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.
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