The Genius of Total Recall

Is “genius” too strong a word? Well, sure. But Total Recall is one of my favorites.

I saw it opening weekend at the Vineyard Haven Capawock theater and remember the credits starting with Goldsmith’s syncopated rhythm and the super cool titles:

I thought, hey this music’s great! (This was around the time I was starting the newsletter that became Film Score Monthly.)

I wasn’t even a huge Arnold fan—I hadn’t seen Conan the Barbarian yet, so I wasn’t aware of the main titles’ similarity to the Poledouris score. But from beginning to end I was thoroughly entertained by the action, the humor, the sci-fi twists and the vivid personalities.

Don’t forget, not only is this Peak Arnold, this is Super Cool Ronny Cox and Michael Ironside—and it’s also (for all intents and purposes) the introduction of Sharon Stone. She had been around for a while, but speaking for pubescent boys in 1990, holy crap man!

And of course, it’s Peak Verhoeven. This, RoboCop and Basic Instinct are a triptych of big studio genre movies that connected with the public and manage to be both smart, captivating mainstream storytelling and uniquely personal at the same time.

I still don’t know exactly how he did it, but the over-the-top violence of Peak Verhoeven is both totally American while it also makes a mockery of it—God bless you, Paul. (He lost the balance in Starship Troopers but I will always love that movie.)

That’s Total Recall: it’s both real and a dream at the same time. I remember sitting there as it faded to white at the end, on the edge of my seat to find out, were they about to cut back to the Rekall lab? And when the credits started, thinking, “Of course they won’t tell us!”

So there’s a lot of genius in Total Recall. But I was specifically thinking today of the Goldsmith score.

For decades, Goldsmith had been writing spectacular action music. A lot of it was serial (in Planet of the Apes) or based on the octatonic scale.

I don’t have the brain space (or the technique, really) to explain it, but Goldsmith would often take a small musical idea and develop and manipulate it for the entire score. And he would often use a dissonant interval: seconds, tritones and sevenths. Alien, for example, is all about the tritone.

But Total Recall is built on the fourth. It’s a stable interval. Heroic, even. All of Goldsmith’s action music in Total Recall is based on the four chords that start “Clever Girl”:

They are two “sus” (suspended) chords (built on seconds, a fourth or its inversion, a fifth) and two minor chords.

So after years of doing action harmonically one way, Goldsmith just stopped and did it a completely other way. And it’s fabulous!

The best I can guess about the approach is two things. One, it had to be heroic. This was a fantasy–adventure. Too much dissonance was putting a hat on a hat—it would be musical violence on top of physical violence.

The other is that the harmonic suspension is an ambiguity just like the movie is an ambiguity—we’re propelled further, further, further into the mystery and action, but never with resolution. Yet it’s full of action and spectacle and delightful twists.

I love the Omni Music book of this score and highly recommend it. I find it endlessly delightful to listen to the Quartet CD while following along with the score.

I don’t remember Goldsmith discussing the project at any great length. Daniel Schweiger interviewed him in the early 1990s, and Jerry made some crack about Total Recall having more notes than a Bruckner symphony. And as all composers were discovering, there was no way a score could survive a sound mix against machine guns—which is probably one reason why, going forward in the 1990s, Goldsmith thinned out his action writing, and did them more in broad strokes.

But Goldsmith never spoke about any of his scores in any great detail musically. Unlike John Williams, who can explain his themes intellectually (and does so in the new documentary) Goldsmith would typically just mumble something like, he just heard it that way.

I think he was probably being sincere—these things came to him instinctively and he couldn’t explain it further because there was nothing to explain.

But I also have to think that there were some things that he could explain to a fellow composer but chose not to in public, because he was inherently shy and didn’t want to sound pretentious or inarticulate. He had way too much education and technique not to know what he was doing. So why try and maybe make a fool of yourself?

If you’re a composer, or just an amateur musician, watch the above video of “Clever Girl” with the score reduction and follow along how Goldsmith gets from point A to point B to point C. Stop the video and think, what should the next chord be?

You might remember the score from decades of listening, but try to pause it and think exactly how thin, how thick, how fast or slow, or what should the accompaniment be? What is the next note? Then play what Goldsmith actually does, and it’s like, wow.

It’s breathtaking.