The White Male Fantasy of Total Recall :: Total Recall Essays

The White Male Fantasy of Total Recall      Ã‚   After saving the planet from a ruthless dictator and barely avoiding death on the hills of Mars, Douglas Quaid (Schwarzenegger) puts a final spin on Total Recall with his final lines: "I just had a terrible thought. What if this is all a dream?" This last statement by Quaid leaves the audience pondering the question of reality, wondering what truly was 'real.' By the end of the film, one could easily argue a whole realm of possibilities: The events were all real; they were all a dream; they were the Recall implant fantasy played out; or they were the Recall fantasy gone haywire. In addition, the film seems to reject imperialism and the domination of white males, also rather postmodern in ideology. What is most ironic about this apparent postmodernism of resistance that we see at the surface of the film is undermined by high modernist ideology that recalls metanarratives of a patriarchal past. Thus we actually get the high modernist ideology that the film appears to reject. F or every progressive step that Total Recall takes forward, then, it takes two steps back, and by the end of the film we see not a progressive victory, but rather a white male fantasy of the return of the patriarchal world in which the white man is on top.    According to Andreas Huyssen, "The postmodern harbored the promise of a 'post-white,' 'post-male,' 'post-humanist,' and 'post-Puritan' world" (194). While I am not purporting to predict the future, one would assume that if postmodern ideology continued on, then the future would continue the gender and racial role deconstruction that began in the mid to late 1960's. But Total Recall does not keep this promise, as there is nothing post-white, post-male, post-humanist or post-Puritan about it, and racial and gender codes, rather than being deconstructed, are actually reconstructed. In fact, Total Recall's world, produced in 1990, written in 1975, and representing 2084, looks much more like George Orwell's 1949 depiction of the world 1984 than any futuristic postmodern world. When Orwell created his future, it was based on projections of the present, and so whites and males still ruled the earth, and communist-like governments ruled the earth. In Total Recall, though, we do not see a pro jected future based on trends of our present, but rather one that reconstructs the past cultural dominant of white patriarchy, and seems to want to project from the early 1900's.