Friday 2 August 2013

We Can Remember This Film For You Wholesale (Total Recall (1990))

From http://www.emanuellevy.com/media/2012/07/total_recall_1990_poster.jpg

Dir. Paul Verhoeven

I was a fan of Paul Verhoeven already, but viewing a large chunk of his earlier, Dutch language now has had a direct effect on viewing his entire career. It explains a lot about his filmography, even explaining Showgirls (1995), when you realise he can be both completely serious and play in levels of parody that pushes boundaries. It also makes me wonder how Verhoeven was even able to get away with becoming a Hollywood director that was prolific as he was, the time when hard R rated films were still acceptable in the mainstream allowing him to go through with some extremely adult work like Total Recall. Soldier of Orange (1977) and its award success had to be the calling card for Hollywood's attention, and his films' visual look, guided by the cinematography of future director of his own Jan De Bont, are rich and would grab anyone. But Verhoeven's frankness, even if it was softened, with less full frontal male nudity and bluntness in sexuality and characterisation, was still provocative and controversial, able to meld it with a satirical edge to almost all his blockbusters. Even in his debut Business Is Business (1971), a comedy drama based on the true recollections of female, red light district prostitutes, shows an irrelevance matched to the serious, willing to show serious subject matter in such blackly humoured way, that still bled through to all his films up to Black Book (2006), his return to Dutch cinema. The grabbing of a second hand box set of his Dutch work, that costs an arm and a leg online, for a cheap price in a store,  a diamond of a find anyone would love to find, pushed me to explore and reconsider his whole canon. His filmography is almost all available bar the obscure TV movies and Tricked (2012), a return to filmmaking that was partially created with the assistance of the public. An upcoming film has been added to his IMDB list, and there has been talk of him getting a film about Jesus Christ green lit, whose provocative titbits from what I have heard would make it difficult to be made in this day and age. If Abel Ferrera may be finally able to make a film on Pier Paolo Passolini though, anything can happen.

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ6atRmMEw-c-W-tjQWjFdLM8yYkmFjXFz2_zVhKVjY5ltnfntJIoq3vWnPHnalMj7rJpLsSEbNRoc6n5GCo6OBBgOc0UpvEMtckU09I43fg2n0lpexfQvMRnnyebBi5sLtHrRKNvksFTF/s400/Total-Recall-1990-vs.-Total-Recall-2012-filmaria-3.jpg

With Total Recall, you realise, with the new things I learn about Verhoeven's cinema, that Arnold Schwarzenegger films could be used as a meta-reflection on what a person's mind could generate. Ordinary man Douglas Quiad (Schwarzenegger), in the near future, goes for a mental vacation, where fictional memories of a vacation, even from yourself, can be embedded into your mind. From the moment he goes for the memory implant, one of two versions of the film can be taking place. The official view of the film is that Quaid finds out he is a real spy whose has been given amnesia to hide the secrets he knows about a conspiracy taking place at the colony at Mars, persuaded by the men of Mars' political leader Vilos Cohaagen (Ronny Cox), with his right hand man Richter (Michael Ironside) directly behind him. The other version of the film is that, in this conspiracy spy narrative, this plot is entirely the implant memory and is all taking place in Quaid's mind to the end of the movie. The one issue with the later idea is that we see scenes without Quiad in them, with Richer, Cohaagen and Lori (Sharon Stone), Quiad's wife. Bear in mind though is that this is if you view memories from within the idea that it should be first person. Can someone have memories that are third person even about themselves, especially faked ones? (And what does that say about the concept of cinema, a dreamlike construct that allows people to view themselves in third person too?). There's also the less philosophical issue that the official narrative as well as being continually questioned, as asked in the film itself, is incredibly convoluted and close to contrived. It could be that the script of Total Recall is weaker than others Verhoeven had, but with flaws and virtues with each interpretation that balances them together, the film dangles in a great centre where reality is completely subjective. It evokes Verhoeven's last Dutch film before going to Hollywood, The 4th Man (1983), which did the same balancing act in two different versions of what was happening but never choosing one over the other on purpose.

From http://i.stack.imgur.com/qDRbv.jpg

It also allows this film to have its cake and eat it by allowing the moment it turns into a traditional "Arnie" movie, including the one-liners, to become a fantasy for Schwarzenegger's character himself. The film has something off about it when it gets to Arnie shooting people, blackly humorous but also perverted. It is incredibly violent, to the point it could repulse some but has an off-centre sense of sick but reflective humour to it, the middle chapter of a trilogy where the first, RoboCop (1987), had its violence noticeably censored, this film, and Starship Troopers (1997) where even the deaths of giant, alien insects caused one to look back at the stupidly violent carnage with a grim tongue in its cheek. The problem with his career is that Verhoeven's moments of black satire are taken seriously, when it fact they intermingle with the serious, upfront aspects in a way that is never ironic and never dampens the straight-faced aspects. Viewing Total Recall and his films again, even in his serious work there's a sense of perverse playfulness running through them from the beginning of his career, amplified and allowed to run amok when he got to make blockbusters when most non-American directors would have usually been straight jacketed. It's a very twisted sense of humour with this film, but it comes with a more honest view of its material, the potentially ill-advised mixing of revelling with the content, and stepping back and questioning it without philosophical digressions, working perfectly.

From http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02065/1990-total-recall_2065421i.jpg

It's very much a stereotypical Schwarzenegger film, but the technical presentation of it is far higher here because of Verhoeven's ability with the visual look of his films. The effects may have dated - a weird creepiness to seeing a distorted Arnie face made out of prosthetics that is bulging like he's stuck his finger far too high up his nose - but it's almost all practical, having a distinct, otherworldly look befitting a cinematic depiction of the future than a realistic one. It occasionally scrapes the satire of Verhoeven's other American films, but it plays with the idea of memories through gunfights without the obvious political digs, all interlocking together in one single reality that is deeply flawed. That, whether Total Recall's narrative for three quarters of it is real or not, the world it depicts is chaotic beneath the surface nonethless, and is now spread to the rest of our galaxy, one that has also been part of the director's trademarks even when depicting real Dutch history such as in Katie Tippel (1975). It's far from the best of his filmography, just in the Hollywood films too with Starship Troopers looming over it all, but Total Recall still has virtues. They are both as an Arnie film - some of his best one liners at least - and as a film with a sliver of subversion, whose ending could be exceptionally dark even if it's supposed to be a triumphant one. It's completely unsubtle, but set up at the start, it uses this to create a fascinating, and entertaining, vacuum in action film tropes by making everything (possibly) a theatrics that a married man, a construction worker, would wish he would do in his everyday life, but shown to us in this film. I have not mentioned that this is based on a Philip K. Dick short story because I have only read one work of his so far, his novel Eye in the Sky (1957). It is befitting however; after a freak accident, a group of people are shown the insides of each others' minds, worlds wrapped around their subconscious desires and murkiest beliefs. Playing with this idea that, maybe, just maybe, we're watching an Arnie film dreamt by Arnie, as gory and ridiculous as an Arnie film dreamt about would be, it results in a far more tantalising and appropriate take on the ideas of human fantasy. In The 4th Man, the protagonist, an author, creates his novels by imaging things that are fake are real to the point he believes them, potentially a downfall for psychosis unless he was actually right, presented to us again with the least expect person, the star of Commando (1985), a man used to fighting chainmail wearing, shouty Australians than the concept of fake reality itself. The cartoonish hero given an existential crisis in a cartoon. Only Paul Verhoeven's cinema crosses such lines like this. 

From http://www.doblu.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/totalrecallmindbending4346.jpg

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