Last night I watched Total Recall, which I bought for five dollars at Target a while back. I have a bunch of other things to say about it. But one thing in particular jumped out at me. I hadn’t seen this movie for years, so a lot of the details had gone missing. If you don’t know the movie, Schwarzenegger plays a guy in the future who finds out that the life he thought he’d been living isn’t real. He’s actually a secret agent on Mars. It’s based on a Philip K. Dick story, so the question remains throughout whether or not he’s really just dreaming the whole thing. It’s especially a possibility since early in the movie he visits a memory-implant service which gives him memories of going to Mars on vacation, complete with a fantasy about being a secret agent.

Anyway, there’s a scene where Quaid (Arnold) is visited by a man who claims to be a doctor sent from the memory-implant service. Quaid suspects that he is actually in service to the enemy. The doctor however pleads for Quaid to come back to reality. He hands Quaid a little red pill which Quaid eyes suspiciously. The doctor explains (from the script):

It’s a symbol. Of your desire to return to reality. –Inside your dream, you’ll fall asleep.

Quaid takes it, puts it in his mouth, ends up murdering the doctor, and then spits the pill out onto his dead body. The whole thing is almost an exact inversion of a similar scene in The Matrix. Morpheus offers Neo the choice between the blue and red pill:

You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe.

You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

The difference here though is that in the Matrix the red pill “wakes you up inside the dream” and is a genuine offer to come up to a higher (or lower, I guess) level of reality. Neo takes it willingly and is transported. Quaid refuses it and stays inside the dream. Ultimately though, both characters end up battling enemy agents to save the world.

It’s weird how many things this movie connects together. Besides this connecting thread between it and the Matrix, we also have Schwarzenegger having starred in Terminator. A woman named Sophia Stewart claims to have written a story called The Third Eye in the early 80’s which was plagiarized and turned into both the Terminator and Matrix trilogies. (I’m actually planning to interview her soon, so stay tuned). Not to mention that this movie also pulls Philip K. Dick into the mix, since it was based on a story of his: “We can remember it for you wholesale.” I’ll have to read through that original story and see if it’s different. I actually saw some earlier versions of the screenplay online which were radically different and did not include the red pill sequence.

Plus we have the story itself. First off, we have an ordinary man who ascends to a position of greatness, in the form of Schwarzenegger. Much like in the Manchurian Candidate, he finds out he’s been brainwashed for nefarious purposes. Also creepy is that the situation on the planet Mars revolves around political instability due to the depletion and limitation of natural resources. The industrial ruler of the planet declares a state of martial law in order to battle the terrorists (rebels fighting for independence). This is noteworthy for a couple reasons, Mars is the planet of war, and the term “martial” comes from that. This also relates back to the Governator tarot card I made - which is certainly a Mars-driven energy. Plus we have this whole line of prophecy which is predicting that Schwarzenegger will rise to the presidency, with dire results. With that in mind, it’s also interesting to watch this whole flip-flop as Quaid battles with the mind-control and the evil in his past. Is he ultimately for the people or against them? Is any of this even real?

Anyway, it’s not the world’s greatest movie or anything, nor does any of this “prove” anything - but it’s certainly a big ball of connections. But then, once you reach a certain point mentally, so is everything I guess. For better or worse…