were not para­mount to whatever appeal Seconds might have had; no, what made the Rock Hudson idea poten­tially funny was that it was in a sense too good to be true. This Rock Hudson was Hudson before his forced out­ing. The phrase “the man every man wants to be, and every woman wants to be with” or whatever it is, had not been coined yet (I don’t think), but that is in fact the ideal which he rep­res­en­ted to middle-class American pop-culture con­sumers. But at the same time Hudson him­self, and the whole idea of the mat­inée idol, peri­od, were on the cusp of cul­tur­al obsol­es­cence. There’s some­thing about this fact, and the fact that Seconds was shot in black-and-white, which was then at the time sup­posed to lend a “doc­u­ment­ary” or “real-life” feel to film foot­age, that added to the par­tic­u­lar power with which the movie res­on­ated at the time with the people who saw it. People who were not, as it happened, par­tic­u­larly inves­ted in see­ing Rock Hudson redeem or prove him­self as an actor. 

Because the mat­inée idol did not have to be an “act­or;” per­form­ing vir­tu­os­ity simply was not where their value was loc­ated. As it hap­pens I believe Rock Hudson a very effect­ive per­former who may well have been a good, or “good,” act­or, and I think that it’s almost neur­ot­ic to pre­face any assess­ment of his work with an assur­ance that you “know” he was­n’t all that tal­en­ted. With the excep­tion of, you know, some­thing now rightly deemed impossible in hind­sight like Tazu, Son Of Cochise, Hudson was more often than not entirely right in execut­ing the par­tic­u­lars of each of his film roles. Above and bey­ond the amus­ing MacMahonist notion  (applied to Charlton Heston, as we recall) of phys­ic­al beauty so acute as to con­sti­tute tragedy. 

But it is still to Hudson’s cred­it that when seen today his work in Seconds can live up to expect­a­tions that his actu­al audi­ence did­n’t even think to enter­tain in 1966. His per­form­ance is remark­ably somber and yet he does­n’t make it drag on the audi­ence; he seems to instinct­ively under­stand that a brood­ing Rock Hudson is still pretty easy on the eyes, which frees him up to really brood—not go “ultry-sultry” but look as if he’s just been informed of the actu­al exist­ence of death or some­thing. Some sources say that he made the movie at around the time he was just begin­ning to share the real­ity of his life as a gay man with some of his friends; argu­ably, this dimen­sion added some genu­ine depth to the who-am‑I tor­tures his char­ac­ter puts him­self through. 

It is worth remem­ber­ing, too, that some­times Hudson’s closest col­lab­or­at­ors and biggest boost­ers could under­es­tim­ate him. In the volume Sirk on Sirk the great dir­ect­or, who steered Hudson through sev­er­al won­der­ful films, recalls cho­reo­graph­ing Hudson for 1957’s The Tarnished Angels: “There are some lines [from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’…] I read […] to Hudson in order to give him an idea of what Faulkner had in mind for the report­er character”—the lines are those begin­ning “No! I am not Prince Hamlet,” and end­ing at “at times, the Fool”—This is what I wanted Hudson to be, and I told him so: ‘You are not the Prince in this movie,’ I told him—‘that’s Stack.’ To my sur­prise, he under­stood, although he knew that this meant in a way he would have to play second fiddle.”