Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!mit-eddie!thakur
From: uda@IDA.LiU.SE (Ulf Dahlen)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.cinema
Subject: Re: Total Recall: subtle blatancy (spoilers)
Keywords: blatant subtlety
Message-ID: <1990Oct15.192943.22515@eddie.mit.edu>
Date: 15 Oct 90 19:29:43 GMT
References: <1990Sep22.064744.12151@eddie.mit.edu> <1990Sep25.024218.20650@eddie.mit.edu> <1990Oct7.174450.20678@eddie.mit.edu>
Sender: thakur@eddie.mit.edu (Manavendra K. Thakur)
Reply-To: uda@IDA.LiU.SE (Ulf Dahlen)
Followup-To: rec.arts.cinema
Organization: CIS Dept, Univ of Linkoping, Sweden
Lines: 36
Approved: thakur@zerkalo.harvard.edu


In article <1990Oct7.174450.20678@eddie.mit.edu> cruz@lab.ultra.nyu.edu (Nancy Cruz) writes:
>Re the dream sequence questions, I recall at one point Arnie must
>distinguish whether he is dreaming, and determines he is not based on
>perspiration.  This could be viewed in one of two ways a)  This proves
>to us that he is NOT dreaming   b)  It is used as a clue for the
>audience, ie., Arnie does not perspire once in the whole movie or does
>he?

There is an interesting thing about this scene. Arnie is with his wife
and the man from Rekall, both trying to persuade him to take the pill.
This pill makes the audience think Arnie is NOT dreaming, and that it
is all real and they are trying to kill Arnie or at least make him
fall asleep. When Arnie sees the sweat on the Rekall man, he realizes
they are trying to fool him. He shoots. THEN, the image is blurred and
played in slow motion. What does this mean? Is it Arnie falling deeper
into his dream, cutting off every chance of ever waking up again? Is
the whiteness at the end of the film Arnie's lobotomy (sp?)?

I think this total confusion of how the story should be interpreted is
what makes Total Recall interesting. It would have been nice if they
had made the ending a little bit more realistic, but then again, if
it's a dream... I still prefer to think of the film as what really
happened to Arnie, not as a dream - but *many* things point to the
dream interpretation.

Comparing Total Recall to Verhoeven's other film, Robocop (has he made
other films?), I think that the violence in Total Recall is less
horrible. Maybe that is because Robocop is in one sense more
realistic, and the violence therefore is seen as more credible. Total
Recall has a bit of a comic book over it, making it harder to really
care about people getting shot to pieces...

__________
Ulf Dahlen
uda@ida.liu.se, uda@liuida.UUCP