Being, Time, Bios: Capitalism and Ontology

Biocinema: A Drop in Total Recall

Biocinema A Drop in Total Recall It would perhaps be impossible to produce an exhaustive list of concrete biopolitical mechanisms that permeate our culture and life. In the following I will try to present just one example that is by no means either comprehensive or even necessarily the most representative, but at least indicative of possible concrete ways in which the biopolitical cultivation of uncertainty, as the guarantor of immortality, can take place through the medium of film. Postmodern films (and literature) are more often than not renditions of the Cartesian doubt as to whether reality exists as we perceive it or our perception thereof is an illusion. Think of Hollywood blockbusters such as Blade Runner (1982) (and, of course, generally Philip K. Dick’s novels, whose A Scanner Darkly also became a film, in 2006), Lost Highway (1997), The Matrix (1999) and its sequels, Fight Club (1999), Being John Malkovich (1999), Memento (2000), Mulholland Drive (2001), The Final Cut (2004), Inland Empire (2006), and more recently, Inception (2010). As a rule, through the devices of amnesia, memory or dream implants, alter egos, among others, these films pivot around an unresolved uncertainty as to whether what is presented to us as reality or as a certain character is indeed what we take them to be. To be sure, moments of certainty abound in these films, but only momentarily, as they are always taken back for the sake of another possible certainty, and the substitutions could theoretically go on ad infinitum . Blade Runner’s subtle finale with its lingering insinuation that the replicants’ terminator (significantly named “Deckard,” [Harrison Ford]) might himself be a replicant is a representative example. And, as the following example will show, the divine gaze required for the status of 173 174 / Being, Time, Bios reality to be bestowed, however transiently, on the objects of perception no longer needs to emanate from the heavens, as was the case in Descartes ’ time. Rather, it may as well make its surreptitious entry through the lowly earthly human body, including its secretions. To exemplify this point I turn to one scene from Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990), whose plot up until that scene can be summarized as follows. Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a construction worker, goes to “Total Recall,” a company that transplants memories, so that, as the film has it, one can have the memory of a vacation on a planet other than Earth without the hassles involved in real transportation and vacations. After Quaid has undergone a memory transplant of a vacation on Mars, both he and the audience are uncertain as to whether what happens in the rest of the film takes place within this imaginary vacation or in Quaid’s real life. Both he and we gradually understand that in his past he had been Hauser, the leader of the revolution on Mars against its exploitative tyrant, Cohegan—but both he and we remain uncertain as to whether or not this past identity, fully erased from Quaid’s present memory, yet fully reconfirmed by characters whom Quaid encounters on Mars, is also part of the “Total Recall” transplant. At that point, a psychiatrist from “Total Recall” shows up in Quaid’s hotel room on Mars, to try to convince him that he is Quaid, still “strapped on a transplant chair” at “Total Recall” on earth, “dreaming ” all this adventure on Mars—including the psychiatrist who, according to himself, is “artificially implanted as an emergency measure” in order to help Quaid overcome his “free-form delusion”—and not “an invincible secret agent from Mars who is the victim of an interplanetary conspiracy to make him think that he is a lowly construction worker,” as the psychiatrist sarcastically puts it. The psychiatrist delivers his lines under the threat of Quaid’s gun pressed against his head, and as Quaid (and presumably the spectator) is gradually leaning toward believing the psychiatrist, the camera, slowly but dramatically, zooms on a drop of sweat on the psychiatrist’s forehead. This minute, yet cinematographically magnified, drop provides Quaid with the absolute certainty that he is not dreaming, and thus allows him to escape his Cartesian radical doubt with a gesture that might lack the philosophical subtleties of a Descartes but not the resolute determination worthy of both specifically Schwarzenegger’s cinematographic persona and generally the contemporary renditions of the Sci-Fi action genre: the close-up is abruptly cut by a shot of Quaid shooting the psychiatrist in his forehead. [18.116.239...