"Total Recall", as directed by Paul Verhoeven, is pure sci-fi spectacle. Released in 1990, it stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as Douglas Quaid, a man disillusioned with his life-- his spouse and job bore him, and he keeps having dreams of a seductive woman on Mars. She is an albatross, a lost dream seeping into his daily reality, and somehow, she feels more than a figment of a fractured mind. She is out there. But the worst part of his nighttime experiences is this: he occasionally slips out into the Mars landscape, breathing in the toxic air. His eyes bulge red. His tongue slips out of his mouth like a slithering strawberry. And he dies in agony. That's the end of the story.
A truly disgusting image, ala Paul Verhoeven
Similar to "The Matix" in concept, Total Recall deals with reality-bending storytelling. It asks the perennial questions: Is what we experience with our senses real? Can it ever be proven to be real? And if it isn't real, would it matter anyway? Several great philosophers have dealt with this quandary, famously with Plato and his cave, Descartes and his 'think therefore I am', and Hume before Kant's a priori. Verhoeven confronts it through Philip K. Dick, attacking it laterally. In his film, a company, known as Rekall, implants memories into clients' brains. These are done willingly, a means to escape the drudgery of life without actually going anywhere physically. Rekall's newest 'vacation' is more than relaxation on a beach, it is being the hero, beating the bad guy, and saving the girl.
The doctor/salesmen gives Schwarzenegger's Quaid the pitch:
"Basic Mars package will run you 899 credits. Now, that's for two full weeks of memories, if you want a longer trip it will cost you a little bit more because it's a deeper implant. [...] When you go Recall, you get nothing but first class memories. Private cabin on the shuttle, deluxe suite at the Hilton, plus all the major sites, Mount Pyramid, grand canals, and of course, VenusVille. [...] As real as any memory in your head. [...] Your brain will not know the difference. And that's guaranteed or your money back."After the procedure is done, the patient will mis-member a trip as a millionaire playboy, a sports hero, an industrial tycoon, a secret agent... "What is it that is exactly the same about every single vacation you have ever taken? [...] You. You're the same. No matter where you go, there you are, it's always the same old you. Let me suggest that you take a vacation from yourself. And I know it sounds wild. It's the latest thing in travel. We call it the ego trip." You want to escape yourself? Are you sick of standing on the side as the party rages? Of wondering why your life in meaningless? You can escape the facade of your character, just Rekall it.
Be the hero.
Post-Colonial theory hinges on the idea that by describing the Orient, the fantasy kingdom, the outer-space adventure, you are actually describing yourself more than a real location. These beautiful, horrific kingdoms of the dreamscape only exist in the interior world-- these modern gods, these Martian landscapes which Quaid finds himself in, these legions of Heaven and Hell-- they are results of a mind laid bare by the monotony of typical Western life. You are experiencing life through a window. You are bored. You need to escape. On Earth, you are constantly reminded you are unimportant, that your opinion doesn't matter, that you have to kowtow to other people's wishes-- Quaid's fantasies are deeply masculine ones. He finds himself in Joseph Campbell's mono-myth. He is the hero of this story. Rekall can fulfill a desire to be the main actor and win.
Because of these reasons, because he is bored with his wife, his job, his childless experience as the world falls apart around him, Quaid chooses a secret agent as his dream persona. Something goes dramatically wrong with the process though. He stands and throws the doctors aside, escaping through the front doors, pursuers on his trail. Arnold has awakened. He has become a Buddha.
Layers keep falling away, revealing new aspects to the complex question of "who am I if I am not me?". We are introduced to a Mars colony, the woman in Quaid's dreams, and we discover that Quaid's previous persona may have been complicit all along.
You are your own enemy.
Arnold's character finds out that he was once Hauser, part of a conspiracy to find the terrorist, Kuato. He was the villain before he was the hero. In other words, his past comes back to haunt him. Hauser is Phaedrus-- the evil wolf, Saturn, who slices and dices the universe. And that means Kuato is the wise teacher come to help Osiris beat Set. On Mars, Kuato is an illusive man who the capitalists are desperate to find and kill. Quaid does find Kuato's hiding place, but he turns out not to be the ordinary person we expect. He is, in fact, an infant tumor growing on the chest of another man.
Kuato is the true Messiah. What does that mean to you?
He tells Quaid, "you are what you do. A man is defined by his actions not his memories." He grabs Arnold's hands. "Now open your mind to me, please. Open your mind. Open your mind. Open your mind. Open your mind. Open your mind." He repeats it to really get his point there, see? We are taken down a hallway to underneath the mysterious Marshian pyramid, down more passages, and discover the ancient alien technology which will release oxygen into the atmosphere of Mars, ruining the villain's monopoly on the planet's gas.
Besides being a rip-roaring male fantasy with intrigue, back-stabbings, romance, and three-breasted whores, Total Recall is a surprisingly deep meditation on modern-day life. Because Quaid is a white man, we experience his perfect dream-- and it is a dream full of heroism, of killing, of sex. He kills his wife. He gets to be with the hot, exotic Marshian. He gets to be the cunning, heroic, strong leader of a clan of mutants. There are midgets. There are whores. There are gunfights. There are twists and turns, but Quaid is always the one who will win in the end. This is his fantasy. This is his Orient of the mind.
The Winner
But then it all comes crashing down. As Quaid sits in his fancy suite, he hears a knock on a door...
In walks Dr. Edgemar.
Ye tempter.
We assume that he is working for the film's villain, Cohaagen, because the audience has also been swept up in the Quaid's adventure. But almost surprisingly the doctor suggests none of this real afterall, that the adventure we have all been living through Quaid is a dream within a dream within a dream. He tells our hero that he has "suffered a schizoid embolism" and that he has experienced a "delusion". When Quaid tries to justify it, especially of the woman he had visions of before the memory implants, Edgemar answers back, "Oh Mr. Quaid, she's real because you dreamed her." Quaid raises a gun the doctor's head and threatens to kill him:
"It won't make the slightest difference to me Doug, but the consequences to you will be devastating. In your mind, I'll be dead, and with no one to guide you out, you'll be stuck here in permanent psychosis. The walls of reality will come crashing down around you. One minute, you're the savior of the rebel cause; next thing you know, you'll be Cohaagen's bosom buddy. You'll even have fantasies about alien civilizations as you requested; but in the end, back on Earth, you'll be lobotomized! So get a grip on yourself, Doug, and put down that gun!"Quaid fires it. He refuses to give into the Doctor's suggestions. The basis of growth is 'letting go' say the mythologies of the East. We have to release the ego's need to cling to things to be at peace. 'Bhudda' literally means one who has awakened.
2. Intense Level of Play
Hinduism's Shiva has ten arms. He moves them independently but also without thought, as if they were a machine working in tandem. "[The Hindus'] image of the divine is of a sort of centipede. A centipede can move a hundred legs without having to think about it, and Shiva can move ten arms very dexterously without having to think about them" (Watts 79, Myth and Religion). Kurt Vonnegut, perhaps unsurprisingly, delivers a similar image in Slaughterhouse-Five, one of a man's life in the form of a millipede, crawling from baby to death, forever alive in still images in the fourth demension.
Featured in film, Samsara.
The multi-armed god is a representation of every person whom has ever lived. We are his arms, we are all Shiva and just don't know it, pretending to be someone we are not. The word person having the same origin as 'persona' or mask. We wear 'personalities' like a mask, and the more lost you are the more you have forgotten the fact that you are THE godhead, the universe, the divine. Watts continues, comparing theater to the Hindu god. He says:
There are actors coming on the stage, but they are real people like you. In order for you not to see them in that way, they are going to put on their costumes and makeup, and then they are going to come out in front here and pretend to various roles. And you know you want to be half convinced that what they are doing on the stage is real.
The work of a great actor is to get you sitting on the edge of your chair, anxious, or weeping, or roaring with laughter, because he has almost persuaded you that what is on the stage is really happening. That is the greatness of his art, to take the audience in. In the same way, the Hindu feels that the Godhead acts his part so well that he takes himself in completely. And each of you is the godhead, wonderfully fooled by your own act. And although you won't admit it to yourself, you are enjoying it like anything. (Watts 82)
Story and myth are the closest we get to truth. They represent the plays which have been occurring since the big bang exploded and light and matter ballooned across the nothingness and until the end of everything.
The knight saving the princess from whatever.
We are capable of playing every role there is. We identify with the hero's quest to take down the villain, we gasp when it looks like he is about to be killed, and applaud when he wins out; but at the same time there is delight with the villain's shenanigans. In theater, we realize the importance of the bad guy when he receives applause from the audience at the end of play. This, of course, is less explicit in modern entertainment. There is no dramatic bowing of the mobster with gales of approval at the end of the movie.
As kids, we engage in this intense "level of play", which the ancient hunter-gatherers in the Paleolithic era extended to all of life. Joseph Cambpell writes in Primitive Mythologies: The Masks of God that a "certain level of 'make-believe' is operative in all primitive religious. 'The savage' wrote Marett, 'is a good actor who can be quite absorbed in his role, like a child at play; and also, like a child, a good spectator who can be frightened to death by the roaring of something he knows perfectly well to be no 'real' lion'" (Campbell 23). By acknowledging that the villain is being acted by someone who is not evil, we are beginning to acknowledge that it is all an act. That we are all being tricked into believing that we are who we are, that we are the hero, and that we should cling to material things. And that we have been tricked by ourselves.
Like Dr. Edgemar says, it is a delusion. What Quaid's character in Total Recall doesn't realize is that he is performing the hero's role in this dream. In the next, he might be the evil industrialist, the perky lover, the little mutant child with the freaky eye. That is what reincarnation truly is, a morphing of the eternal consciousness into every role.
MUUUUTANTS!
The Indians have the mythic image of the Net of Indra. It "is a net of gems, where at every crossing of one thread over another there is a gem reflecting all the other reflective gems. Everything arises in mutual relation to everything else, so you can't blame anybody for anything. It is even as though there were a single intention behind it all, which always makes some kind of sense, though none of us knows what the sense might be, or has lived the life that he quite intended" (Campbell 284, The Power of Myth).
This is not to say we shouldn't be involved; however, it does seem to be the case that the worst atrocities against our fellow men occur when we become too involved in rationality, in complexity of 'I'-ness, in the material world. Stories show us that we are communicating with archetypes. When we get into a really good book, our minds start communicating with this unconscious realm. It gives the chaotic voices of the right brain shape and coherence, linking both hemispheres together in a song or dance and harmonizing the brain like a lyre.
A liar... I mean a lyre.
Old archetypes from ages past haunt us again. There is no one there to tell us that this isn't real, or that this can't happen. It is complete experience. We get caught up with the characters, with the monsters which the ego usually denies us with its rational knowledge. Trolls, ogres, demons gods are there in their archetypal splendor, daring us to be terrified by their grotesque visages, or the specters within ourselves.
Erik Davis in his book TechGnosis claims that the "pagan and the paranormal have colonized our pop media" and that the "West's mystical heritage of occult dreamings, spiritual transformations, and apocalyptic visions crashed on the scientific shores of the modern age" (4-5). It is the same with video games, with their fascination with alien and fantastical monsters, the same with Total Recall with its mutants and godlike aliens-- creatures that were at first thrust into the spiritual dimensions, then to the farthest reaches of the Earth, and now alive in science fiction and fantasy... these nightmares will never go away...
As we progress further into the 21st century, there is going to be more bending of identity to the whims of computer interface. Information technology has already begun to shape our personalities in profound ways. With the ascension of social media, users are picturing themselves not as a person but an online image.
Go through your friends' photo albums, wall posts, and favorites list-- these are online identities which can be very separate from the person they present in public.
Erik Davis says that of all the technologies, "it is the technologies of information and communication that most mold and shape the source of all mystical glimmerings: the human self." It "tweaks our perceptions, communicates our picture of the world to one another, and constructs remarkable and sometimes insidious forms of control over the cultural stories that shape our sense of the world" (Davis 6).
Like all tools, these technologies become extensions of the person wielding them. However, beyond even that, they allow us to interface with each other in methods which weren't available to us before. In the online sphere we can hide behind masks. No one knows our "true" personalities, only a silly username. This allows great freedom of identity in the cyber-world and is an interesting case-study on the nature of reality-- of images and illusion.
Davis writes of the growing number of new technologies. Each time a new one became available, people would see it as mystical. People believed that electricity was the spiritual force which God used to create life. In it, they found new mythic experiences. When we don't understand something, we usually choose to see it as magical, fill in the space with 'lacuna'. Magnets were also used for therapy by icons like Franz Anton Mesmer who came up with 'animal magnetism', which eventually led to the concept of hypnotism.
Picture by Christopher Burdett... I thought the eye was a nose.
Phone calls and radio waves were seen as spiritual-- voices from people that were them and not them at the same time. Old animist spirits were evoked in us. Their desire was to be free, roam the collective imagination once again. As the world became increasingly demystified, the magic was drained from peoples' everyday lives. This was translated into 'real-life' adventures of explorers discovering new civilizations underground and ancient islands populated with strange locals in books like The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Erewhon by Samuel Butler, or reemerged in spiritual contact through electricity and radio waves.
Whereas older technologies were extensions of a limb, McLuhan opines that modern ones were more like the expansion of the nervous system. "As new technologies begin to remold [...] boundaries, the shadows, doubles, and dark reflections that haunt human identity begin to leak outside the self as well, many of them taking up residence in the virtual spaces opened up by the new technologies" (73). Magic of ages past has dissolved into the pseudo-underworld, and it is now the magic of the internet which possesses the mind of man, only one part of the GRIN (genetics, robotics, information tech, and nano-tech).
Now that we are nearing the technology that Total Recall experimented with, what does this mean for us? Will it be the continued break down of identity into something new, into something terrifying? Other science fiction has also shown similar dystopic hells where the only outlet is fantasy, so much so that it becomes the only reality for most people. The power of story, of myth, is endless. Governments and corporations can use it to manipulate us, to control, and especially to distract us, but we can also use it destroy ourselves. Most of us see our lives as being on a course with a destination in mind. Taoism, Zen Buddhism would remind us that that's not what life is really about-- it's about letting go, experiencing the moments, the joys of the uncarved block. It is folly to believe that life can be controlled at all, at least in the long run-- are we moving to a world where technology destroys the self? And is that a bad thing? Verhoeven seems to believe that this desire is a symptom of something greater: the desire to be free of the demystification of the universe, of the collective boredom, the dazed eyes of contemporary life. What do you think?
There is also one more important piece to Total Recall's story: you, the viewer. We watch a man live out his fantasy, but are we not living out our fantasies through him. Like the play at the end of A Midsummer's Night Dream, are we not forced to view ourselves as potential actors in a play we did not realize we were in?
Wow. Thanks for writing this. It's great.
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