TOTAL RECALL: Two Brilliant Films For The Price Of One

Like the best of Paul Verhoeven’s films, Total Recall endures because it offers a big, meaty buffet of grotesque fun supported by a solid foundation of social criticism and thoroughly examined science fiction ideas. There’s no better way to out a snooty movie jerk than by telling them your favorite film is RoboCop, Starship Troopers, or Total Recall because all three films feature a wealth of intellectualism while baiting sight-unseen incredulousness. If you think you’re smarter than Verhoeven, your chances of being a dummy are astounding.

Total Recall is a movie about a bored, blue-collar working man who dreams of bigger things and purchases a memory implant that lets him experience them from the comfort of a shopping mall.

Or Total Recall is a movie about a Martian spy exiled to Earth with a wiped memory and carefully orchestrated fake domesticity whose slowly emerging past life pushes him to purchase a memory implant that crashes this facade and forces him on a journey to not only free the people of Mars from economic slavery but also win ownership of his mind from the evil man he was before having his memory wiped.

The film can’t really be both at once. So which story are we dealing with? The typical answer for a film with this kind of ambiguity is “it doesn’t matter.” But it does matter. Both films are extremely different with different points to make.

The “it was all dream” take on the film means none of Douglas Quaid’s actions were literal. After the credits roll, he wakes up at Rekall and goes back to his home, wife, and job. But that doesn’t mean it lacks interest. Though Rekall offers him a prewritten memory, there’s still wiggle room for us to imagine some of the film’s more interesting details (like, say, a lady with three breasts) coming from Quaid’s subconscious desires, which opens the whole thing up to character-based interpretation. If you’re really hungry for a term paper topic, you could totally unpack the film as an examination of masculine fantasy.

Meanwhile, there’s the “it’s all really happening” view of the film, which trades psychological heft for a thoroughly engaging spy story filled with class issues and a compelling look at the concept of individuality and the solidity of our personalities. Is Quaid Quaid? Or is Quaid still in some way the evil Hauser? He finds himself with all Hauser’s physical skills, but none of his personality. Do we have innate personalities or are we nothing more than the content of our memories?

You can watch Total Recall both ways and consider them with equal depth even though they do not really exist simultaneously, making it a far more rewarding than normal film, especially when it comes to genre fare. Especially especially when it comes to genre fare with goofy mutants and popped out eyeballs.

The ambiguity is not totally perfect, however, largely due to casting. To accept the “it was all a dream” interpretation, we must also accept the almost inhuman-looking Arnold Schwarzenegger as just a regular Joe construction worker (not to mention Sharon Stone as his super hot wife). We’ve taken Arnold into our hearts in many other situations that don’t exactly make sense, but in this particular case it is much more tempting to see him (and Stone) as a super spy unnaturally forced into a life that does not fit.

But that’s the movie we have. Without Arnold, there would be no Total Recall as we know it. Schwarzenegger facilitated the purchase of Total Recall’s script after it had been in development hell for quite a while. Richard Dreyfuss was once attached to star. David Cronenberg worked on it for a year with William Hurt in mind (unsurprisingly, he is credited for the invention of Kuato). Once Schwarzenegger got ahold of it, he wielded an unusual amount of power over the project’s development, which means we have him to thank for bringing in Verhoeven.

Without Verhoeven, it’s hard to imagine the many wonderful elements Total Recall would lack (actually, you could just watch the remake to see what that might look like). For all its brains, Total Recall is filled to the brim with memorable oddities, from the Johnny Cab, to the “Two Weeks” sequence, to Arnold pulling a big ball out of his schnoz, to an armless Michael Ironside falling to his death, Total Recall is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to awesome shit.

Little of that would matter, however, if the film didn’t pull its weight in terms of story. Many movies can’t even make one story matter. Total Recall holds up two. And its gross, knobby alien knees don’t wobble in the slightest.