Marxist Movie Review: Total Recall

I remember awhile back when MIM (Maoist International Movement) used to do movie reviews from a Marxist standpoint. I enjoyed them thoroughly, although the MIM had their own ideological agenda that I didn't necessarily agree with. Of course, I have my own ideology as well, and I will unashamedly read them in to my reviews. Hopefully I'll do a couple of these a month - and I am open to suggestions about what movies to review. Enjoy!

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT
Watching the movie before reading this review is highly recommended.

Total Recall

Total Recall stars Arnold Swarzenegger as Quaid, a well-paid construction worker living in a big city apartment with his wife in some unspecified American city. The setting is the future, wherein a Mars mining colony has been established in order to retrieve a valuable mineral plentifully supplied near the colony. Quaid develops an unusually strong urge to visit Mars, and recurring dreams of a brunette woman lure him in to considering a somewhat controversial dream vacation package offered by a company called "Rekall." In the process, doctors inject a memory implant which gives the brain several days worth of experiences and memories as if they were real events, all within a matter of minutes without leaving the chair.

Against the advice of his wife and best friend, he goes in for the procedure. As the scientists are implanting the chip, it is discovered that Quaid's memory had previously been erased and a fake memory installed by another implant - hitting this implant causes a schizoid embolism that threatens to erode his sanity. An important note here is that while we may safely assume that he entered a schizoid embolism, we cannot be sure if this happened before or after the chip was (attemptedly) installed. The discovery of the previous implant may have been imagined by Quaid as part of the current implant's installation which went awry. This means that the remainder of the movie may very well be totally imagined by Quaid or totally real. The definition of reality is hereafter perpetually in question and never answered - an important allegory for real life.

After escaping Rekall, Quaid is confronted by his best friend and wife who reveal themselves to be agents for the Mars colonial government. He also receives a message from his pre-erasure self imploring him to go to Mars, which he does - being chased by colonial agents.

The Mars colony itself is rife with political overtones, though the movie almost tries to pretend to address these as a simple fictional plot rather than intentionally charged statements about society and revolution. The colony is owned by a massive mining corporation strictly controlled by the owner and CEO, Vilos Cohaagen, who is simultaneously the head of the colonial government. Due to the uninhabitable atmosphere of the planet, the citizens of the Mars colony must live in oxygenated domes. Workers are paid poorly and crammed in to under-maintained domes, where poverty and overcrowding result in rampant drugs, violence, prostitution, and other vices. This is analogous class struggle and the ghettoization of the proletariat.

Above: The anguish of the proletariat.

The air quality in the workers' domes is highly contaminated and has gradually caused strange mutations among large swaths of the population, turning skin red and even changing physical appendages in to new, unique (but not vestigial) forms. The rumor is that it is the rebirth of the alien species, but the corporate doctors write them off as simple physical deformations. One might draw a parallel to the suppression of native races and their social association with "mutation" and "impurity" (as a comrade interestingly noted, despite these Earthlings being themselves foreign to Mars, Martians and their culture are curiously referred to as "alien.")

A rebellion is underway by the mutant proletarians demanding higher pay, better air quality and other basic necessities. The rebels are constantly labeled as "terrorists" by the media outlets and the CEO of the colony in news broadcasts, despite the fact that the only mass killings we see are those perpetrated by the colonial authorities in the course of the movie. The CEO at one point cuts off oxygen to a workers' dome for assisting the rebels, nearly murdering the entire community of that dome (but at the same time revealing that the only reason he is still in power is his absolute control over life or death in the colony.)

Throughout the movie, it is hinted that a Martian artifact discovered in the mine which has caused operations to stop is of major relevance to the leadership of the colony. Quaid discovers while speaking to the rebel leader that this machine will "save Mars." The rebel leader is unaware of what it will do, but he somehow knows it will be a good thing. We might presume that his extreme mutation has given him great insight. This mutation appears to have given the rebel leader a "deeper knowledge" of the "bigger picture" of Martian development - making him a sort of "sage". He and the rebels are totally wiped out after he explains the situation to Quaid.

This analogy may be more of a stretch, but I'll give it my best: We might take him to be the embodiment of the pro-revolutionary theorist. While many pro-revolutionaries imagine themselves to be the "subjective element" that can "change history," the rebel leader offers an alternate hypothesis. The revolutionaries in the film do not end up changing anything; in fact, they are more or less eradicated before Mars is saved. They never even live to see the Mars they fought for, but they fought anyway even if the fight was futile. Contrariwise, one could note that without the rebels and their specialized knowledge, Quaid would not have known how to save Mars. That is, the rebels played a role even if they did not actually change the world themselves.

We discover that Quaid was originally a pro-government agent whose memory was erased and a new life created solely so he could lead the government to the rebel hideout, which he does successfully. Despite this revelation, however, the "new Quaid" does not rejoin the government but continues assisting the rebels. This is a powerful lesson in "conditions determine consciousness" because despite previously embodying reaction, he now embraces progress purely as a result of his experiences within the rebel community.

Quaid then proceeds to the artifact and activates it. The CEO had claimed that this technology would destroy all the rich minerals on the planet to avoid anyone utilizing it, but its activation reveals it to be a hydration machine which turns Mars in to a fully habitable planet - undermining the CEO's stranglehold over the colony and freeing the people to develop Mars themselves.

For our coup de grace, we can take this analogically to be the technological development that makes Anarchism/Communism possible and totally abolishes class society and Capitalism. The ruling class attempted its best repression to keep the discovery from surfacing, even facing a stiff rebel resistance which took up arms to destroy that ruling class. Ultimately, however, repression and rebellion both failed, and it required the objective intervention of forces "from outside" of the established class struggle to actually create the necessary social transformation by fundamentally changing material circumstances.

More to Come

"There is no wild essence, like the red squirrel under threat but still holding on, which we could use to repopulate the wilderness. There is nothing real to go back to, and nothing at all of what existed before the motorway now survives." - Monsieur Dupont

We can only go forward, in the long run. The question is "to what?"


Those who are interested in this blog will note that my old posts have been erased. Those who know me will know that I have always maintained a firm position politically as a Communist, philosophically as a materialist.

For all intents and purposes, I would still consider myself a Marxist. That is in the sense that I am a Darwinist; while new discoveries and experiences have unraveled some positions of these great theorists, the core of their exploration remains intact and a useful foundation for newer, better ideas.

In my departure from Leninism, I embraced Anarchism. I would still consider myself an Anarchist. But we must be clear about what these things mean; terms are so confusing in the political milieu.

A summary of my position is negation. I am uncompromisingly opposed to everything that represents the world around me, in all of its backwardness and reaction. We live not only in a time marked by great and monstrous inequities and cruelties, but a time marked by devastation and despair. Nonetheless, it is not enough to understand and lament the universe for its current form. Its important to recognize the greatest tragedy of all: not just that it exists or has come to exist, but that its existence is both necessary and unavoidable.

We are thus trapped in a paradox: we oppose that which exists, but the only way out of it is through it. Those of us with an objective view can plainly see that no social revolution is nigh or even plausible. We also see that social reform is not only incapable of fixing the problem but manages to exacerbate it significantly.

Those of us who are paying attention to history and current events sees the American empire's might being challenged by a rising economic power in China, much as Germany felt threatened by England before World War I. We see a growing nationalist, religious fundamentalist, socially conservative movement gaining steam very quickly in the United States. We're seeing not only the prospect of a new world war, but the unavoidable birth of Fascism and the rise of a new Hitler (with Glenn Beck Himmler on propaganda ops) to challenge America's Wiemar reformist president, Obama.

Not only is this a backwards time, it is an archaic and primitive time.

This is all humanity is. Apes with books and cars. Stop trying to giving him Marx and Kropotkin; he can't possibly understand!

Those of us who are conscious Communist and Anarchists know there is nothing we can do of any social importance, however much we wish there was. Objective forces are lined up against our vision. Communism does not exist as a social relation, only as an unimplementable theory which a tiny minority even finds worth considering. We are time travellers from the world of tomorrow stuck in a nightmarish past that we can neither conquer or comprehend. We are doomed to defeat, failure, and death with no meaningful accomplishments to our name. We're fucked, and we're going to hell in a handbasket.

What is to be done?

More to come.