Total Recall

During class discussion, I admit, I was frustrated by any presumptions about what was or was not real or a virtual reality, just as I was frustrated by my classmate's assurance that Harrison Ford's character in blade runner was a replicant. I think these aspects of the films are meant to be ambiguous and leave interpretation up to the viewer. It is reassuring, I suppose, to look online and see that a director or producer had the intentions that the viewer interpreted (correctly therefore); however, as with literature, the final product and the experience of the viewer/reader contains the ultimate meaning. I am sure it is quite a challenge for a producer to create the exact effect he/she aims for, and intentional or unintentional ambiguity often adds, rather than detracts, from the meaning contained in a film. Many concepts can be defined by what they are not, which has come into hand when looking at cyborgs versus humans. We tend to say cyborgs are not human because they are part machine, but then ask if a human that is part machine is necessarily a cyborg.
In Total Recall, I found that Verhoeven left so many hints and clues as to whether or not Doug was in reality or virtual reality, that he surely must have meant to leave his audience pondering. I do not think any determinations can be proven. In the end Doug comments on the blue sky on mars just as the Recall scientists remark about blue skies on mars being part of his implant. However, before visiting Recall Doug dreams about the woman who is the same exact woman who is in the rest of the movie on mars. This glitch removes, for me, the possibility of a disconnectedness between his ordinary life before Recall and his virtual or real reality on mars after Recall. Likewise, Sharon Stone's character, especially when she appears in his reality or virtual reality, meaning to bring him back to reality with the Recall doctor, persuades me to believe that Doug was not stuck in a virtual reality he was creating himself, but rather that in this futuristic world Doug is a super-secret agent.
When I first saw Total Recall as a kid with my dad, I watched it like a James Bond or Mission Impossible movie in which the bad guess try to disguise themselves and ruin the hero by making him believe it was all virtual reality, a dream. As a student, closely watching the film, I am still more persuaded by my initial reaction, than to believe that his virtual vacation that he bought from Recall created this experience and that after the two weeks he will be living with his wife as a construction worker, with these fond memories implanted in his mind. That does not seem to satisfy anything, or fit with the movie. The two possibilities I deem fathomable are that Doug never enters virtual reality, and Total Recall is more of a James Bond flick, or that the entire movie is the dream from start to finish in which he is given fictitious identity with a wife and a job to make his entire experience more real and believable. But, my second possibility has the same consequences as the one I removed. How can Doug return to whatever life he starts out in, after his two week experience in virtual reality, if he dreams and believes his wife wasn't his wife, and that he loves this woman on mars? If the virtual reality experience is supposed to blend in with reality, be nearly indistinguishable from real memories, then the experience should not be so different or detached, or completely alter Doug's reality so that when he wakes up he has to separate it as a different life or just a movie he watched in which he is the star. As I said, it obviously is a frustrating circumstance for me, and I do enjoy it because it provokes thought, criticism, and theory, as any good work of art ought to, even if it does star Arnold Schwarzenegger.