Remembering the Beginning
Philip K. Dick and a Total Recall Triptych
What happens when a story moves? Arnold Schwarzenegger helped moved one in 1990, when Paul Verhoeven took Philip K. Dick’s We Can Remember It for You Wholesale from page to screen - changing more than just the title along the way.
“Quail”, the book’s protagonist, becomes “Quaid” in Total Recall. The former is a bookish clerk who never leaves his psychiatrist’s waiting room; the latter is a 7 time Mr Olympia who gets his ass to Mars and kills 49 people. Quaid finds himself at the heart of an interplanetary corporate conspiracy; Quail is humanity’s sole hope against a race of intergalactic mice.
What the stories share is ambiguity: Quaid and Quail both undergo procedures in which fake memories are implanted into their minds. Both do this willingly - buying an ersatz adventure from a company named Rekall - and in both stories you’re never quite sure what’s real, what was manufactured, and where the tipping point lies between the two.
In 2012, the story moves again. Another Total Recall hits the screens, with another Quaid trying to recall what’s real, and what’s Rekall. This time though the ambiguity which makes the story work - in each of its three incarnations - is drawn from its connections to the others.
Take the scene in Verhoeven’s film in which Schwarzenegger makes the bold move of disguising himself as a large, middle-aged woman with red hair. Whilst trying to sneak through Mars passport control the disguise malfunctions, the “woman” responding to all questions by repeating the phrase “two weeks” before her face melts and a bodybuilder comes out and kills everyone.
In Wiseman’s version Colin Farrell is now Quaid, and during a similar scene in which we know he’s trying to smuggle himself through a checkpoint, the frame is centred upon a large, middle-aged woman with red hair – who when questioned nervously replies that she’s planning a trip of “two weeks”. True to form, Quaid’s disguise malfunctions at this point - only Farrell’s was that of an elderly Asian man standing behind the woman in the queue. It’s a great scene (in a largely terrible film) but it only really makes sense by acknowledging that the story it’s telling has been told before. The fun of hearing it told again comes from these subtle details which were altered when it moved.
No such fun came from another movement back in 1990, when Aklaim released Total Recall for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Players are dumped into Quaid’s world via the following intro text, lovingly recreated here in its original all caps format:
REKALL INC. PROMISED YOU A TRIP TO MARS. WHAT YOU GOT WAS A HEADACHE, MEMORY LOSS, AND THUGS TRYING TO BEAT YOU. WHY ARE YOU BEING HUNTED AND WHO IS HUNTING YOU? PERHAPS A TRIP TO THE ANGRY RED PLANET WILL PROVIDE YOU WITH ANSWERS.
Perhaps it will! Players then get to enjoy a by-the-numbers side scrolling shooter, incoherently peppered with references to other Arnold Schwarzenegger roles (“You’ve lost a life - I’ll be back!”). The game copies its structure from the main set pieces of the film, but the limitations of the technology of the time means it can’t really add much to the story. Whilst the other three incarnations form a triptych of interrelated ambiguity, the game’s left forlornly on the sidelines. When the story moved here, too much was lost along the way.
Not that this bothered me as an 8 year old. Back then, the game was far more exciting than the film was. The game was a world: you could move around it freely, the screen shifting as each new section opened up. Walk off the edge, and the world came into being around you. Walk into the cinema that’s in the background of the first level, and the film itself is playing on the screen. To me, that was downright magical. The game was like nothing I’d ever seen, and the film being somehow inside of it? Mind blowing.
In 2023? Slightly less so. Watching Arnold slaughter his way across Mars is still entertaining enough, but the game’s now as unreachable as the fake experiences crafted in Rekall HQ. Try and play it and the clunky controls, awful graphics, and incoherent story are all that’s left. The wonder was timebound, a product of expectations which have been altered beyond all imagination by the 30 years of technological progress which followed.
Explaining what happens to these stories is what I spent 3 years of my life doing whilst studying for a PhD. I’ve loved games ever since I was a kid - when I loved how they could push stories in different directions, like the 2D Quaid shuffling into a cinema and seeing himself on screen. Unpacking what makes these stories different is the hardest thing I’ve ever done; being called a Dr because I managed to do it second only to my daughter as the proudest.
Ultimately though, that particular story never led anywhere. People told me that doing a PhD would be hard, but it was only at the end that I found out the hardest part: nobody wanting to read it when you’re done. My dreams and ambitions have faded a bit since then, and my life’s more Quail than Quaid these days. There might be someone out there who reads this one day though. Maybe she’s asleep right now next door to me, and will one day walk into this study and see her dad up on the screen.
Dr Quaid, rekaling the rabbit hole he went down once, and never quite came out from.