July 4: When Mars opened up to humanity again
On July 4, 1997, Mars Pathfinder bounced to a stop on airbags in Ares Vallis. Tonight's film: Total Recall (1990).
On July 4, 1997, late in the evening local time, Mars Pathfinder dropped into the thin Martian atmosphere. The plan was not to land softly. A parachute braked it, then three small rockets slowed it further, and then the probe simply fell to the surface and kept bouncing on airbags. At 16:56:55 UTC it touched down at roughly 18 meters per second, bounced about twelve meters into the air, then at least fifteen more times, rolled a little farther, and came to rest two and a half minutes later. It lay in Ares Vallis, an ancient flood channel, and waited for the Martian dawn to send its first signal back to Earth.
That bouncy arrival is not a dramatic detail. It was the plan. Pathfinder was cheap and bold: in place of the expensive, delicate retrorocket landing the Vikings had used, it trusted the impact to airbags. It worked. This was the first successful Mars landing since the Viking missions, twenty-one years earlier. For two decades Mars had been a pale dot in the sky, a place we went, marveled at, and left. Pathfinder brought it back.
Out of the lander rolled Sojourner, a 10.6-kilogram, microwave-sized wheeled rover, the first ever to drive on another planet. Its designers planned for a one-week life. It ran for nearly three months, for 92 sols, and together with the lander it sent home more than sixteen thousand images. Carl Sagan had died months earlier, in December 1996. The lander that relayed the pictures was renamed the Carl Sagan Memorial Station. There is something in that: the man who taught a generation to dream about other worlds did not live to see the photos.
By the time we get here, we are already at the film. Because Mars is not a strange place for science fiction. Mars is the planet we have colonized a thousand times, on paper and on film.
Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990) shows exactly that Mars. Arnold Schwarzenegger is Douglas Quaid, an Earth construction worker increasingly haunted by the red planet. Instead of traveling there, he goes to Rekall, a company that implants memories: a convenient, cheap, risk-free vacation you never actually took, but which you will remember as if you had. The procedure goes wrong. Quaid learns he may not be who he thinks he is, but a secret agent whose memory was wiped. Or the whole thing that follows may be only the purchased memory, with him still in the Rekall chair. The film never decides, and that ambiguity is its best trick. The story comes from Philip K. Dick’s 1966 novella, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.” With Dick, the question is never what happens; it is what reality even is.
Quaid’s Mars is a colony. Cohagen, the tyrant governor, hoards the air, of which the workers and tenants get only as much as he allows. The atmosphere is too thin outside; those who work the surface too long mutate. Beneath the planet’s ice sleeps ancient alien machinery that, once activated, releases the water ice and builds an atmosphere. “Get your ass to Mars,” Quaid tells himself in his own video message, and as the ancient reactor opens near the end and blue sky floods the red plain, we get exactly the limitless, changeable Mars the Pathfinder engineers watched on television as children.
I am not claiming Total Recall is clever filmmaking. Verhoeven’s film is muscular, overheated, self-consciously tasteless 1990s action, in which the gore and the animatronics both belong squarely to their own decade. But it does not try to be more than what it is: a big, cheerful thought experiment about what we trade to reach another planet, and what is left of us once we get there. Rekall sold the dream in place of the uncomfortable reality. Quaid (probably) took on the reality. Pathfinder’s engineers dropped a microwave-sized robot onto Mars on airbags, because the real Mars was worth more than any dream for sale.
That is the shared point. The real Pathfinder and the fictional Total Recall ache for the same thing. We want Mars to be a place we go, not a dot in the sky. One made it real with airbags and a 10.6-kilogram rover; the other made it myth with mutants and memory implants. Both ask the same question: what do we pay to actually go there?
So tonight, press play. Watch Quaid unmistakably heading for Mars, watch the poverty beneath the glass domes, and consider that humanity did not reach the surface of the red planet for twenty-one years, until a probe bounced down on airbags on American Independence Day. Every adventure on the screen starts somewhere like this: a small, bouncing box that lands in the dark and waits for dawn.
What else could have been tonight
July 4 is a crowded day in the calendar. Here are two other events that would have stood in just as well for tonight’s film:
1776: The Declaration of Independence is adopted. The Continental Congress actually voted for independence on July 2; it adopted the text on July 4. Independence Day (1996) takes that date and reads it literally: humanity’s declaration of independence against an alien occupying power, with President Whitmore’s July 4 speech. The day’s shortest, most exact pairing.
1862: Lewis Carroll first tells the Alice story. Charles Dodgson, the Oxford mathematician, and his friend Robinson Duckworth rowed up the Thames with the three Liddell sisters, Alice, Lorina, and Edith. Dodgson invented the tale as they went. Alice later begged him to write it down. Three years on, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland appeared. The Matrix (1999) borrowed the whole Carroll imagery wholesale: “follow the white rabbit,” the fall down the rabbit hole, the pill that changes what is real. Both stories are about someone discovering that the world they live in is not the real one.
Sources
The main event: the Mars Pathfinder landing, July 4, 1997
Wikipedia, “Mars Pathfinder” (the lander and the Sojourner rover, 10.6 kg, the first wheeled vehicle outside the Earth-Moon system): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Pathfinder
Wikipedia, “Sojourner (rover)” (the July 4, 1997 landing in Ares Vallis, 92-sol operation): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sojourner_(rover)
NASA Solar System Exploration, “Mars Pathfinder” (the airbag bouncing landing, the rover outliving its design life 12-fold): https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/mars-pathfinder/in-depth/
SolarViews, “Pathfinder: Ares Vallis” (the 16:56:55 UTC touchdown, 18 m/s impact, 12-meter first bounce, at least fifteen further bounces, rest after 2.5 minutes): https://solarviews.com/eng/path.htm
National Air and Space Museum, “Mars Pathfinder Lander Prototype” (the parachute, rocket and airbag landing sequence): https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/engineering-model-lander-mars-pathfinder/nasm_A19990073000
Tonight’s film: Total Recall (1990)
Wikipedia, “Total Recall (1990 film)” (Paul Verhoeven’s film, Schwarzenegger as Quaid, the Rekall memory implant): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Recall_(1990_film)
IMDb, “Total Recall (1990)” (plot summary and cast): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100802/
The side events
Adoption of the Declaration of Independence (1776), National Archives, “Declaration of Independence” (the July 2 vote and the July 4 adoption of the text): https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration
Independence Day (1996), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_Day_(1996_film)
Lewis Carroll first tells the Alice story (July 4, 1862), alice-in-wonderland.net (Dodgson and Duckworth rowing on the Thames with the three Liddell sisters between Oxford and Godstow): https://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/resources/background/alices-adventures-in-wonderland/
The Matrix (1999), Wikipedia (the Carroll references: white rabbit, rabbit hole, pill): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matrix