Fit for Purpose

Total Recall and the image of the American fascist

In Total Recall (1990), Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger) has a problem he can’t name. He yearns for something he can only visualize in a recurring dream. In his dream, he traverses a ruby-red Martian landscape with a beautiful woman (Rachel Ticotin). They gaze across an untamed alien valley at Olympus Mons like Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.” He strokes her cheek and she smiles; they’re pioneers on an empty planet. Then he slips down a cliff. His helmet cracks, his eyes bulge grotesquely, and he bolts awake feeling scared and suffocated.

Quaid can’t articulate what he needs, but he needs it more than air itself. Yet he has little reason for discontent. He has a middle-class construction job, a spacious apartment, and a beautiful, perceptive wife (Sharon Stone). Despite that, he feels what writer Brad Nelson terms a “subterranean ache.” His wife, Lori, senses this and tries to soothe him to no avail. “No wonder you’re having nightmares. You’re always watching the news,” she says as he fixates on broadcasts about Mars. But she can’t reach him. “Lori, don’t you understand? I feel like I was made for something more than this. I want to do something with my life. I want to be somebody,” Quaid tells her.

On its surface, Verhoeven’s second American film Total Recall (1990) is about a man who pays for a hero fantasy at a memory implantation business only to discover he’s already a hero. Quaid discovers he’s an undercover secret agent, kills his wife, and overthrows a tyrant to liberate the Martian masses. It’s a satire of adolescent adventure stories like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and The Goonies. But unlike those films, Total Recall has subterranean depths to match Quaid’s subterranean aches. The film’s gruesome, camp, and relentlessly denies us confirmation that what we’re seeing is real. “It was extremely important for me... to make a movie that had two levels.. [so] you could never say, ‘Now we are in a dream or now we are in reality,’” director Paul Verhoeven said of the film. 

Total Recall’s ambiguity comes to a head when memory implantation executive Dr. Edgemar visits Quaid midway through the film to tell him his Martian adventure’s a dream. “You’ve suffered a schizoid embolism... a freeform delusion based on our memory tapes,” Edgemar tells him. We’re meant to understand the film could be Quaid’s Martian fantasy: the geyser-like explosion of his pent-up subterranean needs. Edgemar warns him that satiating those needs with self-delusion will rob him of his ability to discern fact from fiction. “With no one to guide you out, you’ll be stuck in permanent psychosis. The walls of reality will come crashing down... back on earth, you’ll be lobotomized,” he tells him. Quaid shoots him in the head in response. Mercenaries crash through the wall, the spy story reasserts itself, and Quaid murders Lori on his way to the deus-ex-machina that oxygenates the planet.

A more adult culture might’ve encouraged Quaid to cope with his existential agony by reconciling mundanity and meaning in his everyday life. But Verhoeven suggests that in America, adolescence never needs to end. You never need to accept the adult world’s foreclosed possibilities. For the right price, you can buy your dreams wholesale. 

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Total Recall’s a funny movie. It features a three-breasted prostitute, psychic mutant babies, and dialogue so unselfconsciously campy it’s a pleasure to listen to. I belly laughed hearing Schwarzenegger excitedly shout “Aliens built it!” when asked how the Martian oxygenation machine works. It’s self-aware satire: Verhoeven knows what’s absurd about Indiana Jones and Star Wars and plays it for laughs.

But Quaid’s murder of his wife suggests darker social commentary. Before Quaid kills Lori, she implores him to join her in reality. “I love you... I’d never do anything to hurt you. I want you to come back to me,” she tells him. “Bullshit,” he says in response. He remorselessly shoots her shortly after. The camera lingers on her forehead with a bullet in it. It’s a serious moment in an otherwise silly film.

Lori psychologically carries the can for Quaid’s existential dissatisfaction. In his fantasy, she’s a duplicitous seductress tasked with keeping him from achieving his true potential. Verhoeven initially presents her as a perceptive and perturbed wife, but Quaid fashions her into an obstacle to overcome on his hero’s journey. Her murder becomes inevitable: she has to die so his fantasy can live. 

Quaid’s murder of Lori isn’t the result of sociopathy but an inability to express anything more complex than adolescent emotion. He can’t articulate his frustration with words so he does so with a gun. His personal misogyny has political implications. Fascistic violence, Verhoeven seems to suggest, isn’t the product of some nebulous evil but a willingness to eliminate discomfort with force. 

If Verhoeven’s first American film, Robocop (1987), locates dystopia amidst Detroit’s crumbling infrastructure and his third, Starship Troopers (1997), does so in a gleaming fascist future where people purge all emotion through ultraviolence, Total Recall does so in the dissatisfied working man’s mind. It’s less a societal cross-section than a Knausgårdian close-up on how a normal man becomes a Nazi.

In that context, the schizoid embolism—a freeform delusion fashioned from affirmation fantasy, TV news, and advertising—feels like Verhoeven’s indictment of the American moviegoing audience itself. Total Recall was styled in the genre of popular children’s media like Star Wars and Indiana Jones. But unlike George Lucas's films, Verhoeven’s work suggests using affirmation fantasy to fashion a new identity can facilitate a kind of lobotomy. One loses the ability to distinguish fact from fiction and can justify hurting anyone under the imprimatur of righteous self-actualization. Willingly embracing self-delusion requires silencing contradictions. At a certain point, it’s easier to kill those contradictions than keep them quiet.

Critics took issue with Total Recall’s plot contradictions. Gene Siskel described it as a film that “begins splendidly with good humor and great special effects” until Schwarzenegger arrives on Mars, at which point it begins to “self-destruct” and “degenerate into... a mechanical wrestling match.” Janet Maslin at The New York Times was even more cutting. She criticized Sharon Stone and Rachel Ticoten’s characters as being poorly thought-out “hybrid hooker-commandos” and the deus ex machina of the alien nuclear reactor that can “quite literally clean up the atmosphere, wipe out pollution and bring about blue skies,” as absurd.

Siskel and Maslin were right, but neither considered Verhoeven might’ve made the film intentionally absurd. If one accepts that Total Recall’s a dream, it makes sense that the story wouldn’t make sense. The women would be unrealistic because they’re a construction worker’s Madonna-whore fantasy. Quaid’s psychological corruption would breed narrative corruption. Siskel and Maslin’s reviews of the film seem predicated on the idea that Total Recall’s supposed to deliver an experience like a cinematic theme park ride. But what if Verhoeven, a Dutch Nazi occupation survivor, wanted the audience to feel uncomfortable? What if he wanted to indict this genre’s narrative incoherence? What if he wanted us to feel self-conscious about how readily we consume this dreck?

Even Verhoeven’s casting of Schwarzenegger seems responsive to rising 80s right-wing sentiment. Schwarzenegger’s performance is flat and one-note: he lacks Harrison Ford’s charisma, Paul Newman’s subtlety and seems incapable of complex emotion or diction. Rita Kempley in The Washington Post describes his acting as “unusually oafish... a cross between Frankenstein's monster, a hockey puck with swollen glands and Col. Klink. “Other reviewers write he “stretches beyond his reach” and “keeps real emotion at bay.” Schwarzenegger’s poor work serves the narrative—he’s less an interesting presence than a slab of sexless muscle. Much like Ronald Reagan, he’s a void: a vessel piloted by others to drive a more complex plot forward. 

As Aaron Bady notes in his Andor review, Luke Skywalker wants to go to the Imperial Academy before he becomes a rebel hero. Indiana Jones could just as easily work for the Reich as he does for Roosevelt. With Total Recall, Verhoeven makes a film that exposes this film genre’s blank ideological interchangeability. Stripped of propagandistic purpose, Quaid’s just a mild-mannered man with a propensity for unthinkable violence. Had he lived in 1930s Germany, he’d have been a Nazi. Had he lived in 1970s America, he’d have committed atrocities in Vietnam. Were he alive today, he’d be a prime target for internet radicalization. His refusal to reckon with his chthonic needs makes him vulnerable to anyone who’ll soothe them. In Total Recall, Verhoeven showed the Reagan-era action-adventure hero is also the ideal fascist footsoldier. Like many contemporary men, Quaid’s empty, dissatisfied, and waiting to be implanted with a reason to kill. All he needs is the right story.