"Total Recall", as directed by Paul Verhoeven, is pure sci-fi spectacle. Released in 1990, it stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as Douglas Quaid, a man disenfranchised with his life--his spouse and job bore him, and he keeps having dreams of a seductive woman on Mars, where he occasionally falls and breathes the atmosphere's air (warning, it's graphic). Similar to "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" with its memory-augmenting fantasies, but also unlike that film, a company implants memories instead of erasing them. Their newest form of entertainment happens to be something more than just a memory of a vacation on a beach in Hawaii or an Alaskan cruise; it is an adventure. The doctor/salesmen gives Quaid the pitch: "Basic Mars package will run you 899 credits. Now, that's for two full weeks of memories, if you want a longer trip it will cost you a little bit more because it's a deeper implant. [...] When you go Recall, you get nothing but first class memories. Private cabin on the shuttle, deluxe suite at the Hilton, plus all the major sites, Mount Pyramid, grand canals, and of course, VenusVille. [...] As real as any memory in your head. [...] Your brain will not know the difference. And that's guaranteed or your money back." After the procedure is done, the patient will recall a wild trip as a millionaire playboy, a sports hero, an industrial tycoon, or a secret agent. "What is it that is exactly the same about every single vacation you have ever taken? [...] You. You're the same. No matter where you go, there you are, it's always the same old you. Let me suggest that you take a vacation from yourself. And I know it sounds wild. It's the latest thing in travel. We call it the ego trip." Quaid chooses to become an agent to follow the dreams he has been having.
The plot which unfolds after forces you to ask whether any of it is real or not. On his journey home, Quaid is attacked by a coworker who claims that the procedure has begun the process of reopening Quaid's past memories, that he never was who he thought he was at all and his old Marshian dreams really happened to him. The whole film is like this. Layers keep falling away, revealing new aspects to the complex question of "who am I if I am not me?". We are introduced to a Mars colony, the woman in Quaid's dreams, and we discover that Quaid's previous personality may have been complicit in the whole thing to begin with. You see, Arnold's character discovers that he used to be an agent on Mars and that it was part of a conspiracy to find the terrorist, Kuato, an illusive man who the capitalists on the red planet are desperate to find and kill. Quaid does find Kuato's hiding place, but he turns out not to be quite the ordinary person we expect, as you might have guessed if you clicked the link above. He is, in fact, an infant tumor growing on the chest of another man. He tells Quaid, "you are what you do. A man is defined by his actions not his memories," and grabs Arnold's hands. "Now open your mind to me, please. Open your mind. Open your mind. Open your mind. Open your mind. Open your mind." We are taken down a hallway to underneath the mysterious Marshian pyramid, down more passages, and discover the ancient alien technology which will release oxygen into the atmosphere of Mars, ruining Cohaagen's (the film's antagonist's) monopoly on the gas.
Besides being a rip-roaring good time with intrigue, back-stabbings, romance, and three-breasted whores, "Total Recall" offers up another deeply disturbing scene. Not only does it make us re-question the events of the movie, but also our own lives. As Quaid sits in his fancy suite before he meets Kuata and discovers his double-dealing in the past as Hauser, he hears a knock on a door. In walks Dr. Edgemar, or more like he is pulled in by Quaid with a gun to his cranium. We assume that he is working for Cohaagen because the audience has also been swept up in the Quaid's apparent dream. But the doctor warns him that he has "suffered a schizoid embolism" and that the entire adventure so far has been a "delusion". When Quaid tries to justify his experience, especially of the woman he had dreams of before the memory implants, Edgemar answers back, "Oh Mr. Quaid, she's real because you dreamed her." Quaid raises a gun the doctor's head and threatens to kill him: "It won't make the slightest difference to me Doug, but the consequences to you will be devastating. In your mind, I'll be dead, and with no one to guide you out, you'll be stuck here in permanent psychosis. The walls of reality will come crashing down around you. One minute, you're the savior of the rebel cause; next thing you know, you'll be Cohaagen's bosom buddy. You'll even have fantasies about alien civilizations as you requested; but in the end, back on Earth, you'll be lobotomized! So get a grip on yourself, Doug, and put down that gun!" Quaid fires it. He refuses to give into the Doctor's suggestions. Mythologies of the East would report to us that the basis of all growth is 'letting go'. We have to release the ego's need to cling to things to be truly at peace. 'Bhudda' literally means one who has awakened.
2. Intense Level of Play
Alan Watts says Hinduism has a similar concept in Shiva, who has ten arms, or "the Buddhist Avalokiteshvara with one thousand arms. Their image of the divine is of a sort of centipede. A centipede can move a hundred legs without having to think about it, and Shiva can move ten arms very dexterously without having to think about them" (Watts 79, Myth and Religion). The multi-armed god is a representation of every person who has ever lived. We are his arms, we are all Shiva and just don't know it, pretending to be someone we are not. Watts continues, comparing theater to the Hindu god. He says:
There are actors coming on the stage, but they are real people like you. In order for you not to see them in that way, they are going to put on their costumes and makeup, and then they are going to come out in front here and pretend to various roles. And you know you want to be half convinced that what they are doing on the stage is real. The work of a great actor is to get you sitting on the edge of your chair, anxious, or weeping, or roaring with laughter, because he has almost persuaded you that what is on the stage is really happening. That is the greatness of his art, to take the audience in. In the same way, the Hindu feels that the Godhead acts his part so well that he takes himself in completely. And each of you is the godhead, wonderfully fooled by your own act. And although you won't admit it to yourself, you are enjoying it like anything. (Watts 82)
Story and myth are the closest we can ever get to truth. They represent the plays which have been occurring since the big bang exploded and light and matter ballooned across the nothingness (we have creation myths) and until the end of everything (Apocalyptic myths).
What stories tell us about ourselves is that we are capable of playing every role there is. We identify with the hero's quest to take down the villain, we gasp when it looks like he is about to be killed, and applaud when he wins out; but at the same time there is delight with the villain's shenanigans. In theater, we realize the importance of the bad guy when he receives applause from the audience at the end of play. This, of course, is less explicit in modern entertainment. There is no dramatic bowing of the mobster with gales of approval at the end of the movie. However, it is not unheard of to overhear people leaving the theater mentioning how amazing the actor was who played the killer. As kids, we engage in this intense "level of play", which the ancient hunter-gatherers in the Paleolithic era extended to all of life. Joseph Cambpell writes in Primitive Mythologies: The Masks of God that a "certain level of 'make-believe' is operative in all primitive religious. 'The savage' wrote Marett, 'is a good actor who can be quite absorbed in his role, like a child at play; and also, like a child, a good spectator who can be frightened to death by the roaring of something he knows perfectly well to be no 'real' lion'" (Campbell 23). By acknowledging that the villain is being acted by someone who is not really a bad person, we are beginning to acknowledge that it is all in act. That we are all being tricked into believing that we are who we are, that we are the hero, and that we should cling to material things. Like Dr. Edgemar says, it's all a delusion in our heads. What Quaid's character in Total Recall doesn't realize is that he is performing the hero's role in this dream. In the next, he might be the evil industrialist, the perky lover, the little mutant child with the freaky eye. That is what reincarnation truly is, a morphing of the eternal consciousness into every role.
The Indians have another mythic image of the Net of Indra which relates to this essay. It "is a net of gems, where at every crossing of one thread over another there is a gem reflecting all the other reflective gems. Everything arises in mutual relation to everything else, so you can't blame anybody for anything. It is even as though there were a single intention behind it all, which always makes some kind of sense, though none of us knows what the sense might be, or has lived the life that he quite intended" (Campbell 284, The Power of Myth). This is not to say we shouldn't be involved with life because that is the fun of it; however, it does seem to be the case that the worst atrocities against our fellow men occur when we become too involved in the material world. Stories show us that we are communicating with archetypes and roles which we all fit in some way. When we get into a really good book, our minds start communicating with this unconscious realm. It gives the chaotic voices of the right brain shape and coherence, linking both hemispheres together in a song or dance and harmonizing the brain like a lyre. Old archetypes from ages past can rear their heads and haunt us again, and there is no one there to tell us that this isn't real, or that this can't happen. It is complete experience. We get caught up with the characters, with the monsters which the ego usually denies us with its rational knowledge. Trolls, ogres, demons gods are there in their archetypal splendor, daring us to be terrified by their grotesque visages, or the specters within ourselves. Erik Davis in his book TechGnosis claims that the "pagan and the paranormal have colonized our pop media" and that the "West's mystical heritage of occult dreamings, spiritual transformations, and apocalyptic visions crashed on the scientific shores of the modern age" (4-5). It is the same with video games, with their fascination with alien and fantastical monsters. I will cover games and identity more in future entries, but for now, I will reveal the interview I conducted with some of my friends on this topic:
As we progress further into the 21st century, there is going to be more bending of identity to the whims of computer interface. Information technology has already begun to shape our personalities in new and profound ways. With the invention of Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter, users are picturing themselves not as a person, but an online image. Go through your friends' photo albums, wall posts, and favorites list--these are online identities which can be very separate from the person they present in public. Erik Davis says that of all the technologies, "it is the technologies of information and communication that most mold and shape the source of all mystical glimmerings: the human self." It "tweaks our perceptions, communicates our picture of the world to one another, and constructs remarkable and sometimes insidious forms of control over the cultural stories that shape our sense of the world" (Davis 6). Like all tools, these technologies become extensions of the person wielding them. However, beyond even that, they allow us to interface with each other in methods which weren't available to us before. In the online sphere we can hide behind masks. No one knows our "true" personalities, only a silly username. This allows great freedom of identity in the cyber-world and is an interesting case-study on the nature of reality.
Davis paints a picture of the growing number of new technologies which changed the perception of the self and how each time a new one became available, people would see it as mystical. People believed that electricity was the spiritual force which God used to create life. In it they found new mythic experiences because the human mind will fill the knowledge-lacuna with imagination. When we don't understand something, we usually choose to see it as magical. Magnets were also used for therapy by icons like Franz Anton Mesmer who came up with 'animal magnetism', which eventually led to the concept of hypnotism. Phones calls and radio waves were seen as almost spiritual--voices from people far away that were them and not them at the same time. Old animist spirits were evoked in us. They desired to be free and roam the planes of the collective imagination again, and these technologies were giving them the means to do so. As the world became increasingly demystified, the magic was drained from peoples' everyday lives. This was translated into 'real-life' adventures of explorers discovering new civilizations underground and ancient islands populated with strange locals in books like The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Erewhon by Samuel Butler, or reemerged in spiritual contact through electricity and radio waves. Whereas older technologies were extensions of a limb, McLuhan opines that modern ones were more like the expansion of the nervous system. "As new technologies begin to remold [...] boundaries, the shadows, doubles, and dark reflections that haunt human identity begin to leak outside the self as well, many of them taking up residence in the virtual spaces opened up by the new technologies" (73). Magic of ages past has dissolved into the pseudo-underworld, and it is now the magic of the internet which possesses the mind of man, only one part of the GRIN (genetics, robotics, information tech, and nanotech).
Similar to the description of reading I described above, "the virtual topographies of our millennial world are rife with angels and aliens, with digital avatars and mystic Gaian minds, with utopian longings and gnostic science fictions, and with dark forebodings of apocalypse and demonic enchantment" (Davis 8). Hermes, or Mercury to the Romans, is the electric psychopomp who will guide us through the new technological spheres of ego. Technology, according to Davis, is a trickster because it "pulls wool over our eyes" and disconnects us from the natural world. This is Hermes' domain. The internet connects us with people across the globe, just like the quick-footed god, but hides us away from those closest to us. "Hermes [...] embodies the social psychology of language and communication. He flies 'as fleet as thought,' an image of the day-light mind, with its plans and synaptic leaps, its chatter and overload. Hermes shows that these minds are not islands, but nodes in an immense electric tangle of words, images, songs, and signals" (19). However, Hermes is also completely comfortable with stealing, tricking, and confusing those around him, and he is most definitely the god of commerce, which the web provides a catalyst for. The false utopias talked about across the web can be harbingers of both peace and destruction. This is something a person should be weary of not only in the science fiction imaginings at fiction-net, but also in emails from Nigerian princes. Hermes cons us with his quick words and duplicitous smiles. His form of communication is language, reading, a form of animism itself with the way it pops images of archaic spirits into our minds. Davis quotes Marshall McLuhan on Hermes' writing: it "'shattered the charmed circle and resonating magic of the tribal world, exploding man into an agglomeration of specialized and psychically impoverished individuals or units, functioning in a world of linear time and Euclidian space'" (35). It is Thoth, the Egyptian Hermes, who tempted King Thamus with literacy.
Like the world depicted in "Total Recall", Char Davies' Osmose surrounds the experiencer with sights, sounds, and a real, living space--you can move around inside this electronic piece of art, playing in it like your own backyard. This is the next stage of online interaction, with humans increasingly building avatars to interact with each other in social memory palaces. "Osmose," Davis says, "[...] reminds us how intimate we are with electronics, in sight and sound, in body and psyche. [... and] is a powerful example of how technological environments can simulate something like the old animist immersion in the World Soul, organic dreamings that depend, in power and effect, upon the ethereal fire" (70). Some theological researchers, like Tom Horn in Forbidden Gates, believe that this sort of communication is the gateway to the demonic realms. With the continued linking up of mind and machine, and concepts of transhumanism and posthumanism, our future, some fear, will resemble something like Star Trek's Borgs with the loss of identity, or as Tom Horn opines, a demonic hell with doors being open that should not, releasing the ability for demons from another realm to break into our own.
In fact, a pulp story by Laurence Manning and Fletcher titled "The City of the Living Dead" paints a Dystopic hell where the last remaining remnants of man's techo-empire are dying off because people have placed themselves into a continual dream-state. The whole of humanity became wired to machines which let them experience any adventure of their choice: “‘Thus if the operator wished to make the Adventurer feel that he was hunting, the record of a hunting adventure was placed in the Machine, and the cable leading from the adventurer’s nerves was connected to it. The nerves of the adventurer’s foot would assure him that he trod the mould of the forest; the nerves of his eyes would bring him a vision of the dim vista of trunks and a wild animal bounding through them; the nerves of his hands and arms would tell him he was making the correct motions to take aim and bring the animal down; and through the nerves of his ears, the Machine Adventurer would hear the dying scream of the beast he had slaughtered'" (14-15). However, no one had left their machine-escape-worlds in ages, and they were slowly starving to death. The only one left was an old man trying to maintain the humans and tech which remained.
Relating back to what Joseph Campbell said about play, here's a great video where Charlie Todd talks about improv. Especially wait for his closing comments about kids and playing.
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