Sevco is on another planet: Total Recall and the Ibrox Identity Crisis.

Paul Verhoeven’s spectacular sci-fi hit Total Recall opens with a man named Douglas Quaid dreaming of Mars. Quaid has never been to the Red Planet, but the dream comes every night. In it, he is with a dark-haired woman, and this always makes trouble for him in the morning because Quaid is a married man. His wife, Lori, keeps wanting to know who the dark-haired woman he dreams about is.

Fascinated and drawn by these dreams, he seeks the services of a company called Recall, not to remember his dreams but to have a different kind of dream implanted. Recall can create fake memories for you: in Quaid’s case, memories of a trip to a planet he is fascinated by but has never visited — or so he thinks.

A smooth-talking salesman talks him into a brand-new product called the Ego Trip. Not only will he get a complete set of memories and the holiday of a lifetime, but during that holiday he will play a role. Quaid chooses to be a secret agent who goes to the Red Planet, uncovers a vast conspiracy and saves the day.

But while he is on the table waiting for his implant, he has a sudden outburst. When he seems to wake up, he is a completely different person — an angry person.

Recall has “blown his cover.” But is he awake or is he still dreaming?

The next thing he knows, he is in a taxi being taken home. When he arrives back at his apartment, the first person he meets is Harry, one of his workmates and a friend who had advised him against going to Recall. Harry told him the story of a friend who had gone there and ended up with a schizoid embolism. This did not deter Quaid, and when he gets out of the taxi Harry asks him how his trip to Recall went.

Harry knows that Quaid went to Recall because he tried to talk him out of it. But he knows more than he should; he knows Quaid did go although even Quaid does not remember going there. Somebody blanked his memory before shoving him into the cab, and in that moment, Harry knows more about what has happened than Quaid does.

Because Quaid does not remember going to Recall, he tells Harry: “You got me mixed up with somebody else.”

Then Harry delivers one of the finest lines in the movie.

“Uh-uh,” Harry tells him. “You got yourself mixed up with somebody else…”

That is the first truly destabilising moment.

It screws with your brain — or Quaid’s brain — and sends you off on one of the wildest rides a movie can take you on, with twists and turns at every stage. You are never really sure what is real and what is not.

Most importantly, that is what makes Total Recall a masterpiece of the genre.

We do not know whether we are seeing something that is really happening, or whether Quaid is still on the chair at Recall, having his memory implant while we simply watch it unfold before our eyes.

That is only one of a hundred different scenarios which have been traded around film forums for years by fans trying to work the movie out.

Many of them think they have, and they produce theories in stark contrast to one another. That is what makes it such a great movie. You will be arguing about it forever, and Verhoeven has supplied only part of the answer.

I watched it again recently, and it made me automatically think about the club from Ibrox and when Derek McInnes was in the papers yesterday saying that they need to become relevant again I knew it was time to write this piece.

I agree with him, to an extent.

They have been striving for relevance since they crawled out of the grave of Rangers, but they have never really been relevant as a club in their own right.

They keep telling the world that they are something other than what they are. The problem is not that we have them confused with somebody else. It is that they have got themselves confused with somebody else.

Today, we can go some way towards resolving Scottish football’s greatest personality disorder. We can remind them again who they actually are.

I am going to presume that all you fine people have seen Total Recall.

This is the original, not the piece-of-shit remake, which I have never seen and never will. That is why I opened with the name Paul Verhoeven, the crazy Dutch director of that movie as well as RoboCop and Starship Troopers.

His trilogy contains films in which, behind a very simple B-movie story, there is a hell of a lot more going on. One is a sci-fi film about a futuristic android cop. Another is a story about teenage kids joining the military and going off to fight giant bugs in space.

They sound preposterous, but the first one is actually a shocking, funny and savage satire of American consumer culture and the creep of mega-corporations.

The second is probably the most subversive movie Hollywood has ever unknowingly made: a film set in a fascist society where all the main characters – our “heroes” – are fascists but do not know they are, and where the society itself serves a gigantic military-industrial complex which chews people up and spits them out. If, by the halfway point of that film, you do not turn uneasily to the person sitting next to you and ask, “Should I feel bad that I want the bugs to win?”, then you are watching it the wrong way.

I will not go into the plot of Total Recall, or at least not much, because I do not want to spoil every single twist for anyone who has not seen it yet. But I am going to discuss the ideas surrounding the theory that Douglas Quaid imagines the whole thing.

I am going to ask you to speculate for a moment about how that man feels when he leaves the chair at Recall and returns to his normal life.

Because Douglas Quaid, the man we meet at the start of the movie, is a happily married man but a deeply unhappy person. Someone who feels unfulfilled. Someone who feels as if all life’s opportunities have passed him by.

The man who wakes up in that chair, if the entire thing is in fact a dream, has the memories but not the capabilities of the man who saved the planet Mars.

I am not giving away any plot points here; the slick salesman at Recall does that in the first ten minutes of the movie. He tells Douglas Quaid every single thing that will happen to him over the course of the film. The question is whether you believe it really happened, or whether he imagines that it happened.

Bear with me for a second while we go through the logic of what Recall is selling. This is an ordinary man and, between the memory implant and his own imagination, he leaves Recall with wild memories and goes back to work, breaking rocks in a quarry.

Do you think that man is any happier doing that than he was before he went to Recall for the implant? What happens then?

His job is still not enough. Harry, his workmate and friend, will still be there, worried that Quaid may have done himself a permanent injury. And you know what? He will be right. But Quaid will never be able to talk to him about it, because Douglas Quaid will recoil every time he sees Harry. Because he remembers killing him.

So, you have two separate strands of your brain working at the same time. You are leading a normal life, your friend at work is concerned about your health, and yet you have a perfect memory in your head – indistinguishable from all the real ones accumulated over the course of your life – of that guy trying to kill you, and of you killing him first.

And that is just the start of Quaid’s problems, his problems at work, at a job that will never satisfy him now.

After work, he has to go home. That is when the shit gets really complicated, because his memories of Mars are about how he and his mystery brunette dream girl saved the planet together: a woman he was in love with in the dream, and about whom his memories are as clear in his brain as the memories of his own wife.

And as if that was not insane enough, it does not stop there.

In the Recall memory implant, his wife was only there for show. She was an agent who had been hired to keep an eye on him. The marriage itself was a sham itself, itself a memory implant only eight weeks old, and after she confessed that she tried to kill him as well.

So, imagine it; you have a job you can barely face, a workmate you simultaneously remember being your friend and trying to kill you, and a wife whose identity has been completely dismantled in your mind.

You leave a job you can’t stand to go home to a woman whom you remember betraying, who you remember betraying you and who in your memories is not your wife at all; and because you remember all that and can’t tell what’s real from what’s not, how can you ever trust any of it again? And how can she trust you either?

Good luck saving that marriage.

Then you watch the news and see that the Red Planet is still in turmoil. All the violence you thought you stopped is still happening. The man who runs Mars, Cohaagen, is still in charge although you remember a very different reality in which he is no longer running the planet, because you stopped him.

But every time you turn on the television there he is.

You will grow to hate Cohaagen, your wife, your job and Harry, your friend.

You will grow to hate yourself because you can no longer distinguish what is real from what is not, which is the guarantee Recall gave you when you asked how real it would feel. The slippery, smooth salesman told you it would be as real as any other memory in your head.

And if your memory cannot tell the difference, how are you supposed to?

None of those questions are answered by the movie. The film is really about identity. The question RoboCop asks is this: if we strip away everything but a man’s mind, do we strip away the man? Or is the man the mind itself?

Total Recall asks an even more complicated question: does identity come from the things we remember or from the things we do? Is it, as Quaid will be told in the film, our actions which define us?

I have always thought of the Ibrox club and its supporters as the product of a deep delusion bordering on mental illness. They suffer from a profound identity crisis.

They have themselves confused with somebody else.

Part of that comes from the break with reality they all had to suffer in 2012 in order to continue believing that the club they once watched still existed in some form.

I once compared them to Norman Bates.

They dressed in the clothes of Rangers. They spoke the language of Rangers. They tried to act like Rangers, just as Norman dressed up like his mother, spoke in her voice and gave over part of his life to her. That is no healthy way to live.

They are the version of Quaid who walked out of that chair at Recall and tried to go back to his life. They remember being the grand conquerors of Scottish football. They remember thinking of themselves as the most successful club in the world. They remember when they could sign international superstars like Gascoigne and Laudrup.

They remember what it was like to have swagger, confidence and power, just as Quaid remembers what it was like to be a secret agent. But Quaid cannot get his body to do what his mind says it has already done.

What does that leave him with in the short-term aftermath of the story?

I think there would be a series of bar fights as he took out his frustrations on other people. The people he wants to take those frustrations out on – Cohaagen, his wife and Harry – are, by and large, out of bounds.

He remembers the mechanics of all those secret-agent moves. His memory tells him he once performed them, but he cannot get his body to obey because that is not how the body works. So, in the early part of his new life, he gets into a lot of fights, gets thrown out of a lot of bars and winds up bleeding in a whole lot of car parks.

The same applies to them. They have a memory of what it was like to be the best.

But a memory is all it is.

No matter how many times they try to tell managers and players, “This is who we are. This is how we act. This is what we can do,” it never translates into actual physical reality. They find themselves getting beaten by teams they think they should blow away.

The more they try to act like Rangers, the more they try to feed the Rangers fantasy, the harder it is to get through the days and return to a normal existence.

Every one of those bar fights that ends in defeat and humiliation only increases the frustration Quaid must feel. How long before he loses his mind? How long before the gap between what he remembers doing and what he can actually do becomes so large that it is impossible to reconcile sanely?

There was never going to be a happy ending for those at Ibrox whilst they clung to this dual reality. The moment they appropriated the name Rangers, the moment they tried to be Rangers, they were headed for heartache and pain.

Because Rangers itself, as I have long argued, was an artificial construct. In effect, what Rangers truly represented was another layer of the dream: another memory implant from long ago, something they remember but which was never actually real.

Because we know that all the power, glory and wealth they once thought they had came from one man, and he was not spending his own money. He was spending the bank’s money. Take away the man. Take away David Murray. Then take away the bank.

What was their club, really?

Well, in the years since Sevco crawled out of the grave of Rangers, they have had three third-place finishes in the top flight.

That is exactly how many major honours they have won in the same period.

They will correctly point out that a league title is included in that, and they will be correct. But let us put it in context. That happened during the Covid campaign, an exceptional season in Scottish football played out in exceptional circumstances.

They have done nothing of note since, and Hearts came within four minutes of turning the trick and winning the title last season, which would have put their own achievement in an even less flattering light.

Even with tens of millions of pounds spent every year on players, above and beyond what other clubs in this league are capable of spending, the reality is that they are just another club.

Clubs do not go to Ibrox anymore thinking they are playing some all-conquering institution. Everyone else has assessed what they are still trying to process: they are not Rangers. They may talk the talk, but they cannot walk the walk.

And try this for size: push the analogy one step further. Even if you give Quaid the benefit of being able to get his life back together, it does not hold together for very long. Everyone he meets is going to think he is crazy when he talks about Mars, the people who tried to kill him and the heroics he performed.

His general instability and irrational turn of mind would drive everybody away.

Yet that is how the Ibrox club looks to me, and to too many thousands of other people in this country, when they talk about standards but never match them with achievements. They talk about a history and glory years that do not belong to them.

So, imagine being in a relationship with Douglas Quaid after he has got his life back together. Every now and again, that guy is going to say and do things that make you roll your eyes and think, “Not this again.”

Well, that is what it must be like for every new player who signs for that club. They are told upon arrival that they have joined a giant of football, an enormous institution. But this is a club with three trophies in fourteen years.

Every time that player hears about the standards the club expects and the success it takes for granted, they must look around and think: what are these people on?

They live in a reality that is all their own, and it is because the heart of the club is that profound identity crisis which is summed up in the sentence:

“You got yourself mixed up with somebody else.”

At one point in Total Recall, Douglas Quaid is confronted by a person who tries to tell him he is living inside a dream. “What you’re experiencing is a freeform delusion,” he is told. One that has gotten out of control.

Not only is he dreaming, but the dream is continuing to unfold in its own directions, completely independent of the implant. In short, he is now making it all up as he goes along and getting in deeper every minute.

However this game goes today, that is the world they are living in now: a freeform delusion which they are writing as they go.

The more they try to be Rangers, the harder they struggle with reality, until reality itself simply will not exist for them anymore. I said in a piece I wrote yesterday that they are already bored with their billionaires and looking for new ones. That is not the act of a football support capable of rationality anymore.

For their older supporters especially, it must all be a bit jarring because, like Quaid, they have two separate realities inside their heads.

There is the one where they are Rangers, still a massive institution which they remember seeing achieve great things.

Then there is the other reality, in which they are a pitiful Scottish also-ran being regularly embarrassed and humiliated by its greatest rivals.

And all of it could have been avoided. Just as Douglas Quaid could have avoided his fate by never getting into that chair at Recall, they could have faced the reality of what they are rather than what they remember being.

They can still face that reality, accept it and learn to live with it.

They can hope that something better is waiting around the corner.

But the longer they persist in the delusion that they are Rangers and that Rangers expects certain things, that Rangers demands certain things, that Rangers must have certain things, the more it is going to hurt.

As much as I love Total Recall, it was Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter who got to the heart of where they are, when talking about a very similar phenomenon:

“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”

That was another profound identity crisis with the same basic effect.

You cannot be two different things simultaneously and, if you are constantly switching from one to another, you are going to have problems, just as Norman Bates always did, and it is the psychiatrist at the end of Psycho who explains best the psychological state they are in and what it always comes to in the end: when the mind houses two personalities, there is always a conflict and one of them always wins.

Had Norman been triumphant, I am not saying he would have been sane and normal, but that would at least have been a result consistent and coherent with reality.

But Mother won that conflict, and that was completely inconsistent with reality. That is why he went to the asylum.

Sevco fans can continue to call their club Rangers. They can act like Rangers. They can pretend to be Rangers. But every time reality collides with that fantasy and shatters the wall of illusion, they will lose a little bit more of their sanity.

If they can finally get a grip, they may yet come to accept that this is the way it is going to be from now on, and once you come to that conclusion, you can get past it. You can learn to live with it. You can acclimatise yourself to reality again.

Because the alternative is to persist in the belief that the fantasy is as real, and that way lies madness.

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