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The 1991 science-fiction film Total Recall exhibits the kind of "political amnesia" that Michael Rogin has called an essential aspect of the `postmodern American empire."At the same time, the film insistently undermines the cinematic amnesia that helps to make film narrative possible, by repeatedly representing the cinematic apparatus within the film's own story. The relationship between these two impulses-broadly, the film's recuperation of its political content and its interrogation of its cinematic form-is the subject of this essay.
Starting in the late 1980s, Hollywood studios began releasing several films designed to revise Americans' understanding of that decade's history and politics. In 1988, for example, John McTiernan's Die Hard, an action film that has spawned two sequels and numerous imitations, assured us that, despite their apparent ideological fanaticism, international terrorists were really just in it for the money, a motive somewhat more congenial to the American consciousness. Also in 1988, Mike Nichols's Working Girl, a comic fantasy about breaking the glass ceiling, addressed both women's fears about impediments to workplace progress and masculine anxieties about castrating female executives by its punishment of the stereotypically bitchy Sigourney Weaver, which makes possible the rise to the top of cherubic, deferential Melanie Griffith.1
The number-two grossing film of 1990-Jerry Zucker's Ghost2--offered a romantic parable revealing that the best-known domestic villains of the decade, greedy Wall Street investment bankers, were not only destined for heaven (leaving behind, sadly, their beautiful, sensitive, artist wives) but also intended to donate all their ill-gotten gains to charity. Those who failed to live up to this high standard were dragged below by shadowy demons. The allegory was downright medieval in its moral explicitness.3
The most ambitious of these efforts, both in its cinematic scope and its historical reach, was doubtless Dances with Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990), which tried to reimagine the circumstances under which an expanding Euro-American culture encountered its Native American counterpart in the post-Civil War West. However, the most complexly revisionist film of this period was the science-fiction action-adventure movie Total Recall. Directed by Paul Verhoeven and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Total Recall was the number-five grossing film of 1990 and had the biggest opening weekend ($25 million) of any film that year.4
A complex story of political corruption, corporate class oppression,...