Book-To-Movie: PK Dick’s ‘We Can Remember It for You Wholesale’

Credit: Wikimedia Commons/SpaceX

It’s the fourth weekend of the month and, so, according to our unofficial pandemic schedule, it is time for another Book-To-Movie! For those of you who are just tuning into this blog, a Book-To-Movie is when we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. This month we are reviewing Philip K. Dick’s science fiction short story, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” and its 1990 movie adaptation, “Total Recall”. And I will say it straight out right now, I hated the movie. Yet, it was the very few good points of the movie that got me to read and really like the short story. 

The Short Story

When Dick’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” was originally published in the April 1966 issue of  “The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction”, the Martian craze in sci fi was still going. So, it’s no doubt that that craze, at least in part, influenced this story. But there are no little green men in it (at least as far as Martians go). However, the story does contain creatures and life forms of the red planet such as maw-worms, the unicellular lifeforms they eat, and a bird-like creature which is actually native to Mars’s two moons in the story. 

The story is mostly set in Chicago of the future, home city of emigration bureau clerk Douglas Quail who is tired of his seemingly lowly life and obsessed with a desire to go to Mars. He knows he has no chance of going there because only government and other high officials have that opportunity. So, he does the next best thing: he goes to Rekal. Rekal, Inc. is an agency that sells artificial memory trips. This means that they implant in a person a memory of having been to a place as if that person had actually gone there and she would have no memory of using the agency’s service. So, Quail purchases the Mars memory trip pack. But when he “comes back” and rides a cab home, he discovers in his pocket an envelope containing money and a note that says he was refunded half his fee by the company and so then he remembers that the trip was only a memory implant. 

However, when he arrives back at his apartment, he finds some items that he remembers having picked up on Mars, including a box that contains some dead maw-worms and dead unicellular lifeforms. Because of this, he has no way of telling if he was really on Mars or if he was only given a memory of having been there. It’s a story about the dividing line between reality and fantasy becoming blurred and so, in that way, it’s about a real bad trip (do mind the pun, please). Things get even worse when he discovers interplanetary police agents have been waiting for him in his apartment and who claim he was a secret agent on a mission to Mars but that he gave the mission away to Rekal. For that reason, they plan to kill him. So, Quail needs to find a way to save himself from getting killed over a mission he can’t quite remember was real or not. 

The Movie

As I already said, I didn’t like the 1990 movie. And don’t even get me started on the 2012 remake which didn’t even involve Mars and so got that much further away from the original story. Not that, the 1990 original film was that far from PK Dick’s story. It actually stuck quite well to the original basic plot. The main problem I had with it was that it traded brains for brawns. As I said, in the short story the protagonist was a bureau clerk. He uses his wits to find his way out of his terrifying predicament and only minimally uses physical force when needed in extreme situations. In this movie, the lead character has been changed. Aside from his last name changing by one letter, from “Quail” to “Quaid”, he is a muscle-man construction worker. So, why’s that? Well, for one he’s played by action movie superstar Arnold Schwarzenegger and, for another, the blockbuster obsessed mainstream crowd of that time didn’t want to see a “lowly” office clerk play the role of hero (or even anti-hero for that matter) in a science fiction action movie. 

This preference comes from the preceding decade of the Evil ‘80s, as I’ve always called it, a time when gore and violence exploitation infested U.S. movie theatres and VHS rental stores. And movies would be that way all the way into the Nasty ‘90s, as I like to call that decade. Schwarzenegger was an icon for these kinds of films. 

What could have been an intelligent science fiction movie turned out to be a poor excuse for a violence-obsessed action one. On top of that, the film was chauvinist and almost totally without a sense for morals. Schwarzenegger’s so-called heroic character puts a gun to, what is believed to be, his wife’s (Sharon Stone) head in one scene and then later intentionally kills her. He continues similar bullying by throwing an innocent bystander off of a staircase for no good reason. Quaid has no sense of morality or humanitarianism except at a few points in the film in which this change in character is not even led up to but just seems to be tacked on at random. The movie is also racist which is demonstrated most in the portrayal of a black cab driver on Mars. The cab driver first befriends Quaid but then later betrays him and so this element perpetuates a racial stereotype. 

Not that this movie has nothing good in it. In fact, what really upset me is that it could have been a really good “Star Wars” for the early ‘90s with its space western-like scenes, including a Martian saloon of “freaks”, if it would have toned down on the unnecessary and sadistic violence, racism and sexism. So, it has its good “space” seeds. The make-up effects were done really good for the Mars colonial “freaks” who were, more appropriately put, humans who had been deformed by radiation on the planet. Likewise, the creature effects were also done well for the mutants. The suspense was set up good and the Martian settings, both cityscapes and landscapes, were made really convincing. And the more minor characters who were of the oppressed class on Mars showed some seeds of sympathy. Even Quaid shows this at times, but, as I said, this characteristic in him was not led up to well. So, if the violence and excessive action were slowed and toned down, even if left at the movie’s R rating, it would have been a well-balanced out, satisfying film.

It was those space seeds that made me read the original short story as well as much of PK Dick’s other work. In his “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”, he explores the true psychological danger of artificial memories programmed into people’s minds, a danger both to individuals and society. A concern so likened to that with today’s developing virtual reality. The movie, on the other hand, does not do much more than use a science fiction story, which was so intelligently written by Dick, as a backdrop for just another ‘90s violence and gore exploitation movie for a studio to make money from. It’s a movie that perpetuates the Evil ‘80s/Nasty ‘90s Hollywood message that says that in order to survive in a world full of greed and cruelty you have to be violently cruel yourself. The short story on the other hand did not culminate in this message but, instead, did just the opposite in resolving the conflict. 

Have you read Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” or seen either of the two “Total Recall” movies based on it? If so which of these three do you think does a better job of telling the story?

Until next time . . .