DOUBLE FEATURES

Having recently watched two seasons of Apple TV's Severance and finding myself dissatisfied with the endless rabbit holes of plot twists and random farmyard animals appearing in Kafkaesque office rooms, I decided to return to a classic dystopian movie I hadn’t seen in years—one that had made a deep impression on me the first time around: John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966), starring Rock Hudson.

Right from Saul Bass’s creepy title sequence to the sweaty, free-held camera shots of a washed-out-looking executive headed toward a train in Grand Central Station, Seconds has a viscerally disorienting feel to it—like you're embodying the body and mind of its central protagonist. This is fitting, considering the story’s core concept of body-swapping: in this case, an older man placed in a younger man's body.

More recently, The Substance attempted to explore a similar idea but devolved into a gorefest, lacking the cerebral edge of Seconds, which conveys the heavy existential angst of growing old and bored with life, as well as the anxiety of inhabiting a younger man’s body in a social and cultural era you barely comprehend. As a metaphor for men and women growing older during the youthful counterculture of the 1960s, it could not have been more potent—and made me think about how well Don Draper (from the Silent Generation) in the series Mad Men managed to navigate his way through that same counterculture, in contrast to Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) and Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson) who struggle to adapt to it.

One scene in particular—a bacchanalian, beatnik-style party that ends in a mass orgy in a vat of wine—becomes more the stuff of nightmares than fantasy, which is darkly funny considering the typical middle-aged fantasy of letting your inhibitions run wild before the dying of the light snuffs out the flames of passion.

Ultimately, the overriding feeling of watching this claustrophobic but brilliant cautionary film is that it makes you consider the terrifying notion of swapping your original life for another, more artificial one—and all that entails: the sacrifice of your human relationships and the loss of your memories, which become increasingly distant in the process of a real, living rebirth.

Believe me, Severance hasn't come close to the dread this film inspires.

And not a goat in sight!