December 24, 2012 at 12:25 P.M. I have seen "Total Recall" on pay-per-view. I liked it more the second time. However, I feel no need to alter my review -- nor any of my opinions -- in any important way. I will continue to write.
October 24, 2012 at 3:10 P.M. Spacing between some letters has been altered in a way that I cannot repair. I trust that this will not affect the reading of this text. I infer that this is more hostility from New Jersey's hackers.
A.O.Scott, "Even in the Future, It's Not Paranoia if They're Out to Get You," in The New York Times, August 9, 2012, at p. C9. (Terrible.)
"Total Recall" (Columbia Pictures, 2012): DIRECTOR: Len Wiseman; WRITTEN BY: Kurt Wimmer and Mark Bomback; INSPIRED BY: Philip K. Dick's "We Can Remember it For You Wholesale"; CINEMATOGRAPHER: Paul Cameron (bravo!); STARRING: Colin Farrel (Douglas Quaid/Hauser); Kate Beckingsale (Lori Quaid); Jessica Biel (Melina); Bryan Cranston (Cohagen); Bokeem Woodbine (Harry); John Cho (McClane); Bill Nighy (Mathias).
Mark Rowlands, "'Total Recall' and 'The Sixth Day': The Problem of Personal Identity," in Philosophy Explained Through Science Fiction (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2003), pp. 87-120.
Mark Rowlands, Everything I Know I Learned From T.V.: Philosophy For the Unrepentant Couch Potato (London: Ebury Press, 2005), pp. 1-27.
Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (London: Heineman, 1974).
F.H. Bradley, "Some Remarks On Memory and Inference," in Essays On Truth and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), pp. 353-380.
G.E.M. Anscombe, Collected Philosophical Papers, Volume II: Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), pp. 103-133 ("On Memory").
Introduction: "I recognize you from my dreams!"
Arnold Schwartzenegger was "successful" in the Paul Verhoeven version of Total Recall (1990) as Quaid/Houser. The focus of that earlier film, however, was on the "memory criterion" of personal identity. Mr. Verhoeven's film touched only lightly on the more disturbing counter-cultural or political themes of the Philip K. Dick short story.
Mr. Dick's dark and ominous concerns with the omnipresence of state power, loss of privacy, psychological manipulations and torture, together with his doubts about the nature of "reality" and/or the metaphysics of power in relation to identity, are not easily translated to cinema. Compare Mark Poster, Foucault, Marxism, History: Mode of Production Versus Mode of Information (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), pp. 95-135 with Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1979), pp. 170-195.
As the essential embodiment of the postmodern sensibility, Mr. Dick's often poorly-written stories are so loaded with ideas that are characteristic of our times that directors cannot resist the urge to bring his work to the screen. Philip K. Dick's, "Drugs, Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality," in Lawrence Sutin, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick (New York: Pantheon, 1995), pp. 170-171. ("'Inception': A Movie Review" and "'The Matrix': A Movie Review.")
Orwellian suspicions surrounding manipulations of collective memory (history) have led to doubts about the ways in which all of us, as individuals, are altered through the constant reshaping of the meanings of our memories by powerful forces in society seeking not only to control us, but to enlist our energies in efforts to control others and "constitute" our world(s). ("'The Adjustment Bureau': A Movie Review" and "'Unknown': A Movie Review.")
I was amused to notice that, immediately after the first presidential debate between Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney, viewers concluded that the discussion was "about even and very dull." After the shouting heads proclaimed Mr. Romney the winner, the same persons "remembered" that Mr. Romney had done much better in the debate. ("Presidential Debates" and soon: "What is Memory?")
If the world of human meanings is merely an "elaborate fiction" (Baudrillard/Derrida), then our roles as well as the thematic lines of the narratives that we call our "life-stories," or remembered lives, may be reinvented all the time not by ourselves but in accordance with the wishes of power (by which I do not mean simply the state). ("Conversation on a Train.")
Much of the so-called "problematic of memory" has been explored by the thinkers of the Frankfurt School from a political direction through a celebrated fusion of Freud with Marx:
"If we turn our attention to analysing symbolic forms [art] in the context of mass communications [movies] we must confront a new range of methodological problems. These problems stem primarily from the fact, noted earlier, that mass communication institutes a fundamental break between the production and reception of symbolic forms. ... the depth hermeneutical approach, which I develop as a general framework for cultural analysis, can be adapted to the analysis of ideology. ..."
John B. Thompson, "Introduction," Ideology and Modern Culture (Stanford: Stanford U. Press, 1990), p. 22 (emphasis added). Please see also Juan Galis-Menendez, Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Freedom (North Carolina: Lulu, 2004).
If your memories and the meanings of your life's journey is for the government or, say, Hollywood to decide (ideology), then you'll become a mere puppet or robot, a minor actor moved about by a director and writer working from behind the scenes to create the "drama" that is your life. Allegedly, ideology or political programing hidden in everything from t.v. commercials to newscasts, seemingly invisible on the surface of these texts, operating on your subconscious perceptions, determines what you "remember" happening or seeing in the "real" world. The government will remember things for you.
Who won the first presidential debate between Obama and Romney? See Andre Gorz, "The Condition of Post-Marxist Man," in Thomas Doherty, ed., Postmodernism: A Reader (New York: Columbia U. Press, 1993), p. 344 and Terry Eagleton, "Discourse and Ideology," in Ideology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 193-221. ("Antonio Gramsci and Hegemony.")
The ultimate form of dehumanization is total coopting or draining of authenticity for persons transformed into the fools of government agencies or corporations -- persons made into role-players, as I say, in "plots" not of their making that are designed to effectuate their own exploitation.
What is "real" or what is "really happening" is whatever we are told by television stations and other media is the case. Original thought and interpretation is discouraged. The larger narratives in which we find ourselves placed, where we hope to discover our meanings, for most people in contemporary America and (probably) in many other First World states are derived exclusively from movies and television.
History in postmodernist cultures becomes the repackaged recollections of times or events we seem to have lived through and sort of "recall," but which we have understood very differently than our leaders and which are, therefore, reinterpreted so as to be made consistent with official narratives of "our" story. In other words, we must be MADE to see things as our leaders see them as a matter of being "normal."
There is simply nothing more that one can be in postmodernist America than "normal." Luckily, there is little chance that I will be so described. Our biographies are associated with films that coincide with historical events occuring during those years we have "experienced" together that can then be connected to items we may purchase on-line: Batman underwear, James Bond t-shirts, "Total Recall" posters -- all are available on-line for a small price.
Useful sources on these issues include Christopher Norris, "Foucault, Descartes and the Crisis of Reason," in Derrida (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1987), pp. 213-224 and Christopher Norris, "Getting at Truth: Genealogy, Critique and Postmodern Skepticism," in The Truth About Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 257-305 then Douglas Knellner, "Simulation, Hyperreality and Implosion," in Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (Stanford: Stanford U. Press, 1989), pp. 76-84.
We live in comfy prison cells -- like Mr. Quaid's apartment in the movie -- that resemble the settings of our favorite sit-coms or movie adventures.
This raises the question: What is memory? How can memories be so easily manipulated? Does postmodernist culture necessarily involve the invasion of a "subjectivity" we are told does not exist? Why is it convenient for powerful forces in America that the vast bulk of the population is kept "fat, dumb, and happy"?
I. "Even the best illusion is still not real."
If memory may be defined for the moment as "the mind's embodiment of form" and if personality is essentially concerned with how and what we remember as real, then the meanings of our experiences in the story that we tell ourselves of our lives, the ability to transform the point of our memories, is also the power to remake ourselves.
We are -- and can only be -- who we remember ourselves to be. Our remembered narratives explain our intended destinations, intentions, purposes which alone constitute our meanings. Hence, to surrender our memories (in part or totally), through access to the subconscious by way of hypnosis or other violent and unwelcome invasions, is to give up our humanity. This we must never do.
In a media culture cinema becomes the collective memory of a people. Movie screens are the cave wall in which we tell our story of the hunt. Hollywood, like "Total Recall," sells you the memory of adventures "lived" through surrogates in virtual spaces. We can remember it for you wholesale.
This brings us to the plot of this remake which surpasses the original on which it is based.
Colin Farrel is "Douglas Quaid," a factory worker and Walter Mitty-like everyman who will turn out to be a superspy (Houser) involved in an international revolutionary effort to defeat an oppressive military authority controlled by a character bearing a striking resemblance to Mr. Romney.
The movie must have been written during the reign of the Bush/Cheney junta. Real world politics is gestured at in the story that focuses on the metaphysics of power and the vague alternative presented by Bill Nighy, as an Oxbridge version of Che Guevara. Mr. Nighy's character seems to be based on Simon Blackburn mixed with Che. The crux of this issue of identity for the revolutionary leader is how one interprets one's memories now, at this instant of struggle, as a form of commitment. Mathias has been reading Sartre. ("'Che': A Movie Review" and "Time to End the Embargo Against Cuba.")
Mr. Quaid lives in a book-filled home with a beautiful wife, Lori Quaid, played by Kate Beckingsale ("real world" wife of director Len Wiseman). Mr. Farrel provides his best performance on screen as the "stuck-in-a-rut" would-be adventurer and action hero not unlike the vast majority of men in the audience ready for international mystery before their second "Super-Combo." One must earn a second "Super-Combo."
For those who have recently awoken from a coma, a "Super-Combo" is an extra-large dose of popcorn, massive bubbly drink, and one candy item (twizzlers in my case, M&Ms in yours, perhaps).
Is Quaid/Houser "really" made into an agent of conformity even as he believes himself to be a revolutionary? Can our most anti-authoritarian beliefs and actions really be generated by the forces of pacification as yet another mechanism of control? Is it a coincidence that Levis/Coke-Cola manufacture and sell millions of "Che Guevara" t-shirts? Have these massive international corporations become "socialists" or are they just making a buck exploiting young people's radical politics?
Quaid/Houser will discover that his revolutionary efforts have been "scripted" to serve authoritarian purposes. Unless this is all the false memory of an adventure sold to our hero by "Total Recall" as, indeed, the movie's "virtual reality" and simulacra have been sold to audience members, like me.
Is Hollywood "Total Recall"? This is deep, man. The point being that we cannot know for sure. All of which confirms the argument of postmodernist theorists defining our time as an era of inescapable skepticism, suspicion, and doubt as to the very nature of reality. Pass me the popcorn. ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz.")
Lori Quaid will turn out to be an informer for the evil totalitarian authorities. Women. You can't trust them. On the other hand, her mirror-image and fellow mega-babe, "Melina" (played by Jessica Biel), is awesome in tight black leather pants and does some amazing Kung Fu moves. The bitch/babe thing is definitely "hot and happening" in this movie.
In America's national security state, it is increasingly difficult to trust anyone or to establish clear boundaries between public/private in terms of the scope of the law. Techniques of interrogational hypnosis and other forms of manipulation and psychological torture are based on invasion of the psyche for so-called "public purposes" or security reasons. But then, what is not a public purpose? ("Psychological Torture in the American Legal System.")
The absurd or even ridiculous amount of spying on citizens done by the U.S. government has fostered hostilities and paranoia among various ethnic and racial groups. We are lied to so often by politicians and judges as well as corporations and media that "truth" (reality) is almost impossible to recognize or believe anymore. ("Have you no shame, Mr. Rabner?" and "What did you know, Mr. Rabner, and when did you know it?")
Who is Douglas Quaid at each stage in the cinematic story is a function of who he remembers himself to be and what he takes to be his "project." The film dramatizes -- by fragmenting -- the "memory criterion" of identity in metaphysics, but then suggests that memory is now contested territory, something primarily social and not exclusively individual.
Your mind has become a Derridean "text" without an objective or external referent. This makes it ideal for manipulation through alterations by powerful forces that intend to control you or just to sell you something. ("Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author.")
Mr. Quaid is told about "Total Recall" where he can purchase a vacation not from any one particular place to another, but from himself, that is, a vacation from his every day identity as "Douglas Quaid" into another self or identity as a spy. The fiction that is Quaid's "real" identity can be traded-in for another fiction, "Houser," where the individual is an entirely different person, a James Bond-like "superspy" saving the world.
I noticed posters advertising the forthcoming James Bond adventure Skyfall in the very same theater where I saw "Total Recall." I realize that the men in the audience -- I saw the movie with an almost totally male audience -- are the "real" Douglas Quaids taking a psychological "Club Med" vacation for two hours in that air-conditioned movie theater.
It also becomes clear that my need to place the word "real" in quotation marks is the deepest philosophical point of Mr. Wiseman's movie.
Care for a Che Guevara t-shirt? The same people making the James Bond merchandise will sell you items with Che's picture on them ($20.95 for the shirt!), including lunch boxes and kid's clothes featuring the revolutionary hero for your politically-aware nine year-old. Only in the "People's Republic of Manhattan" can I purchase a Noam Chomsky t-shirt for my toddler and another for myself.
A huge bust of the Buddha is seen illustrating "the world is an illusion" insights drawn from Asian religions and transformed into Hollywood smoke-and-mirrors. Mr. Farrel's Quaid says: "Even the best illusion is still not real."
Moments later the men in the audience were ducking the bullets being fired in the movie. The audience member shelling out $15.50 to see the movie is invited to identify with the protagonist -- you almost cannot help doing so -- in a "modest factory job."
The desire for adventure, being at the center of world events and fought over by two beautiful women -- Lori and Melina -- with a guarantee that justice and women in tight leather pants will win in the end (as they often do in life) is simply irresistible for a generation of men whose adventures play out at desks in corporate cubicles or university libraries. This is life as it should be. I do not know whether I can relate to any of this as I lead a safe and dull existence.
The First World versus Third World dynamics, 1% versus 99% divide, is signalled for audience members by the hero's journey from proletarian dullness to First World splendor, as a feature of his daily commute, undertaken as he reads a battered copy of "Casino Royale." An hommage to Ian Fleming's creation is placed at several key points in the movie.
More interestingly, a Hitchcockian "babe-is-also-the-bitch" thing is happening throughout the movie. Should Ms. Beckingsale worry about this? No, Mr. Wiseman should worry. Never trust a beautiful woman in post-feminist America. Hollywood is reflecting male anxieties/fantasies which are often related. Lori and Melina are obviously the same woman.
Does power corrupt sexual relations? Is power ever entirely absent from the male/female dialectic? Will women in the future always be on top? Let us pause to consider these issues.
The look of the film is classic "Tech-Noir" establishing a relationship with predecessors from "Blade Runner" to "Terminator" to "The Matrix" and Mr. Nolan's "Inception." Action sequences are far from "pointless," Ms. Scott, but are deliberately created to mirror "Disney-like" rides. The violence is cartoon violence because the director does not wish to mar your delight by evoking concern for the pain of characters on screen. "They're not REAL," he says.
II. "I give great wife."
Political ironies in the movie were undetected by the Times reviewer, who failed to realize that the plot device suggesting the earth's devastation after chemical warfare resulting in a division between the planet's wealthy northern hemisphere and poor southern hemisphere, mirrored the tensions between the two women contending either for the hero's destruction or salvation. One woman (Lori) is on the side of exploiters; the other (Melina) is on the side of revolutionaries and freedom fighters. Archetypes of feminine power represent the various forces in our world for Mr. Wiseman.
Chancellor Cohagen (Bryan Cranston of AMC's "Breaking Bad") does a respectable Mitt Romney impersonation, by embodying the greedy few, while Bill Nighy's character symbolizes hope for "change we can believe in." The ultimate resource for which the sides are contending is not oil or coal, but the power to define "reality." Who won the presidential debate? ("And Now, A Word From Our Sponsor ...")
Aside from the political sub-text, there is Mr. Wiseman's fascination with women's puzzling and annoying duality. ("They love you then they hate you!")
The deepest point about the action and fun on-screen concerns the fun itself. Is it real? Or is it make-believe? Is she real or is she a fantasy that she thinks I want or expect? ("I recognize you from my dreams!")
No one can answer such questions.
Media cotton candy is celebrated even as serious questions are raised about the role of Hollywood in the system of oppressions by which we are kept in our places. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1976), (G. Spivak, trans.) then Hal Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Wash.: Bay Press, 1985), "deconstruction" versus "anti-aesthetics."
Mr. Farrel is at his best as action hero and everyman, bringing humor and modesty along with a sense of plausibility to this imaginative script and to his role. If there is a combination in this character of Harrison Ford and Woody Allen, then Mr. Farrel is it. Quaid/Houser is Walter Mitty enthralled by the dazzling adventure, like the rest of us, but never late for his job.
Ms. Beckingsale prefers to be evil these days. (Marriage?) Ms. Biel is among the most glamorous actresses in tinsel-land who manages to convey a "happy-to-go-to-the-football" game quality that is the secret of the girlfriend appeal that makes for a lasting career in movies. I must say that the movie seems pretty "realistic" to me. Both women look great with their hair messed-up and no makeup. Care for a twizzler? ("'In Time': A Movie Review.")
"I give great wife!" Lori Quaid responds when confronted by Quaid/Houser with their "real" intimacy. Who can doubt this claim? Evidently, women find it much easier than men to separate the physical side of relationships from their deepest emotions. This movie shows remarkable wisdom and understanding of human relationships on the part of Mr. Wiseman.
More seriously, as 9/11 taught us and Mr. Farrel understands, it is not big muscle men who are often called upon to perform heroically. Ordinary men and women may find themselves doing amazing things out of necessity. One way that people find it possible to do such amazing things is by allowing imagination, through the catharsis of art, to inspire them to achieve what may otherwise be impossible.
This is Mr. Wiseman's subtle suggestion on the reality question. We often make the impossible very possible and real -- because we have to. This may be the most American insight in this movie that goes a long way toward explaining trips to the moon and other "miracles" that allow us to feel confident that America can never be counted out of any struggle for greatness.
It is also encouraging that our bookish hero makes it O.K. for young men in the audience to read, even suggesting that the man with a book in his hands often gets the babe. Women need little encouragement to read. Most serious readers in America are women. It is important to recall, gentlemen, that there are some women who are also interested in our minds.
Conclusion: "I'd like to be a spy!"
Our memories and their meanings are personal, not public spaces subject to invasion by the state. We must struggle to make this clear to government and corporations alike. Subconscious minds must not become territory for advertisements and manipulations -- whether political or commercial messages -- aimed at controlling us. Subliminal messages are now everywhere -- often communicating the opposite of what may be intended by those responsible for them.
At the conclusion of the film, after all the thrills and spills, we realize that by means of Quaid/Houser we have once again "saved the world" from the comfort of our movie seats.
Mr. Farrel manages to convey the impression that he is sitting next to you in the movie theater as well as acting on-screen and will join you when you come to see the Bond film. We have earned the gratitude of the babes in our lives and yet another "Super-Combo."
We'll have to see this movie again on pay-per view. Mr. Wiseman is on the side of revolution and social justice (for a small fee) and of us "regular guys" with whom he identifies. Like most "ordinary guys," Mr. Wiseman enjoys going to the movies.
The struggle for memory is an everyday reality for many persons -- including quite a few working class heros home from the war in Afghanistan suffering from traumatic brain injuries -- to whom this movie should be dedicated. We join you in the struggle for memory and healing.
With insistence on freedom comes the certainty that memories can never be taken from us, but only enriched and "represented' in the screen adventures we are asked to share. My memories are also my freedom:
"Any type of amnesia," Ian Hacking writes, "results in something being stolen from oneself; how much worse if it is replaced by deceptive memories, a nonself."
Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (New Jersey: Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 264.
