Total Recall represents an interesting paranoia: a fear of an existential crisis due to the rapid advancement of technology. The film is ultimately about the existential implications raised if humanity and machine cannot tell the difference between reality and fiction, machine and man. This possibility would completely destroy people’s faith in the truth of their own lives. A person only believes they are a person because they are told so. Humans define lives by memories. If humans or robots could be implanted with memories, how could anything know what they truly were? Existential crisis would be inevitable, and humanity would come crashing down around us. Philosophically, humanity is already shaky. If one introduced a variable such as the unreliability of memories, the advent of complete nihilism may be inevitable.
In Total Recall, the scene of Quaid waking up in Rekall, thinking that the implantation has gone wrong and that Rekall has blown his cover sets up the rest of the films philosophical vagueness. Quaid then denies that he is Quaid, but a secret agent called Hauser. The subtle set changes and lighting changes can be taken to mean that this scene is all part of the memory implant. However, the film continues to use the “mindfuck” technique to increasingly confuse reality with fiction.
If technology ever did reach such a point where we could no longer determine if memories were truly real, individuals would have no basis for its existence, and spiritual, psychological, and philosophical breakdown would be inevitable. What makes it so frightening is it could be happening currently, and people could be implanted with memories so that they would never know that they had been implanted with memories. Further, we could all be replicants. And as technology increases functionality and daily use, we increasingly are.
Ultimately, technology is a tool, capable of many different things. It can benefit mankind, leading us into a new frontier of evolution. If humanity allows its paranoia to overshadow the benefits, it will be cast into a neo-dark age, where technology becomes something to fear, rather than something to use and to benefit from. Although all the films leave humanity with a warning, they ultimately must be disregarded, for without technology and tools, humanity is nothing more than tall, hairless apes waiting for the next day to dawn.
