We can remake it for you wholesale

Above, the trailer for Len Wiseman's August-scheduled remake of Total Recall. From the overall appearance, it's strongly based on the 1990 Paul Verhoeven original (starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sharon Stone, Michael Ironside and Rachel Ticotin) which in turn was loosely based on the 1966 Philip K Dick short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.

For those who haven't read the original, it's one of PKD's 'existential problem' stories. It concerns a lowly Chicago clerk called Douglas Quail (renamed Quaid in the movie) who, to his wife's derision, yearns to visit Mars. Unable to afford the trip, instead he goes to Rekal, a company which can implant memories. Rekal technicians begin the implant - a memory involving Quail going to Mars as an "Interplan" secret agent - only for them to find in mid-process that he really has visited Mars in that capacity. They sedate him and dump him in a cab wth half of his fee refunded, but he becomes curious about the half-remembered Mars trip; he's uncertain if it's a real memory or a failed Rekal implant. At this point he finds himself pursued by police and the Interplan agency, who have a telepathic tracking device in his skull, but he makes a deal with his trackers that he will surrender if they can reliably erase the Mars memories. An Interplan psychiatrist determines that Quail has a craving for adventure that will always drive him to seek out Rekal. The only way to reliably dislodge the Mars memories appears to be to replace them with a powerful fulfilled fantasy that will make Quail happy to live a mundane life yet simultaneously feel vastly important. Interplan finds this in one of Quail's childhood memories: the fantasy that he saved the lives of some tiny aliens ("like field mice") who in gratitude deferred their invasion as long as he is alive. He is, in effect, the most important person on Earth - simply by doing nothing. They begin to place the implant ... only to find that this story too is true.

I'll always watch the 1990 Total Recall, and in fact most Schwarzenegger films - I won't even distance myself by claiming them to be a guilty pleasure. Schwarzenegger, despite his limitations as an actor (such as his Austrian accent, and the much-ridiculed gormless "Eueraaaaaargheugh!" all his characters make in anguished scenes) always turns in a characterful performance, and has shown his adaptability in being capable of delivering emotional subtlety, self-parody (in The Last Action Hero) and pleasant light comedy (in Twins). He has not escaped the parodising of Jon and Al Kaplan, who have produced the songs Crom, from an imagined Conan the Barbarian: The Musical, and, pertinently to this post, The Mountains of Mars from Total Recall: The Musical.

The co-writers of the 1990 Total Recall screenplay are clearly highly familiar with the PKD story, whose plot the film tightly follows until the end of the Recall visit, and some specific elements make it into the film, such as the robot cab and the Recall receptionist experimenting with colours (though in the story, it's not her nails; she's topless - PKD's futures often contain highly quirky clothing - and her breasts are painted blue one day, orange the next). By taking it to Mars as an action movie, the film picks up and runs with PKD's reference to a Martian secret agent, yet extends the existential side in characteristic PKD fashion. In the story, we have no doubt what is real and what isn't, and the film's additional twist that that the whole Mars adventure may be part of the Recall implant is very much in tune with similar motifs in other PKD works. This is especially so at the point where the Recall psychiatrist turns up on Mars to talk Quaid out of the implanted adventure.

The remake of Total Recall, by all accounts, removes the Mars aspects and confines the story to a dystopian Earth, where Quaid is caught up in a political conflict between "Euroamerica" and "New Shanghai". From the trailer, it looks a visually excellent film. While I like the original a lot, I'm keeping an open mind on this new contrafactum.

It's an odd quirk of pop-culture history that the works of Philip K Dick, who spent most of his career in near-poverty, have inspired a long series of popular movies made after his death: Wikipedia lists Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, and The Adjustment Bureau. Although, mostly, they've been padded out into action movie format, there's something about PKD's take on the uncertainty of reality that appeals to the modern zeitgeist. However, one notable omission so far is the superb Ubik. Last year there were reports - e.g. in Empire Magazine - that Michel Gondry is working on a screenplay for an independent film. I hope it will materialise soon.

See the previous post, PK Dick, Ubik and conceptual breakthrough, and the detailed analysis of Total Recall (its thoroughly ambivalent stance on politics, race and gender issues, and its relation to PKD's ideas) in Memory Prime: Total Recall, chapter 2 of Future Imperfect: Philip K. Dick at the Movies (Jason P. Vest, Phillip Lopate, University of Nebraska Press, 2009). Described as "the only book to examine the first eight cinematic adaptations of Dick’s fiction in light of their literary sources", from this previewed chapter it looks altogether good reading.

- Ray

Lurid covers 1: classics

click to enlage

To be fair, one of the commenters on William Moulton Marston’s OTHER pastime warns that we shouldn't judge a book by the trashy cover style of its era. Point taken. As examples - found variously on the Web - check out the adjacent pulp versions of a few classics. There may, however, be more to these than meets the eye: the Frankenstein appears to allude to Fuseli's The Nightmare, and the Brave New World to many "expulsion from Eden" paintings; I can't see any justification for the 1984 interpretation, though.

I found the slightly lower-key, but still pulpy, 1960 Signet 1984 at Survival Arts, and some others at the Three Farms culture blog: Arthur Miller's Focus and Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. With such real-world efforts, it seems scarcely necessary for Slate magazine to have commissioned a series of spoof covers, The Pulp Canon. Does anyone know of any other real examples?

To rinse away the pulpy flavour, check out the much-publicised The Art of Penguin Science Fiction site for its showcase of the striking and stylistically varied artwork of Penguin SF over the decades. Some are iconic, such as David Pelham's cover for the 1972 edition of A Clockwork Orange; others are not quite there, such as the John Griffiths The Day of the Triffids cover; I can't decide if the triffids look more like kiwi fruit, testicles or ... whatever the plural is of gömböc. (Ed: "Gömböcok", I'm told).

By the way (see left) the 1984 pulp cover is interesting for a number of reasons: I'm pretty sure the little figure staring into Julia's cleavage is a cameo appearance by Orwell himself. The hairstyle in particular is is pretty distinctive. Does anyone have a larger scan?

Talking of 1984, see George Orwell: An Exhibition from the Collection of Daniel J. Leab for a nice Orwell bibliographic collection. See also: Predictions. I'm still looking (unsuccessfully so far) for a confirming example of the claimed Bennett Correspondence College "Let me be your big brother" ad. (To Anon: yeah, I know Burgess says it existed, and the "Let me be your father" version is verifiable: I'm looking for a primary source of the "big brother" variant).

Addendum: sorry, having seen the efforts at Slate, I couldn't resist.

- Ray

Predictions

I've just been reading Predictions (A.S. Barnes, 1956), John Durant's book of American newspaper and magazine art, largely from the late 1800s, portraying the future as it was envisaged at the time. Largely, this work was not intended as literal prediction, but as satire on current trends; many of the pieces are unpleasantly sexist and racist visions of the horrors of gender role reversal, or of America being taken over by negroes, the Irish, Germans, Jews, and so on. There are occasional stabs of brilliant prescience of things that hadn't yet happened, such as worldwide mass communication, anti-aircraft weaponry, and routine nudity on the theatrical stage. Largely, the artists got it wildly wrong, a particular error being the idea that personal air transport would become universal. If you like this kind of failed prediction, the Paleo-Future blog runs a continuing compilation.

Much the same applies in literature. Some works are deliberate attempts to predict: I've previously mentioned here the accuracies and inaccuracies in HG Wells' The Shape of Things to Come (see ... and roads not taken). Others are clear satire: it's the reviewers who insist on phraseologies like "a chilling prediction". A particular case in point is George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. It's very worth reading Anthony Burgess' 1985 - reviewed here by Martin Amis - which apart from its own dystopian tribute to Nineteen Eighty-Four includes a series of essays on the roots and themes of Orwell's book, such as a reflection on the language of IngSoc, and the connections with Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel We, which also may have influenced Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
Burgess argues highly convincingly that Nineteen Eighty-Four is a very dark satire on the period it was written, a period in which wartime alliance with Russia had turned instantly into the Cold War (akin to the shifting but officially nonexistent alliance shifts in Nineteen Eighty-Four). Anyone from that era, Burgess writes, will remember the rationing, the shortage of razor blades, and the Bennett Correspondence College with its post-war "Let me be your big brother" advertisements. * Room 101 was a hated conference room at the BBC's Broadcasting House.

Burgess's 1985, incidentally, is itself no exception to the rule of predictions being wrong; it is partly right, though many years late, in its portrayal of the importance of Islam, but completely wrong in its expectation of trade union dominance, which in the real world was dismantled in the Thatcher era.

Addendum inserted 31/7/208: I highly recommend Dr Ralph Harrington's paper ‘The old enemy’: Anthony Burgess and Islam, which is a detailed analysis of Burgess' views on Islam, which in 1978 were remarkably prescient.

Of peripheral interest, I notice that the Sylvester Stallone film Demolition Man is on UK television this week. If you're of a mind to do so, it can be read as an adaptation of Brave New World (among other explicit allusions, one main character is called Lenina Huxley) though the relationship is even looser than that between Terry Gilliam's Brazil and Nineteen Eighty-Four that inspired it.

Addendum #2: 9/12/2008. * I'm getting a mild attack of scepticism. It's repeatedly mentioned that "Big Brother" comes from post-WW2 ads for the Bennett Correspondence College, when the kindly elder "Let me be your father" Mr Bennett died and his brutal-looking son took over with the slogan "let me be your big brother". This story, which first appears in 1978 in Burgess' 1985, is proving difficult to verifty. The pre-war ad of the older Bennett was easy enough to find (see left); but pictures of the revised ad with the younger "Big Brother" Bennett are elusive. There's no particular reason to doubt Burgess, but propagation from one secondary source with no primary source is a little iffy research-wise. Can anyone help?

- Ray

Book apocalypse

Via MetaFilter, images from the decaying Detroit Public Schools Book Depository/ Roosevelt Warehouse. As Sweet Juniper! relates - It will rise from the ashes - this scene and many similar ones arose from the urban decay of Detroit, where huge sections of infrastructure such as the monumental Michigan Central Station have simply been abandoned.

PS: sorry about the month-long break in posts. I had my appendix out over Christmas. On the plus side, though, I did learn something about piddock.

- Ray

... and roads not taken

The Internet Archive, despite its usefulness, seems to be an under-used resource. For the curious or sneaky, its Wayback Machine is a handy tool for finding past versions of defunct or revised websites. But there's also a large collection of open source material, including out-of-copyright texts (which I've cited here before) and even feature films.
      Alexander Korda's Things to Come is one example. I admit I've never particularly liked it - the screenplay, written by HG Wells himself, is very preachy and stylised - but visually it's remarkable for its time. The source book, The Shape of Things to Come, is also online: not a novel but an imaginary historical account from the early 1900s to 2100. It's presented through the device of a diplomat using the then-fashionable techniques of JW Dunne - see An Experiment with Time - dreaming a history book written in 2106.
      The Shape of Things to Come is well worth reading, in parts (I personally find Well's idealistic final section about world recovery through a rational world state tedious and unlikely). But it's remarkable astute in its prediction for the 1930s; Wells was very nearly right in his date for the onset of WW2, and completely right in recognition of the importance of aerial warfare and the submarine missile deterrent.
      He is, however, very influenced by World War 1. His WW2 starts with a similar pivotal killing to that of Archduke Ferdinand: in this case a young Nazi shoots a Jewish rail passenger on the mistaken assumption that the latter is making faces at him (he is really struggling with stuck false teeth). Wells imagines gas warfare, important in WW1, as the most destructive aspect of WW2 (something that, partly through the Geneva Protocol and partly through fortunate circumstance 1, didn't happen in reality).
      Wells' WW2 continues until 1949, followed by a pandemic fever (akin to the post-WW1 influenza pandemic) peaking in the mid-1950s. The resultant Balkanized Europe and an America caught up in ritualistic denial of its collapse, described in the Europe in 1960 and America in Liquidation chapters, are a very dark and modern post-apocalyptic vision, unlike the somewhat idyllic post-civilisation England envisaged by the Victorian pastoralist Richard Jefferies in After London.
The Germans had G-series nerve agents, but didn't use them on the mistaken assumption that the Allies also did.
- Ray