ABSTRACT
You didn’t go to Rekal, Incorporated with the idea of regaining your memory; you went, as we realize, for the usual reason people go there-a love by plain, dull people for adventure. 1
Philip K. Dick, “We can remember it for you wholesale”
Doing the right thing means not only becoming a new person, long a traditional move in our exceptionalist and self-help-addicted culture, but also denying you were ever anybody else in the first place. 2
Frank Grady, “Arnoldian Humanism, or Amnesia and Autobiography in the Schwarzenegger Action Film”
In 2001, director Paul Verhoeven reflected on the decision to film his 1990 blockbuster Total Recall in Mexico City. “We found architecture that’s called “New Brutalism.” It was a very dark, bit heavy-handed, concrete style that gave the movie a very definitive architectural production design.”3 Leading actor Arnold Schwarzenegger similarly remarked that “the architecture in Mexico City is unlike anything else,”4 while Brian Robb adds that “Verhoeven initially wanted to shoot the Earth-set sequences in Houston, Texas, but decided that Mexican architecture had the futuristic quality he was seeking.”5 There are a number of compelling points to consider regarding this enthusiasm over Verhoeven’s “discovery” of New Brutalism and the perceived futuristic qualities of the buildings used in the film. We might begin by recalling Suvin’s claim that a defining feature of the genre is to be radically or at least significantly different from the empirical times, places, and characters of “mimetic” or “naturalist” fiction.6 Likewise for Dick, SF “exists” due to the human craving for this difference through “sensory and intellectual stimulation” as provided by the eccentric view and the invented world.7 However, for Suvin’s “radically different place” and Dick’s “invented world” to be recognized as such, their opposite must be similarly identified as the familiar and everyday-the home as “zero world.” As already discussed in relation to Blade Runner, in postfuturist films the home is often less apparent or simply nonexistent; it is either a memory or something to be coveted, but does not exist as a place of return or sanctity. Hence, the desire to “make one’s home” in the world replaces the earlier emphasis on “being at home” or “returning home,” and it is this process of homemaking that emerges as a central theme in Total Recall. Furthermore, the making of home also infers a subjective and active participation in defining the home for oneself and it is this process of how one attempts to construct their home, both materially and psychologically, that is at issue in Verhoeven’s film.8
