eXistenZ and Inception (duhnduhnduhnduhnduhn..WOOOOOAAAAAHHHHNNNN)

One thing that really struck me about eXistenZ was its similarity to Inception in the exploration and questioning of reality. Though other films have certainly incorporated such themes (e.g., The Matrix), both of the films in question layer many different “virtual” realities in order to disorient the viewer from understanding which one is, in fact, “real.” Even the realities from which the protagonists plunge into their virtual worlds are called into question at the end of both stories: Leonardo DiCapprio's spinning top and the Chinese waiter's inquiry as to whether or not the players are still gaming. In the latter case, the gamers already rose from a virtual reality that was introduced as the true reality at the beginning of the movie, further emphasizing the ambiguity of realism.

Another interesting parallel lies in the construction of the game in eXistenZ. That is, a player's preconceived ideas and unconscious desires apparently help shape the way the virtual reality, the characters, and the goals of the game are formed. As a result of such ideas and desires, the game we witness reflects an ongoing struggle between “realists” and gamers. In the “real world,” the former accuse the latter of “deforming reality” by creating an alternate one in which people can indulge their time, their energy, and their dreams. This introduces the notion that the virtual world is a dangerous vice that tempts many into limbo and apathy, while continuing the discussion with respect to questioning reality. Furthermore, the inception of these ideas into the virtual world highlight the dangers of virtual reality as well as the power of human will.

From a game designer's standpoint, the balance of free choice versus structure and control likely exhibits the greatest challenge in designing a virtually realistic system. Allegra notes at the beginning of the film that eXistenZ is meant to be an entirely new gaming paradigm; perhaps this was meant to reflect a shifting of such balance. As a gamer, I understand the dilemma. The linearity (or lack thereof) of a game often correlates with its replay value; at the same time, if the gamer is given too much freedom, the storyline often suffers. In The Matrix, the machines encounter a similar problem after the failure of their first, utopian virtual reality. Their solution was to create the perfect illusion of free choice to keep the minds of their human batteries content. To really drive home the relevancy of this balance, Pikul asks Allegra shortly after being “plugged in” for the first time if there is any free will in her games. She replies, “Only as much as real life.”

Bad acting and accents aside, eXistenZ appears to be the Canadian predecessor to Inception in the genre of virtual reality mind****s. While both movies certainly incorporate other themes (e.g., Pikul's fear of penetration and revulsion at the organic game consoles), they both focus on the power of ideas, the importance of free will, and the dangers of indulging in dream worlds. Both also force us to ask questions such as: What is reality? How can we tell if we're really in it? How does our understanding of it influence our understanding of consequence and violence? Finally, can we truly choose our own destinies, or are we all part of a bigger game designed by someone upstairs?

Also, this has nothing to do with my post, but in case you don't get my title...

Is this real?

In a movie, does it matter which world is "real"? I kept coming back to this question as I watched Existenz and found myself wondering, again and again, "Is this the real world or the game? Is he really dead?" The obvious answer, from an extremely cynical point of view, is that it was not the real world, and that the characters were not really dead, because all of the events only occurred with the context of a movie. The director yelled cut, the actors went home, and that was the end of that. But this pragmatic perspective jars with the experience of watching the movie, where I really cared, in each moment, whether the events were just the game, or were actually occurring in the movie's reality.

The typical explanation of this would be "suspension of disbelief." I was absorbed into the movie's world, was tricked into believing, at least on an emotional level, that the events were real, and so cared about the characters and their fates. However, although I think this explanation is good in general, it cannot explain my own reaction to Existenz, as my disbelief was not suspended for even a second. I found the dialogue unconvincing, the accents painful, and the two protagonists endlessly irritating. I never believed in any of the characters in their own right, and consistently thought of them as "Jude Law with a bad accent," "The Doctor" and "Bilbo Baggins." I felt no emotional connection to the story (and was frequently repulsed by it), and so shouldn't really have cared whether any one of them died "in the game" or "in reality."

I therefore think that movies like Existenz succeed in making us ask "Is this real?" partly because it constitute a challenge to the viewer's intelligence, and partly because it plays off viewer insecurities about their own perceptions of the world. I am the sort of person who cannot help trying to guess what the "twist" of the movie will be. I declared "all of this is a game" a minute into the movie, and enjoyed the puzzle of "Is this the game? Is this reality?" throughout the course of the film. Although I would enjoy the film more if it outsmarted me and gave me a twist I truly didn't expect (as indeed I was more impressed by this movie when it turned out that the protagonists were actually the "realists"), there is a sense of great satisfaction and security in knowing that you "outsmarted" the movie, and that you weren't taken in by the tricks that it played.

Yet I think it also plays upon the terrifying fact that none of us can always tell the difference between dream and reality. Have you ever had a dream that was such a perfect copy of real life that you thought it was real? Have you ever woken up from a dream and questioned whether it was something that actually happened, or remembered something and been unable to tell whether it happened in real life, or in a dream? Perhaps I am just particularly susceptible to such things, but I have been so unsettled by bad dreams that I have called my family to check that they were OK, and have yet to forget nightmares I had as a child where I "woke up," only to find the monster in my room. Even outside the context of dreams, people sometimes become disconnected from reality after traumatic events, such as the death of a loved one, or world changing moments like 9/11. People ask, "Was that real? Did it really happen?" not only because they don't want it to have been true, but because everything begins to feel like it must have been a dream. When watching movies like Existenz, we therefore ask "Is this real?" and attempt to outsmart the movie because we want the reassurance that we can tell the difference, that we are smart enough to figure out when something is a dream or a game, and when something is actually happening to us.

Estranging Reality to Realize the Strange

When both watching EXistenZ and reading Snow Crash (although I’ll focus on the former here, since I’ve not quite completed the latter), I was struck not so much by the creation of such involved virtual worlds as I was the utter strangeness of the “real” worlds. For example, when I first began Snow Crash, I was convinced that I was reading a story about the day to day life of a modern-day pizza delivery boy whose devotion to virtual reality games had driven him to suffer a psychotic break. Once I realized that this explanation wasn’t sufficient—that Hiro was indeed living in a hyper-commercialized version our (very near) future in which pizza companies are run like the mafia and racism has become acceptable and commonplace again—I began to suspect that, in fact, the entire world I was reading about was virtual. After this flailing attempt to ground myself during the exposition, the transition to the metaverse was actually quite calming—finally, a version of reality that I knew wasn’t reality! Not only that, but, compared to “reality”, I found the metaverse to, surprisingly, be comfortingly close to my own perception of reality, or at least what I would expect a virtual version of my own to resemble, with its social hubs and motley collection of avatars.

The “reality” of EXistenZ (and here I’m referring to the world we think is real for most of the film) is similarly disturbing, with its grotesque emphasis on organic-looking technology, not to mention the thickly layered-on, unnatural accents and over-the-top dialogue. This confusion only got worse near the end, when EXistenZ and “reality” started to “bleed together”, making it impossible to distinguish between the two. Even the very end, which presents the most believable world (with technology that actually looks like technology, not perverted body parts, and legitimate accents), the eerie symmetry between situation and dialogue between that “reality” and the first “reality” casts everything into doubt. When Allegra describes EXistenZ as “a game everybody’s already playing”, she’s more right than she knows. Like in Snow Crash, the world that we know is virtual becomes, somehow, the most “real” option, both because of its sheer, dirty grit (real animals instead of technologies that seem to mimic their form but have no explained source) and because we know on which side of reality we— and the characters— stand.

As we saw in “A Rape in Cyberspace”, even lines of text on a screen can create a startling illusion of reality for those invested in the community. Once you add in a second degree of separation, though (reading a book or watching a movie), more drastic action is needed to force the reader or watcher to understand the level of involvement and devotion the characters feel to their virtual realities or games. By making the virtual space the ironically more concrete, understandable option while twisting the “real world” until it’s scarcely recognizable (or until it can’t be sorted into “real” or “virtual”), Stephenson and Cronenberg do a 180 on our perception of reality and, in doing so, draw us more fully into their characters’ lives.

Afraid of extending reality

I’m still reading the last quarter of Snow Crash, but I’m finding myself curious about a minor aspect of the novel: what’s wrong with being a gargoyle? Hiro defines gargoyles (p123-4) with slight disgust: “Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies… They serve as human surveillance devices… Nothing looks stupider these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society…. The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time.” So, aside from the obvious alignment to a “class” of “geeks” who in the past may have accessorized with fanny packs and pocket protectors and toted around graphing calculators, etc., I want to know what’s so “embarrassing” about a gargoyle. It seems that gargoyles are more than embarrassing; they’re ostracized and othered. For example, Y.T. notices very quickly that Hiro has turned into a gargoyle, and Hiro becomes very defensive, claiming that his device is the smallest belt pack machine ever made, which I guess makes him less obviously marked as a gargoyle (p.265).

And I wondered why this even caught my attention - I think it’s because this struck me as an inevitable part of Snow Crash’s future: if there’s a “Real World” and a “Metaverse,” and people are starting to collapse those two worlds by becoming gargoyles, it’s only a matter of time before that becomes the norm. Perhaps gargoyles are stigmatized in Snow Crash because, as Hiro mentions early in the novel, it’s possible to be very wealthy in one world and inconsequential in the other (although, of course, he also explains that only about 1% of people have enough funds to access the Metaverse regularly, so that’s already skewing the dichotomy of “superstar in the Metaverse/ pizza delivery boy in the Real Word”). If everyone became gargoyles, I bet this disparity between the Real World identity and the Metaverse would collapse (or at least become much more narrow), and the potentiality of creating a “new” virtual identity of “higher value” would also be less promising. So gargoyles are ostracized not because they’re nerdy, but they’re a threat to the higher ups in both the Real World and the Metaverse. (I could definitely be wrong here; I’m just speculating.)

The gargoyles, as well as Stephenson’s description of the Metaverse in general, both strongly remind me of Existenz and “A Rape in Cyberspace.” With gargoyles come the difficulties of discerning virtual reality from reality; virtual reality really just becomes an expansion pack of real life (for those who can afford it and feel pressured to buy into it). The virtual reality of Existenz is ultimately so convincing that it’s difficult to know where the game ends and where “real life” and “true agency” begin - and I’m not convinced that it even matters at that point. (And at one point in the movie, Jude Law agrees with me; he doesn’t want to kill people because it’s impossible to tell whether they’re in real time or the game.) I’m also afraid to ever play The Sims again. Similarly, “A Rape in Cyberspace” collapses “virtual reality” and “reality,” expanding the scope of where/how rape can occur. And becoming a gargoyle resists the separation of these terms.

On a related note - I just saw this on a blog today.
I’m not going to weigh in on the issue here, but it’s definitely an example of how “the real world” is expanding in ways that make Stephenson’s 1991 Metaverse seem almost prophetic: let’s think of online dating sites like Match.com as places where people are creating avatars that may or may not accurately reflect who they are in “real life.” If a person is a registered sex offender in real life, should that record follow them into the Metaverse? How about in Carole Markin’s case, where I’d argue that the avatar extended into reality, and she (like many other people on dating sites) decided to collapse the worlds, and was sexually assaulted?

Addicted to Cyberspace

I want to build upon Shelina's post, in which she compares the cyberspace in Neuromancer to our current experiences with the internet, arguing that "we seem to be capable of entering a type of virtual reality without the physical melding of human and machine."

My initial reaction to Gibson's cyberspace was extreme discomfort. To Case, at least, cyberspace seems a way of escaping reality. Without the ability to access it, Case becomes a suicidal drug addict, desperate for a way to escape the bleakness of reality. Once he reconnects, he cries "tears of release" (70), and quickly allows cyberspace to take over his entire existance: "This was it. This was what he was, who he was, his being" (79). As we saw in Tiptree's story The Girl Who Was Plugged In, virtual reality completely replaces Case's actual reality, with his virtual self become more real that the person he is without the assistance of the matrix. "He forgot to eat" (79), because real life no longer matters. And this addiction appears to be because real life is too boring, too painful, too unbearable. When he remembers Linda Lee, and her death, for example, "he jacks in and works for nine straight hours" (79), hiding from his own thoughts, his own reality, by immersing himself in a vibrant world where he gets to rule.

This resonates with our own current relationship with the internet, and with computers in general. Many people have become addicted to gaming, whether World of Warcraft or Farmville, with some individuals even literally playing themselves to death through extended gaming marathons. Even casual users can find hours of their day disappearing to constant refreshing of Facebook and PrincetonFML, clicking links of Wikipedia, or watching cats playing the piano on Youtube. Neuromancer seems to have predicted not only the existance of this network, but also its ability to help us to escape from the stresses and worries of our everyday lives, and the addictive nature of this possibility.

However, the more of Neuromancer I read, the more troubled I became by my initial definitions of "real" and "imaginary," and my condemnation of Case for prefering to abandon "reality" in favor of comforting cyberspace. Shelina's discussion of how novels produce a similar experience particularly made me rethink this dismissal, as I can neither deny that my novel addiction involves escaping into a fictional world for a while nor claim that there is something "weak" or "delusional" about engaging in such activities, I think I must reevaluate my original black and white definition. Poe asked, "Is every thing we see or seem but a dream within a dream?", and if the answer is "yes," and life is just an illusion in our consciousness, does it matter whether that life takes place in the "real world," or in a consuming virtual reality?

To add to this debate, I found an article on BBC news that claims that a connection has been found between excessive internet use and depression. However, the researchers were unable to determine whether excessive internet use causes depression, or whether people use the internet more before they're depressed. In the first instance, "escaping" from reality through cyberspace is mentally harmful. In the other, it provides a welcome and useful form of escape when the "real world" becomes overwhelming. The problem, I guess, is discovering which is the truth.

Technology: A Threat from Within

I thoroughly enjoyed Neuromancer’s depiction of how technology might be used in the future. One aspect I was particularly intrigued by was how technology made the “boundary between the physical and the non-physical very imprecise” (Haraway, 153), or in the case of the Sprawl, between the real and the virtual. Case is often more comfortable when navigating the non-space of the Sprawl than in the real world, a reflection of the fact that he has spent so much time in cyberspace that it seems more real to him than the physical reality he inhabits. Similarly, Wintermute has the ability to tap Case’s subconscious to create a virtual world much more vivid and starkly real than anything Case’s own memory could recreate by itself, yet another way in which technology blurs the boundaries between the subjective and objective. And once these boundaries become ill-defined, keeping track of reality becomes difficult, as evidenced by the fact that the Linda whom Case meets in the beach hut does not realize that she is just a personality recording, the real Linda having already been killed.

Less benign than this confusing of the real and the virtual depicted in Neuromancer is the suggestion that technology enables social decay. For example, memory-manipulating techniques enable the exploitation of women as “meat puppets”, while Chiba City’s lowlife actively engages in illegal trade in software, hardware and biotechnology. These vices certainly have modern-day analogues in prostitution and black-marketeering, but insofar as society is portrayed as actively exploiting technology to continue engaging in and creating new vices, Gibson appears to be suggesting that while the ways in which our primal desires manifest themselves may change, the underlying motivations will not. The wealthy are certainly not exempt from this rule either, as the advent of cloning technology enables Ashpool to commit incest and murder one of his own kin with no consequences at all. Much of Neuromancer’s social commentary is conducted by contrasting the different lifestyles led by the urban underclass and the corporate elite, but Gibson also suggests that at least in this regard, they are not so different from each other after all.

Finally, through its depiction of Wintermute’s plot to reunite with its other half, Neuromancer indicates how artificial intelligences might pose a threat to society. In order to achieve this goal, Wintermute destroys Corto’s personality by overriding it with that of Armitage, blackmails Case into working for it, and mercilessly eliminates the Turing Police when they attempt to stop its plans. Yet not only was Wintermute created by humans, it was also created to be separate from Neuromancer, and this separation is what ultimately drives it to reunite with its other half. Just as the Time Machine depicts humanity as enabling the means of its own destruction by appropriating technological advancements for military purposes in the Time Machine, Neuromancer suggests that the threat which Wintermute poses to humanity is one which humanity has only itself to blame for, as Wintermute’s destructive impulses are merely consequences of the condition into which it is created.

Sapience, Modification, and the Human-Technology Interface

In my mind, one of the biggest subjects broached by Neuromancer concerns what defines humanity or, more broadly, true sapience. These issues obviously factor in when discussing the AIs present in the Novel ("Wintermute" and the titular "Neuromancer") but are also addressed through four of the primary characters: Case, Armitage/Corto, Molly, and McCoy Pauley (The "Dixie Flatline"). Throughout the book, we are constantly questioning what does it mean to be human? What is reality in a world of tangible cyberspace? Where is the line between life and death, man and machine?

The fundamental issue behind these questions of humanity are in the cyberpunk-esque future described by the book. In this future, "Console Cowboys" navigate cyberspace by plugging in and traveling through it as though it were a tangible reality. Furthermore, systems exist such that a "force-feedback" of sorts can be returned the user with the inputs usually either another individuals sensations or a sufficiently advanced AI capable of mimicking true physical reality. These themes are already ones we've touched upon in this course, the former parallels the sockets in Delaney's Nova while the latter is something akin to Mogran possession. However, Neuromancer combines the two via cyberspace and as a result deals with all the problems these books otherwise raised independently.

Megaregions -> Sprawl -> Cyberspace as an Escape

Continuing the individual parallels, Molly, Armitage/Corto, and Dixie all match characters or ideas from the aforementioned works. Molly represents the extent of technological self-modification with her mirrored eyes, razor-tipped fingers, and general physical improvements (similar to the cyborgs of Nova, there being a difference between her modifications and those made by an enterprising Demon). Armitage represents a false personality implanted over an exiting being (like a possessed being from Body Surfing) while conversely Dixie is a disembodied consciousness (paralleling a Mogran). The unique character in the mix though is the protagonist Case himself. Case has the modifications allowing him to connect and navigate the web yet is otherwise in full command of himself. Nonetheless though, he is addicted to plugging in and hacking to the point of becoming detached from reality. He constantly refers to his own body as mere flesh and a limitation and even seems to criticize his relationship with Molly as driven by the corporeal body.

Molly Millions as Imagined by a Web Artist

These relationships, all machinated or influenced by the AI known as Wintermute, show not only the varying levels of man-machine interface but also begs the question of what defines humanity? Is Armitage human because he possesses a true body or is he not because "he" has been forcibly implanted over Willis Corto? Is Case human for a similar reason even though he at times detests the physical world and seeks cyberspace as his true home? Is Molly human despite her extensive modifications to become a living weapon? Is Dixie still human despite lacking a body and existing only as a flash-imprint of his true self on a computer's hard drive? Controlling everyone is Wintermute whose existence and motives encourage us to question the validity of the Turing Police or the AI's own motives.

I don't know the answers to these questions but I do know that worry about the future of our species. All things considered, computer systems are more vulnerable than the physical world. If we are all plugged in come the year 2050+, all it takes is a rogue bit of code to throw everything off. A metaphorical virus turned real which would expand far faster and with a higher "fatality rate" than any disease known. Because of our cyber-humanity, would we be able to or want to live forever? Who are we if we are reduced to a Dixie-like construct? If we all are just effectively computer programs, who is to say that AI's cannot be citizens or people too? The lines will blur and quite frankly, I fear that day.

Making Contact: Sam's Connections to Self, Others, and Audience

Like many classmates, I was struck by the bleak isolation of Moon. In particular I focused on Sam’s desire for physical human contact. Early in the Sams’ time together, Sam-5 tells Sam-6, “I just want to shake your hand. Will you shake my hand,” only to be denied by a gruff, “Maybe later.” These dueling desires for contact and separation make sense in light of the Sams’ unique experiences. Sam-5 has spent three years of his life without direct contact with another human. Sam-6 “remembers” being on Earth a week ago. The Sams’ first real physical interaction (after another rejection – this time of a high-five) is a fairly serious fight, heightened by the fact that Sam-5’s deteriorating health quickly brings on a nosebleed, even though Sam-6 “barely touched [him].” Again, physical contact has a greater impact for Sam-5 than it does for Sam-6, this time represented by a physical manifestation of its effect. Finally, near the end of the movie, having reached a mutual understanding (and aware that neither of them has ever really experienced human contact before), the Sams exchange a high-five. In another film (and at first in this one) I would have seen this gradually-formed connection between doubles as symbolic of the protagonist accepting himself. But that doesn’t quite work here because, as Kai pointed out, the question of human identity is so overtly unstable within the movie. It’s hard to distinguish the protagonist, because neither Sam is the original. They are projections of someone who came before.

This idea of projections of someone else’s life carries through into the video messages from Tess and the accompanying implanted memories. From a meta-narrative perspective, I was reminded of our discussion of Total Recall and the importance of distinguishing the real within fiction. In a sense, characters are always projections to us. We use them for entertainment instead of energy, but we’re the ones who bring them to life for a predetermined period and with a predetermined course to follow. Their lives begin there, and all reference to the time before come from implanted memories (in the form of words or flashbacks) that we’re expected to accept as part of their reality. When it’s over, the characters basically stop existing, though thanks to DVDs and the internet we can bring the same character back to life and start the story over again. The whole movie, then, can be seen as a movie about movies, although looking at it this way kind of muddles any important messages that come through when we look at it in terms of outsourcing. It's something of an oversimplification to connect the destruction of each Sam to the end of a movie, since characters can certainly stick with the audience and the audience can imagine the rest of a character's life. But Sam-6’s story incorporates this idea as well. He gets out of the cycle of the character, leaving viewers with a specific question of what happens next. Like each Sam with his implanted memories, the audience forms a strong connection to video projections. We get invested in them almost as if they were real people. Movies are a form of connection through projection, even though we know they’re not real.

As a related tangent to the idea of isolation and connection, reality versus fiction, I also thought about Sam as a prophet, beginning with the references to different work areas as Gospel writers and culminating with Sam-6’s voyage to Earth to spread his version of the truth (it seems to mixed reception). I noticed a few connections between Sam’s story and the Gospel stories of Jesus. Like Jesus, each Sam had three crucial years before death and resurrection (of another Sam). Sam wasn’t quite a carpenter, but he did spend 938 hours (the 39 days falling just short of the Biblical 40) doing some careful woodworking. By the time I started doing math to prove my point, I was beginning to feel a little unsure about making the connection in the first place, but I think if the references were intentional then perhaps so was their lack of credibility. Having followed Sam through the entire movie, the audience is left never knowing what exactly we should believe in.

It does not do to dwell on dreams, and forget to live

In The Book of Martha, Octavia Butler presents what she calls her "utopia story" (214). The only place utopia can occur, she suggests in the story and in her afterword, is "in everyone's private, individual dreams" (214). However, I was troubled by this "utopia," as it suggests that true happiness must come at the cost of reality. Martha decrees that everyone "would have their own personal best of all possible worlds during their dreams" (203), but if everyone has their "best possible world" handed to them in dreams, what can possibly motivate them to make a better world in reality? How can society progress, or even survive, when its inhabitants are wrapped up deep in their own imagination?

"Each person will have a private, personal utopia every night" (204), Martha suggests, but the words "private" and "personal" here suggest that this "utopia" is actually very isolating. Each person can play in their ideal fantasy world, but they cannot share it with others. They will make friends, fall in love, have adventures, but always alone, always with figments of their own imagination. God's comment, "Everything is real. It's just not as you see it" (208) and Martha's power to shape God and Heaven (or whatever we want to call the place in which she finds herself) to her own specifications suggests that this loneliness is intentional, that everything in life is both real and a dream, constructed by what a person "sees." "Reality" is formed by each person's perspective, and therefore is always to some extent a figment of their imagination, always a somewhat isolated experience, separate from the experiences of others. Is Martha's suggestion therefore little different from the "reality" that she already inhabits, improved to allow people to taste their own idea of happiness?

"If only I could wake up," Martha whispers, at the start of her story (189), but by the end, she only wants "to forget" (213). From one perspective, Martha therefore undergoes a great change during the course of the story, moving from a desire to experience truth, to the desire to escape it. However, a second perspective suggests that Martha is always filled with the desire to escape unwanted reality. When she whispers, "If only I could wake up," she is aware that her experience is real, but wishes it could be a dream so that she could escape it and return to her more-familiar life of before. Although the desire is framed differently each time, Butler therefore suggests that Martha is always eager to "forget" the unwanted, and turn to a more comforting experience of almost-reality.

Yet will Martha's solution even provide everyone their own private utopia? Her idea relies upon the idea that people know what they want, and will be happy when they get it. Indeed, one might consider Martha's own experience with God as her own dream; as an author, she finds herself able to play God, to shape the world to her liking, to allow people to experience their fantasies. Yet Martha finds that she hates this power in "reality," and ultimately wants to forget the experience. If we consider Martha's experience in this story as one of the dreams that she creates, experiencing "whatever people love to do most... whatever grabs their attention, whatever they desire" (204), it seems that having "whatever you desire" might ultimately be a negative experience, that too much power and influence, even within your own private world, is terrifying. Will Martha's "utopia," like many before it, therefore crumble into dystopia, even in people's dreams? Is total happiness impossible, even when it is lived as a figment of one's imagination? What happens when one's desires are not bounded by reality?

Reflections on Recall

One prominent theme addressed in “Total Recall” and “We Can Remember it For You Wholesale” is the issue of distinguishing reality from illusions. In attempting to convince Doug to purchase a memory implant, McClane argues that once an event has passed, all that remains are the recollections we have. Indeed, had Doug never visited Rekal, Inc. in “Total Recall”, the memories he had of life on Earth – revolving around his work as a construction worker and his wife – would still be his reality, for he would have never known about or discovered his previous life. But if these apparently fictitious memories are indistinguishable from reality, then why might we still want to determine which is real, and which is not? One possible reason might be because knowing the truth allows us to act as we actually want to, without being unknowingly influenced by others, and this is certainly reflected in Doug’s actions: although Doug knows that going to see Kuatro will endanger both himself and Melina, he does so anyway in order to find out more about his past self, Hauser, and why his memories were erased, so that he can understand why he is being hunted by Cohaagen’s men.

Closely related to Doug’s past self is the question of personal identity, which is more prominent in “Total Recall”. After Doug and Melina are captured, Doug finds out that he will be mindwiped again, with his personality replaced by Hauser’s. Given his dislike of Hauser’s manipulative, egoistic ways, his resistance to being mindwiped seems natural. However, I believe that Doug has a stronger motivation to fight the memory implant than that, as Doug resists the mindwiping attempt as strongly as he would any attempt to kill him. This is most likely because Doug has had first-hand experience with memory implanting, and as he knows that his current memories represent his reality, the loss of his current identity would be equivalent to death.

Interestingly enough, these themes discussed are related to existing philosophical questions. For example, the question of distinguishing reality from delusions has often been explored in skeptic arguments such as the dream argument, while the issue of personal identity has been discussed by Bernard Williams, who imagined a mind swap experiment and a person’s possible responses to being tortured after the mind swap. However, “Total Recall” and “We can Remember it For You Wholesale” do not present these philosophical questions as abstract thought experiments seemingly irrelevant to daily life. Instead, because the story is set in a time where memory-implanting technology has been developed, Doug is forced to confront these questions of reality and personal identity when this technology is used on him, and his response to them suggests to us how ordinary people might behave when placed in such situations as well (although we probably wouldn't be as gratuitously violent as Arnie). Thus although the futuristic setting of these stories is unfamiliar to us, the issues they discuss are not, and this is certainly consistent with Suvin’s definition of science fiction as a “literature of cognitive estrangement” (p. 372), or one which “allows us to recognize the subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar” (p. 374), suggesting this might be a useful definition to begin examining science fiction texts with.