Total Recall is one of the most beloved science fiction films of the last few decades, and
its ambiguous ending has led audiences to wonder: was Quaid dreaming, or was he actually
a secret agent? Here's the ending of Total Recall explained.
One of the most important facts of the movie is that the plot of Total Recall identically
mirrors the memory implants that Doug Quaid himself requests from the Rekall organization.
Quaid asks for the "Secret Agent" package.
"I don't want to spoil it for you, but you rest assured, by the time the trip is over,
you get the girl, kill the bad guys, and save the entire planet."
Coincidentally, Quaid realizes he was always a secret agent, gets the girl, kills the bad
guy, and saves Mars.
Quaid appears to wake up before the implant is actually inserted, but the salesman is
very specific about the realism of the implants, and how they trick the brain into thinking
it's remembering real memories. Is Quaid dreaming, or just remembering his true self? The blurring
of reality and dream continues throughout the movie, with multiple villainous characters
begging him to question what he believes to be the truth.
Surprisingly, the villains are 100 percent correct. Quaid is dreaming, and the moment
the camera cuts away from the start of the Rekall procedure, everything that follows
is our visual impression of Quaid's dream.
In fact, many of the movie's plot elements are culled directly from innocuous moments
embedded in those few opening scenes. The Rekall employees even say that they combine
the base program with elements from the subject's real life to better create realistic memories.
The movie opens with a dream, as Quaid sees himself and a woman we'll later learn is Melina
on Mars in spacesuits. Quaid slips and falls down a hill and his helmet breaks, his eyes
bulging out of his skull as he wakes up, ending the dream. At the end of the film, Quaid and
Melina are sucked out into the atmosphere of Mars, and his eyes bulge out of his skull
in almost the same way.
The Recall scientists are using Quaid's dreams for potent imagery, the better to match his
subconscious desires with his Rekall-implanted memories. Even if Quaid is actually Hauser
on a deep secret mission, it makes no sense for him to dream his own death in a way that
looks identical to what actually happens. Quaid's dreaming death scene is foreshadowing
for the final action set piece on Mars, a viscerally effective image that the scientists
use to make the Rekall sequence feel even more real.
This oft-overlooked detail is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that Quaid is dreaming.
In the opening scenes prior to the Rekall procedure, he walks through an X-ray machine.
We see his skeleton move through the box without alerting anyone of any hidden metals on his
body. Later, after the Rekall procedure has begun and Quaid is running for his life, he
passes through the X-ray machine again, this time setting off an alarm as it recognizes
the gun he's holding.
However, attentive viewers will remember that Quaid actually has a tracking chip buried
in his cranium that he then has to remove to cast off his pursuers. The tracking chip
is clearly made of metal, but didn't appear in the X-Ray, either before or after the Rekall
procedure. Why not? Because Quaid hadn't yet gotten to that moment in his dream—the scientists
used the memory of his stroll through the machine as an action set piece, but because
Quaid didn't know at the time he had a tracking chip, his subconscious mind didn't bother
to change the imagery of his skeleton.
Early in the film, one of Quaid's co-workers from the construction company warns him to
not go to Rekall—he heard someone was almost lobotomized there.
"A friend of mine got himself a procedure there — nearly got himself lobotomized!"
Quaid ignores his warning; after the Rekall procedure, he discovers that his former friend
is actually an undercover agent for the government tasked to keep Quaid unaware. But is he?
His warning about the possibility of a lobotomy echoes throughout the visual inspirations
of the movie: when Quaid pulls out his tracker chip, he pushes a tool through his nasal cavity
until he hears a "crunch," a strikingly similar process to original lobotomy procedures. Likewise,
when the doctor shows up on Mars to tell Quaid he's having an adverse reaction to the Rekall
procedure, he takes the tack of reminding Quaid of the possible side effects to the
brain. When Cohaagen is planning to swap Quaid's memories with Hauser's, the terror of the
scene is that Quaid's personality will be erased, a terror shared by similar horror
stories of lobotomies. Even Quaid's eye-bulging near-death scene at the end of the movie can
be read as the fear of a brain aneurysm. The dangers of the Rekall procedure reverberate
through the entire film.
When Quaid is discussing the Rekall procedure with the salesman Bob McClane, McClane mentions
their "special package." This process involves taking on a new identity, and Quaid bristles
against it. He still wants to be him, but he's tempted by the secret agent option. He
eventually takes it once McClane gives him the hard sell, but his initial discomfort
at being someone else becomes sublimated into the Rekall procedure.
Quaid, as we find out later in the film, is also Hauser, a secret agent and one of Cohaagen's
right-hand men. Quaid has to struggle against being re-implanted with Hauser's personality,
perfectly mirroring his own discomfort with the Rekall procedure's multiple identities
option. Quaid wanted to remain true to himself while still taking advantage of the "Secret
Agent" module of the Rekall procedure, and that manifests in his battle with the "Hauser"
personality. "Hauser" allows him to be both a secret agent deep undercover while still
remaining the same person he was before being woken up from that deep cover.
Malina is the mysterious woman who first appears in Quaid's dream that opens the film. She's
given no dialogue or personality, just a face in an astronaut's suit. Later, when Quaid
goes to Rekall, they ask him to describe his perfect woman, encouraging him to be as honest
as possible to have "more fun" in the implanted memories. Quaid describes a woman who is,
quote, "brunette... athletic... sleazy and demure," and before he passes out he sees
that the scientists are sculpting Malina's face.
We know from the beginning that the scientists are combing through Quaid's dreams to better
fit him for an implant—while Malina's face appearing on the television could be interpreted
as Quaid's hallucination, we know it to be a product of the scientists' technology. Malina
herself, as we later find, works in a brothel, is athletic, and is both demure and sleazy.
She perfectly matches the personality type Quaid wants to appear in his Rekall memories.
Lori, Quaid's wife, is against Rekall and Mars altogether. When Quaid is enacting his
secret agent fantasy, he imagines her as a mole for Cohaagen. That he positions her as
the villain when she's so against him wasting money on a dangerous procedure or a vacation
to a war zone makes perfect sense. Her convenient secret marriage to Cohaagen's lieutenant Richter
allows Quaid to freely pursue Malina without having to worry about any sort of guilt for
breaking his marriage vows. As an added bonus, she consistently compliments his masculinity
and sexual prowess—even when she's an enemy, Quaid can't help but use her to prop up his
own ego.
While the sales agent boasts to Quaid that Rekall implants are better than a regular
vacation, he lists a litany of annoyances that their service avoids:
"You got lost luggage, lousy weather, crooked taxi drivers. When you travel with Rekall,
everything is perfect."
When Quaid is on Mars later in the film, he gets a ride from the ultimate crooked taxi
driver: Benny, a cabbie who has a deal with a specific establishment that gives him a
cut of the profits if he brings tourists there.
But that's not all—later in the film, Benny is revealed as a double agent for Cohaagen,
tasked with discovering the secret mutant freedom fighters' lair. Benny's presence serves
as a balm for Quaid's worried mind—if this were a "real" Rekall procedure, then there
wouldn't be any crooked cabbies, just like McClane explained earlier in the film. By
the time Quaid reaches Mars, his mind has started to protect him from the possibility
that the Rekall procedure is going very wrong.
Lori shows up again when Quaid is confronted by Dr. Edgemar, who warns Quaid he's in danger
of suffering a schizoid embolism, and he's trapped within the dream. He says he and Lori,
the real actual Mrs. Quaid, have gone into Quaid's fantasy to pull him out before further
damage occurs. He warns Quaid that the Rekall fantasy will become so jumbled, that the,
quote, "walls of reality will break down."
"One minute, you'll be the savior of the rebel cause; next thing you know, you'll be Cohaagen's
bosom buddy. You'll even have fantasies about alien civilizations."
Edgemar continues to say that if this fantasy continues, Quaid will be lobotomized back
on earth. Quaid thinks Edgemar is a plant and shoots them both, but the doctor is right:
the walls of reality, and the hotel, literally break down as Cohaagen's men burst in. Shortly
after, the mutant leader Kuato is murdered, leaving Quaid as the leader of the rebellion,
just as Cohaagen bursts in to deliver the news that Quaid is actually Hauser, his right-hand
man. The doctor's prediction was exactly right.
As the scientists are preparing Quaid for the Rekall procedure in the beginning of the
film, one of them notices something odd in Quaid's dreams. He tells the other lab worker,
"That's a new one. Blue sky on Mars."
He's referring to the blue sky that ends the film, just as Quaid wonders if he's actually
dreaming. And he is: the scientists have never heard of a blue sky on Mars before they put
Quaid under, and their acknowledgement of its significance is what allows them to create
a soothing ending for Quaid's Rekall dream.
Likewise, in the lab scene, the secret alien arc reactor can be spotted flashing across
the screen before Quaid's put under. One of the scientists also makes the observation
that, quote, "It's all about alien artifacts these days." It makes no sense for the Rekall
offices to actually have access to the alien artifacts that Cohaagen is obsessed with keeping
to himself.
It appears on the monitor because it's part of Quaid's dreaming package, and they're prepping
the operation. Director Paul Verhoeven himself backed that up on the DVD commentary, saying,
"All the images of the tubes that you just saw are of course the tubes that you see at
the end of the movie when the nuclear reactor starts."
But if all of that evidence can't convince you, then maybe the director's words will.
Paul Verhoeven lays out the clues that point to the dream interpretation on the DVD commentary
of the movie, starting at the moment that Quaid drifts off to sleep after seeing Malina's
face on the monitor.
"Be aware that if everything that happens in the movie from now on is going to be a
dream, if there is no reality to anything ... realize that the dream really starts at
the moment that he falls asleep. So the next scene, which seems to be a f----up of the
machine, is part of the dream."
Verhoeven continues,
"So this is the last moment of his reality. Goes into the unconsciousness, and basically
from now on...boom! The dream starts. [...] That's the trick of the company, that they make a
dream that's so convincing that it seamlessly goes from the first reality into the second
one."
Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus, even more Looper videos about your favorite
movies are coming soon. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss
a single one.