We Can Remember It For You Wholesale

We Can Remember It For You Wholesale

We Can Remember It For You Wholesale is an interesting short story that inspired the movie "Total Recall"(From what I understand it, the beginning part). The story is of a "Everyman" character named Douglas Quail who has intense desires to take a trip to Mars. He can't afford to actually go, so he finds himself at the Rekall Corporation, who are a corporation capable of implanting fake memories in his mind of a trip that he never took, along with mementos in his apartment to vindicate his implanted trip. The problem arises when it turns out that Quail actually has been to Mars, as a government assassin. The police come after him to kill him before he remembers the full story, but they are too late.

In any case, I suppose what drew me to this short story was my interest in the idea of memories being bits of information that can be manipulated. In various ways, this plot device has come up in numerous science fiction stories and films. In the case of the Matrix, memories are created of events that happen inside the computer program known as the Matrix, so its a sort of "brain-in-a-jar" type of memory modification. In the case of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the company sort of works in the opposite direction of Rekall, in which the idea is to forget something traumatic or unpleasant(in the main characters case, a breakup with a girlfriend). I like this version of it because it has the main character search his apartment looking for all those little things that can be linked to a memory of the person he's forgetting, and what he ends up with is a garbage bag full of this ex-girlfriend. In the case of the Doctor Who two-part episode Human Nature/Family of Blood, The Doctor erases not only his memories but his biology as a Time Lord to escape capture. He frequently ponders on the pocket watch that he placed his memories in while in human form, but disregards it as if some memory is being recalled but not entirely. He also writes these half-recalled memories down as fiction in a journal, so his method of memory erasure does not prove to be entirely complete.