Arnoldian Humanism, or Amnesia and Autobiography in the Schwarzenegger Action Film

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.