10.13125/2039-6597/1325
Recent remakes of iconic science fiction films such as Total Recall, far from merely reproducing cultural landscapes from the past, are actively producing new constructions of categories of identity such as gender and sexuality. In particular, in the two filmic adaptations of Philip K. Dick’s short story “We Can Remember it for you Wholesale” by Paul Verhoeven in 1990 and Len Wiseman in 2012, memory is a metaphor for the historical accountability of hegemonic masculinity—or the lack thereof. Dick’s original text and both Total Recall adaptations can be read as revisionist approaches to the past through a dystopian vision of the future, which, in turn, is but a projection of present anxieties of masculinities in crisis. A comparative analysis of the amnesiac heroes presented in these three sci-fi texts will thus offer an insight into the way in which futuristic action men ‘recall’ present and past discourses on power. Indeed, memory constitutes the narrative mechanism that allows collective and individual realities to be questioned and re-imagined through the intra-textual and inter-textual references present in the three texts in question.
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Amaya Fernández-Menicucci
Between
Memory
Memories of Future Masculine Identities: A Comparison of Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember it for you Wholesale”, the 1990 Film <i>Total Recall</i> and its 2012 Remake
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
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Narratives of the Technological Imagination
2014-12-17
2014-09-21
2014-11-30
2015-01-13
1
Amaya Fernández-Menicucci
2014/12/17
10.13125/2039-6597/1325
Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha
2039-6597
8
Memory
en
Memories of Future Masculine Identities: A Comparison of Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember it for you Wholesale”, the 1990 Film <i>Total Recall</i> and its 2012 Remake
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/1325/1171
4
    Memories of Future Masculine
 Identities: A Comparison of Philip K.
 Dick’s “We Can Remember it for you
 Wholesale”, the 1990 Film Total Recall
          and its 2012 Remake
                   Amaya Fernández-Menicucci


         Imagined memories of masculine identities

        But what I’ve really done is, I have atavised [my characters’]
     society. That although it’s set in the future, in many ways they’re
     living—there is a retrogressive quality in their lives, you know?
     They’re living like our ancestors did. I mean, the hardware is in
     the future, the scenery’s in the future, but the situations are really
     from the past. (Philip K. Dick quoted in Spivard 1990: i)


     Memory as a process of identity construction is at the heart of the
three texts I discuss in this paper: Philip K. Dick’s short story “We Can
Remember it for you Wholesale”, published in 1966, but written in the
1950s; the 1990 film Total Recall directed by Paul Verhoeven; and Len
Wiseman’s 2012 version of the latter by the same titled. In each of these
three texts, a man struggles to remember who he was, as he discovers
that his present identity has been artificially implanted in his brain,
after all previous memories of his true self were erased. However, the
three texts do not rely on memory as the only mechanism of self-
construction. Indeed, fantasy and desire emerge as the first strategies



Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)
Amaya Fernández-Menicucci, Memories of Future Masculine Identities



of self-building. The ‘new’ past that is being revealed is, in fact,
identical to the fantastic visions that had been animating the main
character’s dreams for as long as he can remember. The future of self-
projection and the alternative presents of fantasy aptly precede the past
of memories in these sci-fi narratives. In their fictional ‘cosmoi’,
identity is the result of a combination of unconscious desire, obsessive
and ever-present yearnings, submerged memories, conscious
recollection and self-narration. Identity is thus relying on three
fundamental channels for its development: memory as continual
existence, fantasy as propelling desire, and consciousness as self-
narrative. Each of these represent the way in which the self
understands and elaborates on, respectively, the past, future and
present versions of the self.
      At first sight, it would appear that all three texts in question
revolve around an idea of memory based on Andy Clark’s and David
Chalmers’s theory of the extended mind (1998). Technology operates
both within and without the main character’s mind, affecting and
shaping internal and external ‘realities’ alike, so that there is no clear
demarcation between the dimensions of the tangible and of the psyche.
Furthermore, the fact that all three texts consistently elude a definite
version of reality is reminiscent of postcolonial understandings of
memory as an imagined territory, to draw upon Salman Rushdie’s
Imaginary Homelands (2010). In this sense, to recall is to reinvent the
past according to desire-driven configurations. Nevertheless, both
Dick’s short story and the two Total Recall films resist and defy
attempts to define memory, fantasy and self-narrative except in
relation to one another. A working definition of their relationship
could be phrased as follows: memory is a discursive account of the
past self which results from the often conflictual interaction of external
(alien) and internal (self-generated) narratives of the self. In other
words, memory, as we shall see later on, is compound of and identical
to the various ‘stories’ that are told about the past self by the present
self, as well as by other characters. Whether these ‘stories’, or
narratives of the self, are true or not—and to what extent they are—
cannot be fathomed. Ultimately, these narratives of the self are all


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fictional in ‘potentia‘. The fact that some of them coincide with the
self’s wildest fantasies contributes to blur the boundaries between
reality and desire.
      Since Verhoeven’s Total Recall is an adaptation of Dick’s story for
the silver screen, and Wiseman’s film is, in turn, a remake of
Verhoeven’s, memory is here fundamental not only in the process of
intra-textual self-narration, but also in the process of inter-textual re-
construction of the narrative itself. From a postmodernist point of
view, the latter process is negotiated through the ongoing dialogue
established with the text by the writer-reader binomial. Spectators’
memories of an earlier version of a given text ultimately influence each
successive interpretative act. What is more, to re-produce the original
text in a different form is a creative act in itself, even more so if the
result is radically different as far as the intentional expression of
meaning is concerned (Palmer 2007: 3-7). Hollywood’s current
tendency to resort to remakes1 could be seen as a mere attempt to
capitalise on formats that have already proven to be commercially
successful. However, to analyse those remakes from the perspective of
gender studies is to take into consideration how ideals of masculinity
and femininity have evolved through past socio-cultural contexts and
into the present one. It would then be interesting to investigate the
extent to which futuristic scenarios of technological progress become
but a backdrop to cultural evolution. If this were so, Hollywood
remakes would be playing past anxieties against future potentiality in
an attempt to soothe current individual and collective identitary crises.
      In “We Can Remember it for you Wholesale” and both Total Recall
films, the ‘construction’ of memory is as technological and fabricated
as it is organic and unconscious. Indeed, technology, like memory,
supplies the basis for the existence not only of each individual plot, but
also of each of the successive versions of the plot. Technological
progress triggers the events described in each of the three plots, but it
also mobilizes the very process of textual adaptation to the cinematic

     1  From The War of the Worlds to I am Legend, there are many instances of
classic sci-fi films re-made by the mainstream film industry.


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Amaya Fernández-Menicucci, Memories of Future Masculine Identities



medium. The technological manipulation of memory, consciousness
and desire – and thus of personal identity – is, as we have seen, the rail
along which runs the main plotline of all three texts in question2. The
centrality of technology within the narrative cosmos of Dick’s story
provides a powerful motivation to turn a literary work of fiction into
an audio-visual text and to bring the latter into the late 20th/early 21st
century with an array of high-tech designs and effects. On the one
hand, a science fiction text is particularly suitable to flaunt the latest
special effects and thus market its on-screen version as one of
Hollywood’s mega-productions. On the other hand, in “We Can
Remember it for you Wholesale”, Dick provides the reader with the
means to initiate and develop a complex discussion about the ultimate
fulfilment of manhood. This idea is traditionally at the heart of action
films and, in fact, the specific format used by both cinematic
adaptations of Dick’s story stretches science fiction themes over an
action film plot. This merging of science fiction and action is not
unusual in itself, but it certainly acquires greater relevance when it
comes to re-mediating a narrative of the gendered self in general and
of the hero in particular. Dick’s tale speaks of the resurrection of a
masculinity in crisis and, as Yvonne Tasker (1993) and Paul Watson
(2002) have argued, the 1980s and 1990s are a period of pervasive
uncertainties, as far as gender identities are concerned. Wiseman’s
decision to re-make Verhoeven’s Total Recall indicates a will to address
the same themes in the same conventional form. In this sense, the fact


      2Memory loss and manipulation constitute recurrent thematic threads
in science fiction narratives from the 1980s to the 2010s. Two outstanding
examples of films revolving around the idea of memory engineering are
Johnny Mnemonic (1995) and Paycheck (2003). In other science fiction films,
such as Blade Runner (1982) and Moon (2009), memory may not be so crucial
to the development of the plot, but it is still clearly central to the process of
identity formation. Even non-sci-fi films of the period, like The Bourne Identity
(2002) and Memento (2000), delve into the nature of memory as a
fundamental means of self-construction.



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that Dick’s story only deploys technological paraphernalia ‘within‘ the
fictional cosmos of the story itself sets it apart from its two filmic
versions in that the latter are also produced ‘through‘ technological
means. The transition from a verbal text to a visual one allows for a
different form of gender representation, one with an ‘in-your-face’
effect that faithfully mirrors the physicality and spectacularity so akin
to the action genre. Thus, technological progress and technological
excess – the profusion of gadgets which Dick’s original text
conspicuously lacks – not only constitute the material and aesthetical
dimensions of the two Total Recall films, that is, the ‘form‘ that shapes
the filmic text by resorting to a particular set of conventions and
discursive strategies, but they also constitute the ‘thematic‘ framework
within which narrativity is woven.
      In Dick’s, as well as in Verhoeven’s and Wiseman’s texts, all
identity dimensions – class, ethnicity, sexuality, race, age – are
configured via the triangle memory-fantasy-consciousness mentioned
above. However, I shall concentrate on gender in particular because I
believe its construction catalyses the process of identity formation as a
whole in the texts in question. Specifically, I shall analyse these
narratives as quintessential examples of three, quite different,
paradigms of masculinity in crisis (Connell 2005; Kimmel 1996; Watson
2002). Dick’s “We Can Remember it for you Wholesale” is concerned
with the shifting landscapes of post-atomic culture (Holliday 2006).
Verhoeven’s Total Recall, is precariously poised in-between
postcoloniality and fin-de-siècle anxieties. The third text in question,
Wiseman’s Total Recall, was gestated in the post-9/11 era of globalised
uncertainties. Both the films and the short story can be said to offer an
intrinsically ambiguous interpretation of the reliability of the focaliser.
In other words, it is impossible to tell whether the events in the plotline
are just an artificially implanted memory fulfilling a desire, or else, the
suddenly resurfacing memories of an old heroic self are real, as the
focaliser seems to believe. However, I am not interested as much in the
inextricable coexistence of paranoia and reality as I am in the nature of
the ultimate fantasy with which each text climaxes and ends.
Individual ideals of gender roles and gender identities are always


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Amaya Fernández-Menicucci, Memories of Future Masculine Identities



intimately connected to gender constructions in specific socio-cultural
contexts. Therefore, an analysis of the way in which the said fantasies
are configured in the texts will in fact denounce which collective ideal
of masculinity is at the centre of each narrative discourse. In other
words, the differences in the representation of masculinity from novel
to film and from film to film can be read as a reflection of the changes
implemented in the socio-cultural context in which the said texts were
produced.
      Each instalment of a sequential text – for example, each of the six
episodes of the Star Wars saga – is related to the others in terms of the
plot, as well as aesthetically and conceptually. A remake – or a new
version of a text, as is the case here – may constitute an indirect or
improper type of sequential text, but it will undoubtedly establish a
fruitful dialogue with the previous text(s). In particular, it will
(re)present a masculinity whose differences from the original ones will
be all the more conspicuous because of the similarities in the narrative
fabric. One of the main points I would like to make is, in fact, that
Dick’s “We Can Remember it for you Wholesale” and both Total Recall
films create visions of future masculinity with the specific purpose of
their being ‘remembered‘ in the present. This is to say that, far from
representing dystopian constructions of masculinity – and thus of
portraying present anxieties from the safe distance of future worlds –
these texts resurrect templates of masculinity that belong to the past
both from the point of view of the main character and from the point of
view of the spectator/reader. In all three cases, the masculinity
‘remembered’ is one that does indeed draw heavily upon the
hegemonic manhood of patriarchal cultural discourses.
      As we shall see later on, the diversification of the hegemonic
discourse on gender has transformed traditional Masculinity into
masculinities, particularly from the 1980s onwards. We could ask these
texts which—possibly conflictive—masculinities they are portraying.
Are there any subtexts that can be supporting the idea that more than
one masculinity coexists in each of the three narrative ‘cosmoi‘? The
second question to be addressed is whether women play no role at all
in the construction of the masculine self in these three texts. Given the


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oppositional definition of masculinity and femininity, this question can
hardly been ignored. If we look at Dick’s short story, the answer could
be assumed to be yes, although not an uncomplicated yes, as we shall
see later on. Things do certainly become even more complex when we
look at the two Total Recall films. The castrating femininity in Dick’s
story is displaced, in the first Total Recall, by an apparently antagonistic
femininity, which turns out to be but a sexual instrument of masculine
aggression and dominion. Conversely, in the second Total Recall, it is
replaced by the figure of the female usurper of masculine roles.


Returning centrality to the holistic Self: Philip K. Dick’s
      “We Can Remember it for you Wholesale”
     As I have already mentioned, the premise is the same for all three
texts under scrutiny here. A frustrated man’s tedious life is troubled by
an irrepressible desire to step out of his character, his insufferably flat
routines, and a castrating marriage. Douglas Quail, renamed Quaid in
both films, secretly applies to have fake memories of a trip to Mars
installed in his brain, only to discover that he has actually been on an
expedition to Mars, and that any conscious memories of this trip as a
secret agent have been surgically removed from his mind. Quail/Quaid
has been, or rather, already is he who he longs to be: the adventurous,
powerful, invincible embodiment of archetypical masculinity. The
narrative of a past self is found to be identical to the hero’s dreams as
they are presented in the narrative of his present self. Both narratives,
that of the present self and that of the past self, become means of self-
identification for Quail/Quaid. Memory, consciousness and identity
thus merge with fantasy, which, in turn, blossoms into an unexpected,
larger-than-life reality. Unsatisfied masculinities are provided with an
‘anagnorisis‘ which bestows the much desired gift of a glorious, heroic
identity on the three protagonists. In all three texts, the framework for
the narrative development is thus that of living out the ultimate
fantasy. In each text, such fantasy is constructed as a combination of
the fact of being the ultimate alpha-male in terms of agency, and of



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Amaya Fernández-Menicucci, Memories of Future Masculine Identities



eventually taking over strategic and political power as well. In both the
films and the short story, the first phase of the fantasy sees masculine
subjects dream of being the strongest, most able, quickest and smartest
of all secret agents – the James Bond fantasy – and thus of being
effectively one of the most important people on earth. Memory, in this
first phase, is conceived as a technological construct, the product of
science applied to the refurbishing of the human being. It follows that
the activities carried out at Rekal Incorporated can be considered as the
product of a new ‘techné‘: the art of identity-making. Memory is a tool
– as artificial and manmade as a spade or a microchip, which is used,
be it willingly or unwillingly, to re-fashion identity.
      However, in Dick’s version, the second phase finds Quail
remembering that he actually is the most important person on earth
because of the deal an alien race had made with him not to invade the
planet as long as he lived, so that «by merely existing, [...] [Quail]
keep[s] the Earth safe from alien rule» (Dick 1997: 320). After
recovering his memory and discovering that he really used to be a
lethal assassin trained by the government, Quail is about to be put to
death because what he once did and now remembers again was «not in
accord with [the government’s] great white all-protecting father public
image» (ibid.: 316). He then manages to convince the government to
erase his memory once more and to implant new artificial memories of
a fake past identity. This past identity should this time be grandiose
enough to prevent him from becoming “restless” again. In the words of
the military psychiatrist who has been asked to determine Quail’s
ultimate dream, the main character’s absolute fantasy is as follows.


         [T]he creatures [...] are very small and helpless, [...] although
      they are attempting to invade Earth; tens of thousands of other
      ships will soon be on their way, when this advance party gives the
      go-ahead signal [...] You halt the invasion, but not by destroying
      them. Instead, you show them kindness and mercy, even though
      you know [...] why they have come. They have never seen such
      humane traits exhibited by any sentient organism, and to show
      their appreciation they make a covenant with you. (Ibid.: 319)



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      Quail inflates his self-image to become Christ-like in that through
him humanity is spared, and, what is more, it is via his display of
humanity that he recovers not only a holistic dimension of being, but
also a godlike status. To quote the Interplan police officer whose job is
to make sure Quail’s ultimate fantasy is implanted in his brain as an
“extra-factual” memory, this fantasy is both “grandiose” and
«arrogant, [...] [i]nasmuch as when he dies the invasion will resume»
(ibid.: 320). Quail’s verbal articulation of his identity also replaces the
sadomasochism of masculine heroism. The physical tortures that
traditionally threaten and are applied to James Bond-like heroes do not
even rise to the category of mental torture in this case. All we see is
blissful unconsciousness followed by recollection and narration, which
enables the sad little man that Quail seems to be at the beginning of the
story to emerge as the unquestioned hero of human history at large.
We could thus conclude that in Dick’s story the male Subject returns to
his place at the centre of the phallo-logo-centric discourse. Dick’s Quail
does not simply turn out to ‘have‘ the phallus—which, incidentally, he
is provided with by his all-male chorus of secondary characters—but
also to ‘be‘ the phallus (Holmlund 2008: 222), effectively displacing
femininity as the gender which in Lacan’s theory occupies the latter
position. However, far from being feminised because of this, Quail
ends up being construed as the ultimate masculine Subject, who is
everything at the same time, who contains everything, centre and
margin, and does not then require a complementary, although inferior
opposite to justify and structure his superior, all-comprehensive
existence. Indeed, once his castrating wife disappears3, Quail is free to


     3 The theme of the missing wife is also central to the action and Western
genres. Her absence usually ignites or is ancillary to the main plotline and
reinforces the notion that the hero should be free from any constraints in
order to carry out his mission. The extraordinary character of the latter
reflects the exceptional character of the male hero himself, who operates
beyond social conventions and is thus dispensed from the obligation to
marry and play the role of ‘pater familias‘.



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Amaya Fernández-Menicucci, Memories of Future Masculine Identities



resume his role as he without whom mankind will be destroyed. Other
than his wife, a nagging, physically and emotionally distant character
whose role is that of bursting every single dream of his – «it is a wife’s
job to bring her husband down to Earth» (Dick 1997: 305), literally in
this case –, the only other female character is the secretary at Rekal
Incorporated, who is presented as nothing more than a sexually
attractive, as well as sexually available, subaltern. After his wife has
left the apartment and the narrative, no other woman is ever
mentioned again. Femininity exits stage for, as we have seen, it is no
longer necessary in order to define masculinity by opposition. In fact,
we could say that feminine characters are forgotten. Memory, as a
process of identity construction, is concerned with one identity, and
one identity only: that of the masculine hero.
      What is more, memory, in Dick’s story, would initially seem to be
the only true process of identity construction. Dreams and fantasies
appear not to be enough to sustain the self: the “might be” and even
the “will be” do not compare to the «have been and have done» Rekal
Incorporated offers (ibid.: 308). However, “actual memory” is not
enough to define identity, due to «its vagueness, omissions and
ellipsis, not to say distortions» (ibid.). Oblivion, the constitutive
restraint of ontological identity, is constantly threatening human
existence. Personal memories, unless reinforced by external data, and
re-woven into a cohesive narrative, are as ineffectual in terms of
providing the subject with an identity, as collective memories become
over time, unless structured along the narrative thread of history.
Thus, artificially implanted memories must be resorted to in order to
re-establish the missing links, to provide the necessary discursive
coherence and to reintroduce those “details” (ibid.) that contribute to
the sense of integrity of the self. This “extra-factual memory” (ibid.), as
Dick dubs it, this artefact of recollection is thus easily comparable to
history in that both are artificial means to carry out the same
aforementioned functions. History provides the collective narrative in
which personal narratives are inscribed. Consequently, the former
must needs define the latter much in the same way socio-cultural
circumstances define individual subjectivities. To quote Christopher


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Palmer, history, as the human construction postmodernity takes it to
be, is construed as “fragile and deceptive”, socially-woven narratives
being as “fabricated or fake” as individual narratives (2007: 5-6).
Moreover, memory can only reside in the conscious mind: it is useless,
as far as the process of self-construction is concerned, if buried in the
unconscious. In Dick’s story, the voyage into Quail’s mind begins
‘after‘ he has woken up. Dreaming is a ‘conscious‘ act for him: «[his]
dream [grows] as he [becomes] fully conscious, the dream and the
yearning» (Dick 1997: 305). Interestingly, it is the narcissism of the
infant child that comes to the rescue of a masculine identity on the
verge of dissolution. It does so by returning to it its lost “phantasies”
(Neale 2008: 11)4 of wholeness, self-containment, omnipotence and
unconditional value. Thus, memory, fantasy and consciousness merge
into a single, circular motion that creates and preserves identity in a
process as holistic, complete and self-contained as the self it produces.


  Loving man, beloved hero: Verhoeven’s Total Recall
     Following Steve Neale’s critique of Mulvey’s analysis of male
voyeurism and female spectacle in cinema (2008: 10-15), I propose a
reading of the first Total Recall as informed by the constant oscillation
between narcissistic identification and erotic voyeurism, both being
primarily occupied with the male body and the masculine self. In other
words, man’s physical and ontological dimensions are playing both the
role of the observer and that of the observed. Thus, man is found at the
centre of a scopophilic endeavour to construct his self ontologically
through the act of gazing at him(self). I see, therefore I exist, and I exist
in the very image of what is being seen; the act of seeing ‘produces‘
what is seen, at the same time the viewer ‘becomes‘ what s/he sees. It
follows that Schwarzenegger’s muscular masculinity is under scrutiny
both by the spectator and by the other characters, who just so happen

     4 Like Steve Neale, I use the spelling ‘phantasy’ as a reference to Judith
Butler’s understanding of the psychoanalytic notion of the ‘phantasmatic’
(1993: 188).


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Amaya Fernández-Menicucci, Memories of Future Masculine Identities



to be (mostly) male. He is perceived and constructed as a specimen,
first, and thus objectified through the inquisitiveness of the voyeuristic
gaze, and then he is turned into a spectacle through the eroticising
effect of the fetishist gaze (ibid.: 16). The last image of the initial
sequence in the film, the dream/memory of a walk on Mars hand in
hand with an exoticised woman, leaves the spectator with a grotesque
token of the fragility of the male body, once his metaphoric and literal
armour are broken through. The next scene, however, focuses on the
solidity of Schwarzenegger’s bull-like neck and wide shoulders. His
massive arms, strategically placed in the foreground along with his
sweaty, palpitating pectorals, compete with, if not overshadow Sharon
Stone’s legs and revealing neckline. Although Schwarzenegger’s
character may not remember his past, the spectators do recall the
plastic ‘masculinity’ of his body from several previous incarnations –
i.e., Conan the Barbarian and The Terminator, to name but a few
(Holmlund 2010).
       In the 1990 version of Total Recall, the aftermath of the Vietnam
War conditions a masculinity still in its Rambo-esque phase, obsessed,
that is, with men’s physical capability for accomplishing feats of bodily
heroism. The white male crisis, already rooted in the 1950s, but
particularly visible during the 1990s (Watson 2002: 15), stems from a
growing awareness – in both academic and popular culture – of the
existence of multiple masculinities that challenge the heterosexual
white norm. The construction of masculinity as spectacle is thus, on the
one hand, a means to counteract a pervasive sense of emasculation of
the Western world. The irony so patent in Dick’s choice of the surname
“Quail” is lost in both Total Recall films, since Verhoeven’s and
Wiseman’s decision to rename the protagonists of their films “Quaid”
indicates their refusal to brand them as fragile, tiny preys to larger
creatures. On the other hand, male physicality, both in bodily form and
in the form of behavioural patterns, is showcased on screen with the
specific purpose of bridging the gap between a rising rejection of
traditional, patriarchal virility and the persisting demand for
masculine models that are reassuringly clear, defined and definite. The
proliferation, from the 1980s onwards, of male nudes (Tasker 2000), as


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well as of the physical feats and visual acrobatics of male actors (King
2009: 91-116), signifies an attempt to both reassure the spectator of the
permanence of hegemonic, heterosexual conceptions of masculinity,
and to mirror the emergence of a plethora of masculinities that cross
over one another as often as they diverge. The sequentiality of 1980s
action films – the various Rambo, Rocky, Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, and
Terminator franchises – was a rhetorical strategy through which
traditional masculinity was «reproduced successfully in post-Vietnam,
post-Civil Rights, and post-women’s movement’s era» (Jeffords 2008:
247).
      Paradoxically, Verhoeven seems to delight in the mightiness of
Schwarzenegger’s physique as much as he enjoys taking his body to
the limit and breaking it. To see a life-sized reproduction of
Schwarzenegger’s head grimace and swell to the point of exploding is
to revel in the visual pleasures the film industry could offer back in
1990. Just as Schwarzenegger’s pumped-up limbs and torso signify an
excessive sort of masculinity, the profusion of special effects –
unnecessary from the point of view of the plotline – is there to convey
a sense of the spectacular that is part and parcel with action and sci-fi
genres alike. Excessive are the main characters, their ultimate fantasies
and the genre that frames the narratives. The explosions, endless
chases and choreographed fight scenes are all designed to underscore
the kind of muscular, skilful, acrobatic masculinity they were seeking
to portray. Visual technology makes Quaid’s feats possible, which, in
turn, makes him a hero. Special effects become, thus, the vehicle of
heroic masculinity by visualising the hero’s masterly use of his
physical abilities – his strength, agility, speed and endurance of pain.
Ironically, it is through the improvement of digital and visual
technology that heroism is returned to its most physical incarnation.
      In Total Recall, Schwarzenegger’s hyper-masculinity both entices
and forbids the spectator from identifying with Douglas Quaid. His
gender identity is both the consequence of spectacular actions and
impeccable performance – whose materiality makes them come across
as plausible, but impossible, at the same time – and the consequence of
the imagined, the fantasised and the unreachable, which, again, turns


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Amaya Fernández-Menicucci, Memories of Future Masculine Identities



his heroism into an impossibility. In this sense, the continuum into
which memory and fantasy merge in the filmic texts reaches out into
the audience in that not only spectators will ‘recall‘ Schwarzenegger’s
previous fictional identities, thus making Quaid’s former identity as
action hero ironically ‘real’, but they will also immediately
acknowledge the impossibility of his ‘merely’ being Douglas Quaid,
the dull construction site worker. This is also partly due to his
obviously foreign accent. Hence, the necessity of renaming his
previous identity Karl Hauser, a German-sounding name. This
particular version of the main character’s alter ego is not to be found in
Dick’s short story. Neither is Melina, the “sleezy and demure” product
of Quaid’s libido, nor the trip to Mars which Quaid takes after his visit
to Rekal Incorporated.
      This trip introduces the theme – so dear to U.S. cultural history –
of armed resistance against an oppressive homeland. Since Quaid is
meant to be working for ‘both‘ sides of the war, the all-mighty
hegemonic power and the smaller, though morally superior
‘resistance’, he plays both the role of Goliath and that of David. Logic
expects the former to win, whereas narrativity wants the latter to
succeed; Quaid overcomes this dichotomic thinking by playing both
roles at once. He is invincible by virtue of his own essence and of the
essence of the grand narrative he finds himself living out. In the scene
in which he finally confronts his opponent, the 1990 version of Quaid is
given a definition of identity consisting in one’s actions, as opposed to
one’s memory/narration of the self. Considering how Quaid manages
to be who he is by remembering who he is, and that he does so by
acting out a pre-ordered memory/narration of his self, it follows that he
is put in a win-win situation, where it does not matter whether his
actions are mobilised by his desire or by his memories, or even
whether his actions are being remembered or his memories are being
re-enacted. In either case, he is, was and always will be the centre of
the universe. In fact, at the end of the film, Quaid is represented as the
creator of a new world, a godlike Adam who fathers his own Eden.
      In one of the last scenes of the film, right after Quaid has managed
to start the alien contraption that provides Mars with an atmosphere –


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thus saving all its inhabitants – we see the marginalised populace of
Venus Ville and the wealthy patrons of a luxury hotel come out of the
artificial domes and walk under the blue skies of the red planet. This
‘brave new world’, which so closely resembles the 19th century frontier,
will be populated by prostitutes, freaks, mine workers, clerks and
businessmen in peaceful coexistence. All thanks to a white man who,
even during the few weeks he worked at a construction site, still
owned an impeccable flat, an exceptionally attractive wife and the
means to go on holiday to exotic destinations. A man who used to
belong to the same destructive power system that exploited the
Martian colons in order to advance its war effort. Just by shifting the
target of his violence from the ‘good’ guys to the ‘bad’ ones, this super-
sized alpha-male justifies territorial colonisation and the murder of Dr.
Edgemar, a terrified and unarmed man, as well as that of the woman
with whom he had been romantically involved only a few days before.
The ultimate masculine fantasy in 1990 consists in using the same
traditional strategies of dominion which allows male subjects to get
literally away with murder, and in being ‘loved‘ for it5. Susan Jeffords
contends that «[early 1990s] Hollywood male star/heroes have been
constructed as more internalized versions of their historical
counterparts [...] A self-effacing man, one who now, instead of learning
to fight, learns to love» (2008: 245). Verhoeven’s Total Recall inverts this
plotline, for Quaid is portrayed as an already loving husband who
must remember how to fight. While in Dick’s story the self-contained
masculine Subject does not need anyone to know of his greatness, since
his is a self-satisfying, narcissistic identification, in Verhoeven’s film
the marginal, the excluded—the Others, in short—must gather again in
grateful awe around heroic manhood, their saviour and protector.
Gender and class divisions are still most evident, but they have
magically ceased to matter.



     5Here is, once again, a convention that is also at the core of action and
Western films.



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Amaya Fernández-Menicucci, Memories of Future Masculine Identities




     Guilty pleasures: Oedipal anxieties in Wiseman’s
                        Total Recall
      In both Total Recall films, «the body of the hero, and not his voice,
his capacity for making a rational argument, is the place of last resort»,
as Yvonne Tasker puts it (2008: 241). However, unlike
Schwarzenegger’s almost carefree rendition of Quaid, the protagonist
of the 2012 Total Recall embodies a masculinity haunted by an ever-
present sense of self-doubt and a past identity which ‘expects‘ him to
be strong, assertive, aggressive and in control. In the 2012 version, the
ultimate fantasy is tinted with nightmarish hues through and through.
It is not a dream, but a labyrinth of guilt the hero must exceed before
seizing his idealised goal. Colin Farrell’s perennial frown is that of a
man terrified of his own power. Conversely, Verhoeven’s playful
approach to special effects and crude visual jokes sprinkles his
discourse with a lightheartedness that tones down the political
incorrectness of Quaid’s rampant, conquering masculinity. In the 2012
Total Recall, technology, on the contrary, is a serious matter. In
Wiseman’s post-apocalyptic world, technological warfare has already
destroyed the planet and split what is left of it into an irresolvable
dichotomy. So irresolvable that the only channel that connected the
two physical dimensions on which it was articulated – the United
Federation of Britain and the Colony – is severed for ever at the end of
the film. In the first Total Recall, technology is as ambiguous as the
narrative itself. Machines can enslave, as the oxygen-producing
windmills do in the Martian Colony, or free human kind, as the
atmosphere-generating device does. On the contrary, nothing good
comes of technological advances in Wiseman’s film. Its final scene
reveals a new world in which very little futuristic technology seems to
have survived and where the hero’s physical greatness is once more
the only source of protection.
      By 2012, the space expansionism of the 1990s has collapsed into a
dystopian, toxic world that has actually run ‘out of‘ space. From the
externalised materiality of masculinity in Verhoeven’s text, we are now



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plunged into an internalised conflict represented both in the
dichotomist mapping of geopolitics and in the schizophrenic duality of
the hero’s psyche. The oppressive atmosphere of the overpopulated
labyrinth of slums that is the Colony – located in Australia in this case
– echoes the dimly lit one-room apartment Quaid shares with a stern,
tense, absent wife. Although heroism is again carved on the body of a
working-class man as the archetype of all masculinities, Wiseman’s
film depicts a more realistic portrait of the grim life of those at base of
the social pyramid. Here, class conflicts are played against post-
globalisation anxieties that exclude race and ethnicity in favour of a
masculinity still reassuringly white. The racialised masses of the
Colony are represented as a faceless flock of sheep, paradoxically
homogenous in their marginality and helplessness. Interestingly,
though, the script pits the white working class protagonist
simultaneously against white upper-class men, racialised masculinity
and empowered femininity, which neatly dovetails into «a pattern of
masculinity that necessitates defining men not by content but by
opposition to an other» (Jeffords 2008: 256).
      The first opposition I would like to consider is between Quaid and
his Black ‘clone’, to quote Holmlund’s terminology (2008: 214-215), a
doppelganger that mirrors every aspect of Quaid’s circumstances,
except the latter’s intolerance to subalternity. If Benny’s character in
the 1990 Total Recall was already pointing at the uncanniness of a Black
man selfishly betraying other subalterns, Harry’s case in the 2012 film
is even more telling. He is depicted as a simple man, content with his
life, which irritates his white buddy, who, on the contrary, is dead set
on upturning a system which denies him of what he feels entitled to.
This white man is portrayed as actively seeking to subvert and
overcome the injustice of a capitalist system, in the face of the passivity
of the racialised citizens of the Colony. This very white man also
chooses to see his Black partner as a traitor aligned with the hegemonic
powers to bend his will and bring him back into the flock. Contrary to
what happens in the corresponding scene in Verhoeven’s film, in the
2012 version there is absolutely no indication that Harry might be
lying. What is more, there is no proof that Harry had any choice in


                                                                              17
Amaya Fernández-Menicucci, Memories of Future Masculine Identities



taking part in the operation. Unlike Quaid’s Italo-American buddy in
the 1990 film, who is explicitly revealed as belonging to the
government secret agency, this working-class Black man is never seen
in any other capacity but that of the concerned friend, eager to help out
his restless buddy. Harry is not even armed. In the fictional cosmos of
the film, the fact that Quaid does suddenly ‘choose‘ to shoot Harry
instead of Melina is underscoring his determination to eliminate any
reminder of the fact that everything might be a chemically generated
fantasy, the dream he had bought for himself at Rekal Incorporated.
But it also leaves Quaid in a world in which Black and white men no
longer work side by side.
      The second opposition is articulated around the two father figures
presented in the 2012 film. On the one hand, we have Cohaagen, the
violent, sadistic father. He builds up the destructivity in his symbolic
sons, while belittling his symbolic daughter, even though he uses her
as much as he uses them. On the other hand, there is Matthias, the
gentle, wise, nurturing father who loves both his male and female
children, although it is clear that he never intended his daughter to
inherit his realm. Both sides of the fatherly diptych must perish in
order for Quaid to rise to his position as the masculine subject. This
may be read as a suggestion of the necessity of a balance between the
destructive aggressiveness of past patriarchal models, and the
meekness of a reflexive, introspective masculinity that has been
historically likened to femininity. In this sense, Quaid would pluck the
best of each masculine model, so that he might embody the perfection
of a third way. However, a different reading might see Quaid replace
both standards, thus partaking of both Cohaagen’s violence, as the
spectator has witnessed throughout the film, and of Matthias’s
intellectual mightiness, as Quaid’s strategic choices demonstrate.
Despite claims that a man’s identity is in the present, Wiseman’s script
never allows Quaid to stray from a citational reiteration (Butler 1993: 2-
3) of both his symbolic fathers’ behavioural pattern. A third
interpretation is also possible: that Quaid’s Oedipal desire brings him
to kill his own symbolic father and to cause the death of Melina’s
biological father. Cohaagen, the man Quaid’s prior identity identifies


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with, must be erased in order to put an end to Quaid’s subalternity and
to a castrating marriage with his symbolic sister. In this case, the third
element in the Oedipal triangle is not the mother, but a sister, whom
the father purposefully hands out to the son, to soothe his
rebelliousness and his desire to usurp the father’s throne. This is why,
despite Lori’s raw sexuality and unarguable sex-appeal, she is always
perceived as a castrating device deployed by Cohaagen to keep Quaid
subject to the dynamics of traditional patriarchy. The second fatherly
figure, Melina’s father, must also die so as to enable Quaid to occupy
the role of caregiver and protector, as well as in order for him to step
up to the highest level in the oppositional system of the subversive
‘resistance’. That in either case we are confronted with pyramidal and
militaristic societal models is not coincidental. Whether good or bad,
hierarchical patriarchy is all that seems to be available.
      The third opposition is articulated through the polarisation of the
two main female characters, Lori, Quail’s fake wife, and Melina, his
true love. In Wiseman’s Total Recall, Lori absorbs the role Richter had
had in Verhoeven’s film as Quaid’s main pursuer and symbolic sibling.
As already mentioned, in the 2012 film, Lori is represented as a female
usurper of masculine roles, as a female warrior, responsible for the
ongoing ‘war of the sexes’. She is thus poised in opposition to Melina,
who is devoid of all aggressiveness and self-reliance in the 2012 film,
and, on the contrary, relegated to the role of the female sidekick. If
Melina is the new Eve in a future Eden, Lori represents Lilith and must
be crushed. After Quaid/Hauser kills Lori at the end of the film, a
police officer from the Colony shouts at him to drop his gun, only to be
replied by another policeman that «[i]t’s alright. It’s him». As soon as
heroic masculinity is back in power, he can wave a gun and “it’s
alright”; he can shoot down a woman without being questioned for it.
      Both Total Recall films shift the focus from destructive to
constructive masculinity without actually changing its constitutive
features. This explains Melina’s initial mistrust of Schwarzenegger’s
character. Yet, the 2012 version of Melina trusts Colin Farrell’s Quaid
long before he trusts himself, ‘despite‘ the fact that his facial traits have
been surgically altered beyond recognition. What is it then that


                                                                               19
Amaya Fernández-Menicucci, Memories of Future Masculine Identities



Wiseman’s Melina is trusting blindly? What is it that she, like
everybody else in the resistance, is recognising in him? Precisely the
fact that he is still the same man. His archetypical masculinity is still
conspicuous notwithstanding the numerous cosmetic alterations that
might have been carried out on the surface. It is this very sameness, so
reminiscent of the Cartesian dichotomy of Sameness versus Otherness,
that is being explicitly sought and unconditionally trusted. Hence, the
bottom line of both films and of Dick’s short story seems to be that the
‘good’ alpha male, as portrayed and idealised in traditional patriarchal
discourses, has been tamed and anesthetised as much by the ‘bad’
alpha male as by the masculine female, and is now lost in a dystopian
landscape of labyrinthine identities. The only way out, far from
entailing social pro-gress, that is to say, a journey forward into the
future, is a retro-gression back into the atavism mentioned by Philip K.
Dick, back into the protective womb of narcissistic childhood, or,
alternatively, back into the biblical Eden of traditional patriarchy.
      In “We Can Remember it for you Wholesale”, all of Quails’ entity
resides in his mind. It is through language, however fragmentary, that
he unravels the mystery of his identity, thus saving his self from
destruction. On the contrary, both filmic adaptations, precisely due to
the re-mediation of the original piece of writing, rely mostly on the
visibility of the main character’s heroic identity. However, visibility
‘per se‘ is not enough to explain the change from Quail to Quaid. Quail
is re-imagined into Quaid not only through the technology of cinema,
but also through the visualization of futuristic technology as spectacle
in itself. Therefore, on the one hand, Dick’s original text is being
filtered through the many creative opportunities offered by special
effects. On the other hand, Quaid’s identity is moulded by his
relationship with future technology: he finds his identity either by
regaining control over the latter, as we have seen is the case with the
1990 Total Recall, or by destroying technology and replacing it with his
physical feats, as happens in the 2012 version. In Dick’s story, verbal
narrativity takes the place of technological memory as the means to re-
construct masculine identity. Quail is last seen, or rather, heard telling
of his encounter with the alien species while lying on a hygienic bed,


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whereas both Quaids are last seen in contemplation of their recent
conquests: the land before them and the women by their sides. The
sequence of events that has led to that final stance is “action-packed”,
as the cover poster of the 2012 Total Recall claims. While human bodies
fight vigorously and die violently, an assortment of mechanical
contraptions and technological devices grind, shoot, drill, transform
landscapes and re-shape minds. It is the hero, though, who stands tall
and victorious at the end of it all. Since it is through action that the plot
is narrated, in both films physicality eventually substitutes technology
as the means to both identify and narrate the masculine self.




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Amaya Fernández-Menicucci, Memories of Future Masculine Identities




                                   Works Cited
Butler, Judith, Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”,
     London, Routledge, 1993.
Clark, Andy – Chalmers, David J., “The extended mind”, Analysis, 58
     (1998): 7-19.
Cohan, Steven – Hark, Ina Rae (eds.), Screening the Male. Exploring
     Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema (1993), New York, Routledge,
     2008.
Connell, Raewyn W., Masculinities (1995), Berkeley and Los Angeles,
     University of California Press, 2005.
Dick, Philip K., “We Can Remember it for you Wholesale”, The Philip K.
     Dick Reader, Secaucus, Citadel Twilight/Carol Publishing Group,
     1997: 305-322.
Holliday, Valery, “Masculinity in the Novels of Philip K. Dick”,
     Extrapolation, 47.2 (2006): 280-295.
Holmlund, Chris, “Masculinity as Multiple Masquerade. The ‘Mature’
     Stallone and the Stallone clone”, Screening the Male. Exploring
     Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema (1993), Eds. Steven Cohan & Ina
     Rae Hark, New York, Routledge, 2008: 213-229.
Id., Impossible Bodies: Femininity and Masculinity at the Movies (2002),
     London, Routledge, 2010.
Jeffords, Susan, “Can Masculinity Be Terminated?”, Screening the Male.
     Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema (1993), Eds. Steven
     Cohan & Ina Rae Hark, New York, Routledge, 2008: 245-262.
Kimmel, Michael Scott, Changing Men: New Directions in the Study of
     Men and Masculinity (1987), Newbury Park, California, Sage
     Publications, 1996.
King, Geoff, Spectacular Narratives. Hollywood in the Age of the
     Blockbuster (2000), London, I.B. Tauris, 2009.
Matheson, Richard, I Am Legend (1954), New York, Tom Doherty
     Associates, 1995.
Neale, Steve, “Prologue: masculinity as Spectacle”, Screening the Male.
     Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema (1993), Eds. Steven
     Cohan & Ina Rae Hark, New York, Routledge, 2008: 9-22.


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Palmer, Christopher, Philip K. Dick. Exhilaration and Terror of the
     Postmodern (2003), Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2007.
Rushdie, Salman, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991,
     London, Vintage, 2010.
Spinrad, Norman, “Introduction”, The Collected Short Stories of Philip K.
     Dick. Volume II: Second Variety, Ed. Norman Spinrad, New York,
     Citadel Twilight, 1990: i-xii.
Tasker, Yvonne, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema
     (1993), Oxon, Routledge, 2000.
Id., “Dumb Movies for Dumb People. Masculinity, the Body, and the
     Voice in Contemporary Action Cinema”, Screening the Male.
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     Cohan & Ina Rae Hark, New York, Routledge, 2008: 230-244.
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                            Filmography
Blade Runner, Dir. Ridley Scott, USA, 1982.
Conan the Barbarian, Dir. John Milius, USA, 1982.
Die Hard, Dir. John McTiernan, USA, 1988.
Die Hard 2: Die Harder, Dir. Renny Harlin, USA, 1990.
Die Hard with a Vengeance, Dir. John McTiernan, USA, 1995.
First Blood, Dir. Ted Kotcheff, USA, 1982.
I am Legend. Dir. Francis Lawrence, USA, 2007.
Johnny Mnemonic. Dir. Robert Longo, USA, 1995.
Lethal Weapon, Dir. Richard Donner, USA, 1987.
Lethal Weapon 2, Dir. Richard Donner, USA, 1989.
Lethal Weapon 3, Dir. Richard Donner, USA, 1992.
Lethal Weapon 4, Dir. Richard Donner, USA, 1998.
Memento, Dir. Christopher Nolan, USA, 2000.
Moon, Dir. Duncan Jones, UK, 2009.


                                                                              23
Amaya Fernández-Menicucci, Memories of Future Masculine Identities



Paycheck, Dir. John Woo, USA, 2003.
Rambo: First Blood Part II, Dir. George P. Cosmatos, USA, 1985.
Rambo III, Dir. Peter MacDonald, USA, 1988.
Rocky I, Dir. John G. Avildsen, USA, 1976.
Rocky II, Dir. Sylvester Stallone, USA, 1979.
Rocky III, Dir. Sylvester Stallone, USA, 1982.
Rocky IV, Dir. Sylvester Stallone, USA, 1985.
Rocky V, Dir. John G. Avildsen, USA, 1990.
Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Dir. James Cameron, USA, 1991.
The Bourne Identity, Dir. Doug Liman, USA, 2002.
The Last Man on Earth, Dir. Ubaldo Ragona, Italy/USA, 1964.
The Omega Man, Dir. Boris Sagal, USA, 1971.
The Terminator, Dir. James Cameron, USA, 1984.
The War of the Worlds, Dir. Byron Haskin, USA, 1953.
The War of the Worlds, Dir. Steven Spielberg, USA, 2005.
Total Recall, Dir. Paul Verhoeven, USA, 1990.
Total Recall, Dir. Len Wiseman, USA, 2012.



                                   The Author
Amaya Fernández-Menicucci

       Amaya Fernández-Menicucci has researched the relationship
between identity, gender and the representation of space in the fictions
of the South Asian diaspora for years, having published various works
on the subject between 2006 and 2012. More recently, she has been
writing on cultural bodies and the corporeal dimension of gendered
identities. Among her recent publications are “Action and Reaction: the
Villain’s Body and its Role in Shaping the Heroic Body in Hollywood
Action Films of the 1990s” (2013), “In the Name of the Self: The New
Language of Self-Naming. Naming as a Process of Self-Construction"
(2012), and “The Art of the Self: Artistic Identity and Performance in
Sunetra Gupta’s So Good in Black and Kamila Shamsie’s Broken Verses”



24
                                   Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



(2013). She currently lectures at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in
Spain.

      Email: Amaya.Fernandez@uclm.es



                              The paper
Date sent: 30/08/2014
Date accepted: 30/09/2014
Date published: 30/11/2014



                     How to quote this paper
Fernández-Menicucci, Amaya, “Memories of Future Masculine
Identities: A Comparison of Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember it for
you Wholesale”, the 1990 Film Total Recall and its 2012 Remake”,
Tecnologia, immaginazione e forme del narrare, Ed. L. Esposito, E. Piga, A.
Ruggiero, Between, IV.8 (2014), www.betweenjournal.it




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