Total Recall
SOURCE:
Buy This!
“We Can Remember It For You Wholesale,” by Philip K. Dick
SCREEN:
Buy This!
Total Recall, directed by Paul Verhoeven
COMPARE/CONTRAST:
I sometimes wonder what it must’ve been like to grow up watching Ronald Reagan the actor, only to see his political star rise so high. It’s not simply the weirdness of the star of Bedtime for Bonzo sworn into the highest office of the land, but the curious switch in public perception from one type of celebrity to another. I was born long after Reagan had quit the picture business, so to me, he was and is always ex-President Reagan. I suspect the same is true for much of the country. But are there people who still cling to those old memories? People who never recovered from the sheer ludicrousness of certain transitions, and who can’t imagine why others are eulogizing so passionately for a performer whose best skill was in not being that bad on screen?
I believe there are such people, and I salute their stubbornness. More, I empathize with them. For no matter how many terms he may serve, and how many offices his fame may grease his way into, Arnold Schwarzenegger will forever in my heart be a charismatic musclehead with an astounding talent for choosing viable projects. And I’m sure that’s how most folks still consider him. Just you wait, though. If certain amendments get passed, we might someday find ourselves debating over the political and social merits of the Terminator invading Canada. A few of us will scream, “Drive him into the metal works factory!” but no one will listen.
Even if we stick to the present, it’s getting harder to remember the days when Arnie still had box office clout. I sometimes imagine myself trying to explain to the younger generations that yes, once upon a time there was a man with an unintelligible accent and a near-impossible to spell last name who ruled the hearts of action fans everywhere. A man who went a decade without a flop to his name.
But the winds are a’changing, the old guard is moving on, and Arnie is lucky he found political fame when he did. Otherwise he could be doing reality TV and pushing a fitness magazine for old guys like his former rival, Sylvester Stallone. The last few movies the former Action King headlined have been so-so at best; while not all have bombed (I think Collateral Damage did decent business, and T3 certainly didn’t embarrass itself), gone are the days of such iconic successes as Conan the Barbarian, Predator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and, today’s subject, Total Recall.
Before we get to that, however, allow me to shift gears (with a grinding so loud it may wake the dead), to the short story upon which our movie is based, Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.” This is our third venture into Dick territory–and let’s pause to get the giggles out, all right? I’m not sure about you, but every time I attach the word “Dick” to anything, the ten year-old in me (who still owns a large portion of my internal real estate) starts snickering. So, deep breaths, everyone. Let’s try and be mature about this, shall we?
This is my third venture into Dick territory-
All right, thank you very much, you in the back, you may leave. Ahem.
I’ve reviewed two different movies based on Philip K. Dick short stories already: Screamers and Minority Report. I’ve gone to great lengths to describe his knack for creating peculiarly logic universes parallel to our own, places that are just familiar enough for the differences to be truly upsetting. (I think I used to the word “weird” a lot.) But looking over those movies, and the stories they came from, it’s clear that one thing I haven’t touched on is Dick’s sense of humor–largely because both"Second Variety” and “Minority Report” are very, very grim.
You can tell just from the title that “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” ("WCRIFYW") is going to have a lighter touch. While I wouldn’t say the story is a laugh riot, it does get fairly goofy by the end. In some ways, the whole thing could be classified as simply a longform joke, with the familiar rhythm of set-up, build, and punch-line. What begins as an exploration of imagined technology and the art of creating new memories, becomes a spy thriller, and winds up as a tale of alien contact; the cumulative effect is much like a more cohesive version of a game of “Telephone.”
Up front warning: “WCRIFYW” is roughly twenty pages long, and any in-depth look at it requires me to spoil, well, all of it. If you have any interest in reading it for yourself, you should probably stop now. Because it was adapted into a fairly popular movie, the story has been anthologized any number of times, and is not all that difficult to find. Ruining other people’s reading/viewing experiences is not a hobby of mine, so consider that as much warning as you’ll get.
Anyway, the story.
Douglas Quail is dreaming of Mars. He hungers for the place the way we yearn for far off lands we’ve never seen (or think we’ve never seen), only Doug is fast turning into an obsessive. His wife spins into a rage whenever he brings the subject up, but he can’t seem to help himself; he isn’t interested in a trip to anyplace but the Red Planet, even though he realizes it’s not much of a vacation spot.
Desperate to find a compromise, he visits the fine folks at Rekal, Incorporated. Rekal offers the original service of implanting new memories in your brain, allowing you to go places and see things more cheaply than if you actually went there and saw them. There’s a long pitch by a salesman, explaining the package, and ultimately Douglas signs on for the Mars trip. He also gets the perk of a spy-thriller, so that in his false memories (which will seem real), he’ll be a secret agent, involved in all sorts of dastardly doings.
It’s a neat idea; after all, we know that even the memories of things we did do are never entirely trustworthy, so how are we to judge between the false and the real? And the company goes to great lengths to make the experience as authentic as possible, planting on you and in your apartment any number of souvenirs from your faux trip. Plus, they erase any memory you have of visiting Rekal in the first place, so Future You will have no knowledge of the implantation session.
Which is not entirely reassuring, come to think of it. These people are messing around in your brain, and if anything goes wrong, you won’t remember anything about them. But even if you trust Rekal implicitly, their scheme seems somewhat implausible. False memories may be convincing, but no matter what your brain tells you, you’ll be stuck with the fact that everything else in the world is just the same. Say you take a two week vacation. How do you respond when you come home to find the calendar’s wrong and your wife never missed you? Even worse if you take the personality implant–you remember being a spy, but now you’re just a normal schlub again? The whole premise seems based on the assumption that, despite all the reassurances to the contrary, part of you will remember what really happened, or you’ll at least have some sense that it was all in fun. Vitual reality is only fun when we know it’s virtual. It’s like how a third of ever Star Trek: The Next Generation episode had the holodeck becoming “real, and that was never a good thing.
Regardless, Doug goes along with the treatment. Inevitably, something goes wrong; when Doug is drugged with truth serum during prep, he starts rattling on about how the Rekal technicians have broken his cover. Turns out he really was a secret agent, and the government had already altered his memory. Only, part of him didn’t forget, couldn’t forget–and couldn’t stop yearning for the life that was.
Lots of dialogue between Doug and various government agents ensues, with Doug turning out to be a surprisingly efficient killer. This is one of the few Dick stories I’ve read where the government is not only not evil, they’re down right sympathetic. While killing Doug would probably be the simplest thing all around (apparently he assassinated someone on their orders, and they want to keep it secret), they were willing to set him up with this fake life, which couldn’t've been cheap. And now that he’s getting his memory back, even though they really have to off him this time, they feel kinda bad about it. It’s weird; you get used to these “people in power are evil!” threads in everything, so when they actually turn out to be okay for once, you keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Doug turns himself in, and his superiors agree to try a last ditch chance to blank out his brain. Since they can give him whatever new memories they want, Doug suggests they find out what his ultimate fantasy is and make that his new life. If some sort of dissatisfaction was driving him to remember the past after the previous mind-wipe, maybe the solution is to give him a new life he can possible be disappointed in.
After some long therapy sessions, government psychiatrists determine that Doug’s ultimate fantasy is that, when he was young, he saved the human race from extinction by deterring a tiny alien attack fleet through the simple power of his kindness. The fleet promised not to attack for as long as Doug lived, but he could never tell anyone what happened.
The various officials think this is pretty damn goofy (as well as egocentric), but they’re willing to go along. Doug gets prepared for another Rekal session, only….
Yeah. Turns out this “fantasy” is just as real as the secret agent one. He even used a gift the aliens gave him, a magic invisible destroying rod, to carry out the assassination that started the memory wipe business in the first place.
Before I reread this story for the purposes of reviewing it, I was under the impression that it had something deep to say about the nature of memory. At the very least, I was sure Dick would make things ambiguous, never letting us know for sure if the events we were seeing were real, or had become real because that was the way Doug now remembered them.
I was wrong. There isn’t much ambiguity in this story at all. You can tell by the simple fact that Doug never once manages to get the Rekal treatment–things always go wrong before the new memories are inserted. Even more, the story is told from two different perspectives, Doug’s and McClane’s, the salesman/boss at Rekal, Incorporated. It seems odd that Dick would miss such an obvious opportunity to comment on the ways the mind defines and changes its world. (But then, this is something he would deal with in nearly all his great novels; maybe this story was merely a hint of what was to come.)
The deepest subtext I can find is that a man cannot truly write over who he is; he brings the same desires and essential self with him wherever he goes. Which is not particularly enthralling, suggesting as it does a rigidity which is rare to Dick’s work. That personalities aren’t fluid doesn’t make much sense coming from the man who wrote A Scanner Darkly and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Or maybe there isn’t even subtext at all. Perhaps this one is really just a joke after all–a well-written, interesting joke, but still just a joke.
Criticisms aside (and they’re really more criticisms based on my expectations of Dick’s work then anything inherently wrong with the story itself), this is a fun bit of not much, easy to knock off in under an hour. While it does end on a twist of sorts, the twist is no different than the twist that happens on the second page, and is set-up in such a way as to be completely unsurprising. (One honest complaint I have is that the doctor’s relation of Douglas’s greatest fantasy is such a blatantly weird and specific story that you can’t help but think it’s true.)
When you look at short stories like this that inspired larger, far more explosive movies, you have to wonder what element appealed to someone strongly enough to write a screenplay around it. In this case, it’s fairly obvious: before the punchline ending, “WCRIFYW” has some well-established sci-fi action flick elements, with the startling technology, the schlub-hero with the secret past and the inevitable faceless goons who seek to destroy him.
These elements are certainly highlighted in Total Recall, along with some new ones. The casting of Arnold Schwarzenegger is, when you think about it, an odd choice. Walter Mitty-types need to look like average guys, so their heroic fantasies look funny in contrast; or, in this case, so the eventual reveal that this Walter really is what he dreams to be, is more surprising and exciting. (It’s easier to identify with average types, too, making his surprising elevation to coolness in a way our elevation too.)
Arnie is many things, but normal-looking ain’t one of them. His casting just turns this into another action fantasy, filled with improbable explosions and lots of stabbing and shooting and running with the hurting and OY LADY! ahem. Paul Verhoeveen is directing, however, which means that there will be guts and gore, but done to such an extreme extent that they actually become something different from the usual. While Total Recall never really hits the level of black satire achieved in Robocop, it’s still more intense than your average flick of this type. Judged in this light, having Arnie in the lead helps to establish a certain standard of intensity. From the moment you see him lying in bed with Sharon Stone, looking like some Greek god in the flesh, you know what you’re in for.
As for what the movie keeps from its source material, there’s the first few pages and the basic premise, but not much else. Despite his beautiful, loving wife and perfect home, Douglas Quaid (note the name change; can’t very well name our hero after a small bird, can we) yearns for Mars, and dreams of it every night, along with a strange woman he seems to have some sort of connection with. His wife, while a bit more loving than her prose counterpart, refuses to entertain his idea of travel plans, so he decides to pay a visit to Rekal, Incorporated. Same shtick with the salesman, same Mars trip with secret agent tack on, and when they put him under, the same problem occurs; only this time Doug is much more physical about his anger at being exposed, managing to do some damage before they finally put him down. The boss tells his staff to get Quaid out of the office as quick as possible, and stick him in a cab. That’s where we break ties with the Dick short story, with Doug coming to groggily en route home.
The next twenty minutes or so amounts to a series of fights and one extended chase sequence, in which Doug learns that everyone he thought he could trust (his best friend from work, his wife) are all out to kill him. He even discovers he isn’t who he thought he was, through a recording from his past self. Then it’s on to Mars, where Our Hero will kill the bad guys, save the planet, and re-meet the girl of his dreams.
It’s a fun, gory ride, although I’ve always felt that the movie loses a bit of its momentum in the second-half; there are a few big twists before the end, but once you’ve passed over the excitement of the hero having to figure out what’s going on, it becomes more of a generic action movie. (Which isn’t to say that the action is generic, or that the first part has never been done before; more that the normal guy finding out his life is a lie story cliché is more involving to me than good guy saves the weak from the evil and strong .) Paul Verhoeven is on his game, which means lots of the good old ultra-violence. Some of the deaths here are brutal enough to bother even the most jaded of Schwarzenegger fans, and there are a couple of sequences on the surface of Mars involving the airless atmosphere that always seem to last a bit too long no matter how many times I’ve seen them.
Direction like this needs a cast that is willing to go over the top just breathing, and between Micheal Ironside and Ronny Cox, the henchman and lead villain, you’ve got some well-chewed scenery. Arnie himself is clearly in his element, and even does a decent job as the clueless naïf in the movie’s opening scenes; once he gets his memory back, he isn’t required to do much more than punch people, yell, and pop off one-liners. It’s nice to see Sharon Stone acting in a movie before she was SHARON STONE (has she been demoted yet?); she’s a hot blonde with a nasty streak, and there’s an iciness to her that lets you see why Verhoeven cast her in his later Basic Instinct. I’m not the biggest fan of Rachel Ticotin as Melina, the eventually love interest. She’s not bad, really, but she doesn’t stand out as sharply as the rest of the cast.
The film makes an attempt at some mind-buggery, and that was always one of the things that I loved about it when I was younger; the way you never know for sure at the end if what just happened was real, or just a product of Quaid’s trip to Rekal. There are a few ambiguities, like the salesman’s description of Quaid’s “Ego Trip” (the secret agent person he’d take on for the implants) which manages to sum up the movie with a surprising degree of specificity, some shots of Martian architecture which you see in the flesh at the film’s climax, and the early appearance of Melina on a computer screen when Quaid is describing his ideal type. The movie even ends on a fade to white, which seems to be suggestive of something, and on the commentary track for the DVD, Verhoeven mentions trying to keep things up in the air.
Unfortunately, as many other reviewers have pointed out, as I discovered when I watched the movie with more jaded eyes, there is only one possible interpretation of the events we’re shown; despite the disturbing number of coincidences, everything we see has to be real, for the simple fact that there are any number of scenes where Quaid is either unconscious or not present, and what kind of lousy memory implant program would include other people’s memories with yours? Clearly, Verhoeven decided to try and make things more uncertain after the script was done, and choose to just mess around with some production design stuff, as opposed to making a serious effort to make more interpretations possible. I almost wish he had taken that extra step- as it is, unlike Robocop and Starship Troopers, this movie’s subtext is ultimately illusion, and you’re left with just a big budget action film instead of the mindf##k you were originally hoping for.
There is a twist at the end that is worth mentioning, though, and more SPOILERS if you didn’t already realize it.
Quaid and Melina are finally captured by the villainous Ronny Cox, and he’s got a surprise for them. It turns out the man Quaid used to be, Hauser, wasn’t such a good guy after all; it turns out he was playing for the bad guys all along, and that this whole thing was simply a set-up so Cox could get his hands on the leader of the Mars mutants. What’s interesting about this is that it almost entirely contradicts the theme of the source material, since Dick’s story is about the persistence of personality and desire with or without memories. Quaid may have still wanted to go to Mars once his brain was wiped, but now he’s a good guy, and even after he figured out the jerk he used to be, he stays a good guy. I’m not entirely sure why, either- is some sort of point being made here, ala Regarding Henry, that immediate influences are more important than genetics? Or is it simply that Arnie’s the hero no matter what, and they just decided to throw something new at you to allow him to live long enough to escape the bad guys.
Either way, it’s vitally important that you don’t think too hard about the “sting” operation Hauser and his cohorts came up with. There are any number of ways it doesn’t make sense, the primary being, why the hell doesn’t Hauser just try and infiltrate his way back into the Mars colony without the brain wipe? Is he really that bad an actor? (Pause here for any number of Schwarzenegger jokes.)
Still, it’s a pretty damn good action flick, one of the best to come out of the eighties, and one of the many strong pieces that Schwarzenegger built his- dare I say it?- legacy on. And like I said, it’s not as though the short story the movie was inspired by was all that deeply complex either. Perhaps there is some justice, in turning a one note (although it’s a great note) gag into a two hour blockbuster; and while that blockbuster certainly doesn’t follow the spirit of its source to the letter, the change makes a decent enough contrast that you don’t feel that the writers has contempt for the story that inspired them.
Plus, hey, there’s a chick with three boobs, how cool is that?
SOURCE: QQ.5
SCREEN: QQQ
Great Jerry Goldsmith score, too. A little reminiscent of the Conan score, but still terrific.