Total Recall: Real or Imagined?

Since Total Recall came out in 1990, the concept of a thriller in which the story may or may not be what it seems has (happily, in my opinion) become increasingly commonplace.

Upon repeat viewing of the film, regarded as a seminal piece of ambiguous cinema from the perspective of an unreliable narrator, I was actually surprised at how unambiguous the story is. The film is really rather clear cut with all it's hinting that it's pretty obvious that none of the action we see is "real life".

I haven't seen many interpretations of the script, but in my opinion the film is actually pretty damn overt at painting Douglas Quaid's adventures as product of a delusion.

So what happened to Quaid over the course of the movie?

In my opinion, Quaid's initial dreams of Mars at the beginning of the movie were actually just his own insecurities from his daily life on Earth rather than any real memories of Mars. He's unhappy with his simple job and bored with his wife's lack of ambition. His dreams of Mars simply represent him in a fantasy world of adventure with a fictional woman who is better matched with him.

Rekall made a mistake while planting the memories in his head that made him lapse into some kind of psychosis (though everything after his initial passing out is part of his dream/delusion). The scene where he thrashes about and gets sedated, and the scene in which they talk about how he has previous Mars memories in the lab is also part of the dream.

Quaid then goes around living out this insane dream where he's a masterful action hero though it's actually a combination of his own mind making it up (due to the psychosis from the botched operation) and the rough framework of the story Rekall were in the process of creating for him.

Doctor Edgemar's attempt to reach Quaid is legitimate, and Quaid essentially destroyed his last hope of restoring his mental state to normalcy when he shot him. This is because Edgemar represents rationality and the knowledge (even in Quaid's own mind) that he is in a delusional dream. Destroying him shatters the rational side of Quaid's brain, just as the Doctor suggested, and traps him in the dream.

In the end of the movie, he is actually physically still sat in the Rekall labs, and is lobotomised because they cannot help him.

 Okay, that's all very cool. But what evidence backs that theory up?

Let's take a look!

1. The plot is predicted several times, and is too contrived and implausible to be real.

After Quaid escapes the Rekall centre, everything the Sales Rep told him would happen in his dream happens pretty much exactly as he said. This occurs a second time when Doctor Edgemar again correctly predicts everything that happens in the story after he is shot.

Quaid goes from being an everyman to suddenly becoming a lethal secret agent who wreaks havoc on his many relentless enemies. He has enemies everywhere, even the people he hangs out with day to day are aggressive and conspiring to kill him.

He meets a hot brunette chick on Mars (exactly as he specified at Rekall). He goes on to help a downtrodden resistance destroy a powerful, evil oppressor and then terraforms Mars instantly using crazy alien technology. The Rekall technician even predicts this with his "Blue Sky on Mars?" comment in the lab.

The burst of oxygen the alien equipment releases just happens to happily save everyone from an implausibly drawn out death, allowing him to share a big ol' snog with the woman of his dreams right at the end of the movie. He even remarks to himself "Is this a dream?"

And then, rather than the traditional fade to black, the screen whites out somewhat alarmingly.

Doesn't this all seem rather too neat for a "real" story? The ending even seems almost to share the same reality as his dream right at the start of the film, suggesting his mind is trapped now in some kind of a loop. These events all fit exactly with a Rekall package gone wrong, even up the alarming white out, which coincides with poor Quaid being lobotomised.

2. The ludicrous nature of the action sequences.

Quaid goes from being a bog-standard construction worker to suddenly killing huge numbers of armed opponents left and right with all manner of weapons and even his bare hands.

If he really was a special agent with a suppressed memory, he would of course be dangerous. But his sheer lethality and survivability is too ridiculous to be real.

Early after his trip to Rekall, his best friend Harry and three burly thugs abruptly grab hold of him and the men pin him against a wall while Harry trains a gun on him. Harry is about four feet away from Douglas.

Douglas gets out of this situation by leaning back against the wall and kicking Harry and another man. Instead of the men just wrestling Quaid back to the wall and Harry simply shooting Quaid dead, Harry and the other man collapse as if they've been hit by a truck.

Quaid then quickly beats up the men holding his arms, karate chops one in the face, snaps Harry's neck, easily snaps another dude's neck and then shoots his remaining two assailants dead without batting an eyelid. He then runs away, dropping the gun to the floor, and none of the pedestrians walking only 10 feet above on the overpass seem at all worried or concerned about all the screaming and gunshots. Absolutely bizarre, unless this is not really happening.

This kind of nonsense is echoed in almost all of the action scenes in the movie. Quaid's pistol never seems to run out of ammunition. In another early scene Quaid shoots a whole bunch of goons armed with automatic weapons while riding on an escalator, using only a dead body for cover. Four men shooting at him with futuristic machine-guns, and not one bullet even grazes him or goes through the bullet riddled corpse? Again, highly implausible, but very likely in a power fantasy Quaid is creating for himself.

3. Quaid's own insecurities and disdain for his real life turn his friends and loved ones into his enemies in his dream world.

When we first see Quaid's wife she seems to love him, though his craving for brunettes in his dreams and his irritation with her desire for a quiet life suggests he is perhaps less satisfied with her. When we meet his friend Harry, he is friendly and discourages Quaid from going to Rekall because (at least in his view) they frequently fuck up and their customers end up lobotomised. Quaid seems a little put out by this comment, because he wants to go to Rekall.


After the Rekall trip Harry is somehow magically waiting for Quaid at the overpass near his apartment. Quaid could have bailed out of the cab anywhere, but Harry happens to be waiting at the exact spot! He has instantly become a generic violent thug, backed up by three anonymous rent-a-henchmen. He is extremely aggressive, loudly grabs Quaid off of a populated street with no alarm or fuss raised by passers-by and then ineptly tries to kill him while rambling incoherently about some spy-related nonsense.

Shortly before attacking Quaid, Harry says "I told you not to [go to Rekall], but you did, remember?" Quaid replies with "What are you, my father?"

This is Quaid mentally voicing his feelings of irritation towards Dream Harry that he felt in the real world when Real Harry told him not to go. This feeling that he is being undermined and told what to do by people around him is why Quaid's subconscious turns Harry into an evil caricature of himself; Dream Harry becomes a malevolent minder spying on him and trying to control him.

Similarly, Quaid's wife has suddenly become an agent sent to spy on him and coerce him to take his life in a fake, unwanted direction. This character change is particularly outlandish and nonsensical - but makes perfect sense in Quaid's fantasy. Her attempt to control him mirrors his real wife's differing aspirations for their life together.

Not only is she inept in her attempt to kill or subdue him (completely missing him from only the other side of the room with her pistol with multiple shots) but after engaging in a brutal physical fight with him they both sit down quietly and she suddenly tries to offer him kinky sex.

This makes absolutely zero sense in reality and the scene is beyond odd. He was a second away from shooting her in the head, and she tried to stab him to death with a kitchen knife! It seems like a completely laughable attempt at trickery - something utterly see-through and paper-thin.

Remember Quaid admits at Rekall that he likes sleazy women. He even says to his wife in this scene that she never seemed that kinky before, and then she again tries to get him interested in getting physical, saying that perhaps he just never asked her if she was into that stuff.

This makes perfect sense if the whole scene is in Quaid's head - his wife is being more passionate, sleazy and sexy, as he wants her to be. However, he still bludgeons her unconscious and runs away, suggesting that he still wants his fantasy brunette, feels distant to her in reality and they have some deeper fundamental problems in their relationship.

4. The dream is not as Rekall intended, because Rekall would not use people in Quaid's life as characters in the dream. That would be insane and unsafe.

Rekall want to offer you a crazy but manageable adventure that will give you cool memories. This means that their memory packages must be designed to fit into your real life seamlessly (and without giving you lasting trauma!) when you're finished with the "trip".

They offer Quaid the woman of his dreams and a host of other fake, made-up characters to play with. In contrast, his adventure contains a lot of people he interacts with in his daily life, all of which are doing evil things to undermine him.

Building someone a memory package in which you brutally kill your own wife and best friend after finding out they've betrayed you would be totally unethical, and probably far too undesirable and horrifying for a "holiday package"! You'd come back to reality and be totally confused and fucked up when you return home and see your wife and best friend again. Definitely not good for repeat business and definitely not the actions of a family-friendly company that would advertise on the train.

At the same time (as covered above), the ridiculous personality changes these people from his life have after his visit to Rekall and how their behaviour ties into Quaid's subconscious opinion of these people in reality means that the events of the film being "real" is also totally implausible.

So the only logical conclusion is that Rekall messed up his dream and he is now in a psychotic dream state.

5. Doctor Edgemar's attempt to help Quaid is legitimate.

Edgemar's prediction that the "walls of reality will collapse" if he dies is proven true when the walls of the room are literally blown up by baddies moments after his death. His other predictions, which mirror the Rekall Rep's own predictions, continue to come true. Combined with the white flash at the end of the movie, this lends credence to his words.
 
The Doctor himself may truly be beaming himself into Quaid's head via some kind of futuristic technology and/or drugs, or...more likely, he represents Quaid's logic and rational knowledge, deep down, that he is in a psychotic delusion half of his own making and half of Rekall's.

This part of Quaid's brain appears as Doctor Edgemar because Quaid remembers him from the train ad and thinks of him as a voice of knowledge and reason.

Quaid's brain is saying to itself "You're strapped in a chair in a shitty lab. You can still wake up. But you have to make a decision to do it. Wake up."

Of course, I imagine the "Doctor" would have had far better success convincing Quaid to wake up if he'd appeared in a quiet room alone with him and had quietly asked him to shake his hand rather than rage at him angrily and tell him to swallow a pill.

"If you shake my hand you will wake up." He could have said.

However, the appearance and mannerisms of "Dr. Edgemar" in this dream are created by Quaid's psychosis. At this point the part of Quaid's brain that is in control and fuelling this fantasy is highly irrational and is eager to believe his dream because he is enjoying it more than his real life.

Thus "Doctor Edgemar" appears in suspicious circumstances, offering a dubious pill. He also acts like an antagonistic, angry character who Quaid eventually believes is trying to trick him into a trap for this reason.

Perhaps if Quaid had thought more about his situation earlier, "Edgemar" would have arrived earlier and would have been less aggressive in trying to convince him, possibly with success.

The sweat on "Edgemar" could be caused by Quaid's logical side realising that he's completely screwed and will be lobotomised because Psychosis Quaid will not see reason.

Alternatively, the sweat appears because Psychosis Quaid wants to remain in the dream, and the bead of sweat gives him an excuse to reject reality, kill "Edgemar" and continue with his fantasy until the point of his death in reality at the end of the movie.


6. The film is riddled with lapses of logic and bizarre subversions of common sense that only make sense in a dream.

- Why does Quaid not stop to interrogate Harry's henchman when he has him at gunpoint? Yes, the man is moving towards him to attack, but he is unarmed. Quaid desperately needed information and could have simply jammed the gun into the man's stomach and told him to freeze. He didn't need to because the situation wasn't real.

- How exactly does Quaid get to Mars? And without any kind of screening on leaving Earth? We never see the trip, he just suddenly appears there.

- Isn't it terribly convenient that the only way for Quaid to escape the conspiracy is to travel to Mars?

- Why do all the events in the film completely correlate with everything he was sold at Rekall?

- Why would an evil corporate mastermind go to all the trouble of a crazy mind-wipe gambit with a dangerous agent who could flip-flop to either side when he could either just have him killed to remove the threat to his leadership or simply find a simpler way to wipe out the rebels?

- Out of all the female agents you could romantically pair up with Quaid to monitor him, why would you pick the girlfriend of your second-in-command? If there was a conspiracy afoot to control Quaid's movements, they could have just let Quaid meet a random woman, it would have deepened his illusion of a quiet life further. Instead they let him bang the girlfriend of a man high up in the conspiracy. Even the villains are incredulous at this. Again, this makes zero sense except as Quaid ego-massaging himself as The Big Man Secret Agent in a dream.

- Why do the asphyxiating characters turn bright red and start screaming with their eyes bulging out? In reality, you would simply die quickly much like you would on Earth. However, in Quaid's dream in the beginning of the movie, this is what his brain processes the idea of asphyxiating like. In my mind, this is another huge clue that the movie is occurring as a dream.

In Summary

We've been through a lot! And there's probably a whole lot more I haven't covered, such as most of the Mars plot-line in fact. But since in my opinion the plot is almost certainly a fictional dream even based on the overwhelming evidence from the first 30 minutes of the film, there seems to be little point.

I think another interesting question this poses is the same question addressed in the movie Shutter Island: is it better to live a fake (dream) life in which you are who you want to be, even if it is not real and you are doomed in reality? Or is it better to choose a drearier reality?

Edgemar gives Quaid that choice, and he chooses doom in real life preceded by a fantastic fake reality in his mind...which is both kind of tragic and yet, in a very odd way, a bittersweet happy ending at the same time. Quaid never got his crazy trip to Mars or his brunette babe who he truly loved...he just thought he did. And he gave up his real wife and life for that illusion.

So what do you think? Do you agree or disagree? Let me know in the comments :)