A Dream of Revolution

Total Recall, the Red Pill, and Reality  

by Trevor Drinkwater

“I don’t wanna spoil it for you, Doug. But you rest assured: by the time the trip is over, you get the girl, kill the bad guys, and save the entire planet.”

That’s how the salesman at Rekall pitches you the deluxe “secret agent” package, an artificial memory implant that will give you a whole new identity, or at least the illusion of one. Soon, however, you’ll learn that you really are a secret agent and the ordinary life you thought you had was an illusion. And sure enough, everything he promised you in that imaginary adventure ends up coming true. You have to consider the possibility that none of this is real, that it’s all in your head. But you don’t really believe that. You can’t believe it. Because the dream feels too real. The dream shows you what a better world might look like. You’re not ready to wake up.

***

In a pivotal scene in Total Recall, our hero Douglas Quaid is visited by a mysterious man who informs him that he’s trapped in a delusion. In order to escape to the real world, the stranger explains, Quaid must swallow a red pill.

We’ve heard this one before: Nine years later, a similar proposition in The Matrix would inject the “red pill” and the “blue pill” into the popular lexicon as emblems of the choice between harsh truth and blissful ignorance. And now that famous red pill has taken on a whole new life of its own.

Originally adopted by men’s rights activists to signify their awakening to the reality that the world around them is an oppressive gynocracy, the term “red-pilled” is now more broadly associated with the alt-right philosophy and those who subscribe to it.

But although The Matrix was the inspiration for the term,Total Recall’s red pill scene may be even more relevant, symbolically speaking. After all, Quaid epitomizes a central archetype of incel mythology: the “Chad.” Played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in a career-best performance, he’s a big, meaty hunk and a man of action who’s effortlessly irresistible to women. (By contrast, The Matrix’s Neo, with his pale complexion and computer-based lifestyle, resembles the Chad’s frail counterpart, the “Virgin.”)

Although The Matrix was the inspiration for the term,Total Recall‘s red pill scene may be even more relevant.

As a Chad, Quaid naturally has his pick between a “Stacy” and a “Becky” (more incel terminology), two women who represent his two very different lives. In his regular life on Earth, he has Lori, his beautiful blonde Stacy of a wife. Incel reasoning tells us she’s the one he should want, since a Chad has no interest in the “lesser female specimen” of a Becky. Accordingly, when the man with the red pill arrives at Quaid’s hotel room, he brings along Lori, whose obvious allure ought to entice him back to so-called reality. But Quaid really loves Melina, the dark-haired Martian sex worker/rebel fighter of his dreams, and he’s become entangled in her struggle for liberation.

The stranger, who identifies himself as Dr. Edgemar from Rekall, insists that Melina isn’t real. Plausibly, he explains that Quaid suffered a schizoid embolism while receiving a memory implant and has been stuck in a fantasy ever since. According to Edgemar, an adventure on Mars is exactly the fake memory that Quaid purchased back at Rekall, and Melina is just like the woman he described to the technicians—the same woman he’s been seeing in his dreams. Dr. Edgemar can help him wake up from his psychosis and come back to reality—back to Lori—but only if he cooperates. Unlike Neo, Quaid isn’t offered a choice. There is no blue pill.

***

When Total Recall came to theaters in 1990, director Paul Verhoeven had already demonstrated his unique mastery of blood-soaked Hollywood spectacle with 1987’s RoboCop. But with this next project, he pushed the form to even greater heights.

Loosely based on the Philip K. Dick story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” Total Recall reassembles the pieces of a summer blockbuster into an odd portrait of a future that functions equally well as a thrilling adventure story and a bitterly funny satire.

As he did in RoboCop, the Dutch filmmaker depicts violence with a frankness that cuts through the veil of irony to confront the audience with the casual brutality of action cinema. Both movies often feel like dark reflections of American culture, the work of a nosy outsider digging through our garbage and putting it on display.

At the time of its release, Total Recall was one of the most expensive movies ever made, and it shows. Arriving at the tail end of the era of practical effects, it features some of the most stunning uses of prosthetics, miniatures, and puppetry ever captured on film, creating the kind of grotesquely captivating images that CGI can’t quite replicate even 30 years later. Indeed, the visual effects team, including the legendary Rob Bottin, received a well-deserved Special Achievement Award at the Oscars for their efforts. Bottin’s puppets possess an otherworldly quality that underscores the illusory nature of the story, but their texture is disturbingly real.

Though the film interrogates the distinction between reality and fantasy, it does so without pretension. It doesn’t build an elaborate puzzle for you to solve, and it doesn’t seek to dazzle you with the depth of its insight. What it does instead is lay out a deceptively simple narrative that hinges on two opposed versions of reality. The tension between them enhances the conflict at every turn, sowing doubt without detracting from the power of the action onscreen. Within the confines of a brawny scifi action-adventure, Verhoeven and his screenwriters give us a neat little allegory about dreams and the fragility of truth, back when Christopher Nolan’s Inception was just a twinkle in Satoshi Kon’s eye.

Whether real or imagined, Douglas Quaid’s exploits have political implications that resonate now more than ever.

The plight of the mutated residents of the Mars mining colony brings to mind the hellish working conditions at modern tech giants as well as the precarious lives of those in the Global South under neoliberal hegemony. Corrupt Mars governor Vilos Cohaagen is equal parts Jeff Bezos and Donald Rumsfeld, ruthlessly dominating the colony’s economy with a military at his disposal to put down any attempt at rebellion. Cohaagen’s rationing of breathable air, a racket buoyed by his deliberate suppression of ancient Martian terraforming technology, is a pointed embodiment of artificial scarcity. (What would Elon Musk do if he ever actually made it to Mars? Probably exactly this.)

The plight of the mutated residents of the Mars mining colony brings to mind the hellish working conditions at modern tech giants.

Some might call it ironic that the social reactionaries of the alt-right have organized a belief system around a movie written and directed by two trans women. But in the abstract, it’s easy to see how the central conceit of The Matrix slots into their rather simplistic worldview.

Feeling much like Neo does early on in the story—that something is not quite right about the world around them—these young men long for the guidance of a Morpheus, a wise paternal figure whose authority they innately trust. Mysterious yet benevolent, Morpheus is exactly who the Mike Cernoviches and Jordan Petersons of our world aspire to be. From the moment he’s introduced, neither Neo nor the audience feels any reason to doubt him. The only conflict for Neo when faced with that fateful choice of pills is whether or not he really wants to know the truth. Morpheus, the humble teacher, will oblige him either way.

On the contrary, Recall’s Dr. Edgemar is quite pushy about his version of reality, of which Quaid is understandably skeptical. He clearly has a vested interest in convincing Quaid to swallow that pill and, despite his authoritative manner, there’s an unmistakable air of desperation to him. This brings to mind the way a Cernovich or a Peterson may appear to those of us who are not already indoctrinated, and his red pill even resembles the nootropics and other snake oils we often see these types peddling to their followers. To put an even finer point on it, one could say that Dr. Edgemar is the Virgin to Morpheus’s Chad.

To test Edgemar’s resolve, Quaid points a loaded gun right at his head. If this is all an illusion and neither of them are really there, then surely the doctor won’t mind if Quaid pulls the trigger? “It won’t make the slightest difference to me Doug,” Edgemar answers, “but the consequences to you will be devastating.” He predicts a series of outlandish delusions that Quaid will suffer for rejecting his guidance, all of which will indeed come to pass before the movie ends, further complicating our interpretation of the truth.

Though we have ample reason not to trust him, there’s an undeniable logic to the story Edgemar wants us to believe, and the film will not settle this discrepancy for us. Instead, it keeps these two competing versions of reality in constant dialogue with each other, not unlike the way that opposing political narratives play off of one another in our own lives.

With no Morpheus to guide us, the burden falls to us—like Quaid, the hero—to reconcile all the conflicting information being thrown at us. Where The Matrix is prescriptive, Total Recall is dialectical.

For a moment, Quaid is almost convinced. But just as he’s about to swallow the pill, a conspicuous bead of sweat appears on Dr. Edgemar’s forehead, giving our hero all the evidence he needs to call the doctor’s bluff. And in the most Chad-like possible fashion, he puts a bullet in Edgemar’s head and spits the red pill out, decisively asserting his own view of reality. 

Then again, if we choose to believe as Quaid does, that this whole Mars adventure is really happening, then he’s not really Quaid at all. He’s actually Carl Hauser, a top operative for the Agency who infiltrated the rebel movement on Vilos Cohaagen’s behalf before switching sides, and Douglas Quaid was just the fake name given to him when he had his memory wiped. Ostensibly, Hauser is the dreamer and Quaid is the dream—but, knowing this, he still insists in no uncertain terms that he is Quaid. To him, Hauser is not him but a past version of him that he doesn’t remember, one who gives him condescending instructions in pre-recorded video messages. He doesn’t seem to trust Hauser any more than he did Dr. Edgemar, even though Hauser is himself.

The messy moral complications of real-life revolutionary violence are mostly absent. But it’s a fantasy worth believing in.

As it turns out, Quaid is right not to trust himself. In the film’s final twist (“the best mind-fuck yet” in Quaid’s own words), it’s revealed that he’s been setting himself up all along. All of this was just a convoluted scheme by Cohaagen and Hauser to trick him(self) into leading them to the rebels’ hideout so they can crush the uprising once and for all. As Quaid, he really has been trapped in an illusion, whether or not it’s the one that Dr. Edgemar described. The question then for Quaid, as it is for us, is not whether he wants to face the truth, but what exactly is the lie and who is telling it to him. The world may be illusory by nature, but if it’s possible to escape, it can never be as simple as taking a pill.

Now that Quaid has fulfilled his function, Cohaagen wants to restore his old memories and turn him back into Hauser. Quaid, of course, can’t allow that. So he breaks free of the memory implanting device, he and Melina defeat Cohaagen together, and Hauser is no more. The dream usurps the dreamer, and the revolution prevails. And ultimately, the question of what was and wasn’t real is immaterial, because obviously none of this is real. It’s just a movie, a fantasy.

As is often the case in movies, triumph comes to those who’ve earned it, and the messy moral complications of real-life revolutionary violence are mostly absent. But it’s a fantasy worth believing in, because the alternative is surrender.

To be red-pilled is to embrace your own powerlessness. It’s a loser’s philosophy. Those of us who want revolution must be brave enough to believe that it’s possible in spite of all evidence to the contrary. If permanent defeat is the reality of the waking world, then it’s not a world worth waking up to.

***

In the end, you have your moment of doubt. Looking out over the newly-terraformed Martian horizon, it hits you. “I just had a terrible thought,” you say to Melina. “What if this is all a dream?” Melina—perfect, dreamlike—is unfazed. Her response: “Well then, kiss me quick before you wake up.”

And so you kiss, basking together in the illusion of possibility. The people rise up, the tyrant falls, and air on Mars is free for everyone.

Don’t wake up. Don’t take the red pill. Believe in the dream.

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