Total Recall: Is Douglas Quaid’s life but a dream?
I don’t wanna spoil it for you, Doug. Just rest assured, by the time the trip is over, you get the girl, you kill the bad guys, and you save the entire planet.
When Bob McClane describes to Douglas Quaid the plot of the memory that he could have implanted in the film Total Recall he may as well be describing the overall plot of the film itself. Yet this sequence is not a simple case of exposition on steroids, it is this statement that should cause us the audience to question whether the story we’re watching is a fiction contained within the fictional world.
Total Recall is a movie that stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as Douglas Quaid, a dissatisfied blue collar worker who dreams of something more in his life and has an obsession over visiting the planet Mars. He has vivid dreams of the planet and its inhabitants and visits the company Rekall who specialise in implanting memories in lieu of the inconvenience of actually having to perform the activity or go on the holiday.
It’s discovered that Quaid is in fact a freedom fighter who was shipped off of Mars and sent back to Earth to lead a false life with fake memories. Quaid is contacted by himself through video and sets in motion his return to Mars and the ultimate saving of Mars and its colonists.
It is this fulfilment that is nodded to at the very end of the film when after saving the planet it ends on this exchange:
A quick kiss later and the credits roll to white with the assurance that of course this all happened.
So we as the audience are faced with three scenarios (note: I don’t discount there being more):
- Everything happens exactly as we see on the screen, he actually is a double agent and saves Mars etc.
- That it’s all gone wrong like the doctor tells and he’s still lying in Rekall about to become a vegetable.
- That he’s lying there in Rekall and everything has gone right, he’s just experiencing the promised vacation and that after the credits he snaps out of it and goes back to his normal life.
How one could ever return to a normal job after “experiencing” a life like that has got me beat. Surely the psychological damage that would do to a person is significant and at the very least demoralising.
There’s evidence both ways for each of the scenarios.
The aforementioned fade to white that is a common trope in film to signify the end of an imaginary sequence or dying, both of which support scenario 2 and 3.
In support of scenario 1 though is that the film is not purely from Quaid’s point of view. We see things that he couldn’t have witnessed which supports this as a standard film that is showing the sequence of events of the storyline. Had we never seen anything without Quaid the scenarios of 2 and 3 would hold more weight. A little like The Sixth Sense when we realise that the one person who is constant is Bruce Willis.
Had Quaid been a constant throughout the film then you could argue in favour of scenarios 2 and 3 but those scenes certainly don’t preclude these scenarios as certain background information would have had to been uploaded to better create the universe that Quaid is experiencing.
We can’t also discount though that the events turn out exactly as promised in the Rekall office and there is a turning point in the story where one could pinpoint the decent into scenario 2 and 3 when the doctor tries to get him to swallow the pill.
As the doctor pleads with Quaid to come to his senses he tries a little reverse psychology on him encouraging him to give in to it all and to shoot him. What tips Quaid off is a single sweat bead rolling down the doctor’s face.
Of course he kills the doctor and refuses to swallow the pill. The result can be interpreted as a commitment to the fantasy and the breakdown of his own mental faculties or simply the further reinforcement of the “storyline” for his brain, though it has to be said that it would be an uncomfortable conversation afterwards regarding how your wife faired during this fantasy (best to leave that bit out considering her kicks!).
I don’t think there’s evidence one way or the other in that sequence that is the deciding point though. Personally I don’t find the sweat bead conclusive enough, especially when you consider how powerfully the human brain can convince its owner of something they desperately want to believe. The shear detail created by Rekall in the mind is pretty staggering and his mind could easily have extrapolated the sweat as an attention to detail.
Again everything the doctor says comes to pass, alien artefacts which were hinted at earlier are mentioned, conspiracies and the ultimate outcome.
There is another case that could be made in favour of scenario 3, that everything has gone according to plan. This whole sequence of the program going wrong is conceivably a way of tricking the mind into accepting the situation. If you knew the memories weren’t real would you be able to engage with them seamlessly or would they still feel detached? By giving the meltdown theory that something has gone wrong it provides the illusion needed to go with the story to enjoy it and to feel the effect.
Ultimately I like that the answer isn’t given, I think answering it definitively would ruin the depth of what could be dismissed as a fairly shallow science fiction action romp. Instead we can ask what does Total Recall consider more important reality or the perception of it.
Quaid’s question at the end of the film is the question of the entire film, is this a dream?
This is based on a post from my blog from years ago that I’ve always quite liked — Lee
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