Total Recall

Total Recall has been remade and will be released next week. It is perhaps an obvious choice for a remake – contemporary CGI, modern taste for realism and irony, and better actors (Colin Farrell, Jessica Biel and Kate Beckinsale), have the potential to make it a huge, rollercoaster of a blockbuster. I wonder, however, how much of the sinister play with reality and memory the new version will retain. The strap-line on its posters says ‘What is Real?’, suggesting that this will be a major theme in the film. In the original, we remain uncertain until quite late in the movie as to whether anything we see is actually happening or not. There is a scene in which the people trying to capture Quaid/Hauser (played by Schwarzenegger) attempt to persuade him that he is dreaming, that he is not really a spy on Mars, but an ordinary construction worker on Earth. He sees through this lie and manages to escape, but the dilemma is crucial to the film and how it manipulates its audience. We are the real construction workers on Earth, fantasising that we might be spies on Mars. We are placing ourselves in the shoes of Quaid/Hauser, and this scene in which he is told he is dreaming is ultimately directed at us. It speaks directly to us, and the lie is actually the truth. The film as a whole rather than encouraging us to believe we can be more than construction workers, in fact reinforces our position as such. It gives us this fantasy, allows us to play with it for two hours, so that we might accept reality more happily. I’m also fascinated by the many questions that Quaid/Hauser’s identity raises for us. For Quaid, Hauser is a different person, someone he cannot be, and this is in fact how all of us treat our past and future selves. They are distinct from us, yet we recognise whilst repressing the inevitable links. There’s an metafictive play with the names, too: Quaid is Irish-American and Hauser is German-Dutch. The film was directed by Verhoeven (a Ducthman) with American money. Significant? I don’t know. I await with both excitement and concern this new version. It will have lost the quirks of Verhoeven’s direction – the fast changes of situation, the panning camera, zooming in from a distance on its target – but what will it have gained?