Frank Grady - Arnoldian Humanism, Or Amnesia and Autobiography in the Schwarzenegger

Arnoldian Humanism, or Amnesia and Autobiography in the SchwarzeneggerAction Film

Grady, Frank.

Cinema Journal, 42, Number 2, Winter 2003, pp. 41-56 (Article)

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Cinema Journal 42, No. 2, Winter 2003 41

Arnoldian Humanism, or Amnesia andAutobiography in the Schwarzenegger Action Filmby Frank Grady

The 1991 science-fiction film Total Recall exhibits the kind of “political amnesia”that Michael Rogin has called an essential aspect of the “postmodern Americanempire.” At the same time, the film insistently undermines the cinematic amnesiathat helps to make film narrative possible, by repeatedly representing the cinematicapparatus within the film’s own story. The relationship between these two im-pulses—broadly, the film’s recuperation of its political content and its interroga-tion of its cinematic form—is the subject of this essay.

Starting in the late 1980s, Hollywood studios began releasing several films de-signed to revise Americans’ understanding of that decade’s history and politics. In1988, for example, John McTiernan’s Die Hard, an action film that has spawnedtwo sequels and numerous imitations, assured us that, despite their apparent ideo-logical fanaticism, international terrorists were really just in it for the money, amotive 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 mas-culine anxieties about castrating female executives by its punishment of thestereotypically bitchy Sigourney Weaver, which makes possible the rise to the topof cherubic, deferential Melanie Griffith.1

The number-two grossing film of 1990—Jerry Zucker’s Ghost2—offered a ro-mantic parable revealing that the best-known domestic villains of the decade, greedyWall Street investment bankers, were not only destined for heaven (leaving be-hind, sadly, their beautiful, sensitive, artist wives) but also intended to donate alltheir ill-gotten gains to charity. Those who failed to live up to this high standardwere dragged below by shadowy demons. The allegory was downright medieval inits moral explicitness.3

The most ambitious of these efforts, both in its cinematic scope and its histori-cal reach, was doubtless Dances with Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990), which tried toreimagine the circumstances under which an expanding Euro-American cultureencountered its Native American counterpart in the post–Civil War West. How-ever, the most complexly revisionist film of this period was the science-fiction ac-tion-adventure movie Total Recall. Directed by Paul Verhoeven and starring ArnoldSchwarzenegger, Total Recall was the number-five grossing film of 1990 and hadthe biggest opening weekend ($25 million) of any film that year.4

Frank Grady is an associate professor of English at the University of Missouri, St. Louis,where he teaches medieval literature, literary theory, and film. He has published articles onChaucer, Langland, Gower, and fourteenth-century poetry and politics.

42 Cinema Journal 42, No. 2, Winter 2003

A complex story of political corruption, corporate class oppression, and statesurveillance and espionage, Total Recall defamiliarizes these characteristic mod-ern abuses by projecting them onto a twenty-first-century Martian landscape, thussetting the stage for an uncomplicated imaginative rejection of a corrupt politicalculture, presumably unfettered by the constraints of realistic representation andcontemporary technologies—that is, in the guise of pure escapist entertainment.But escape in this film turns out to have a significant cost, one only partly acknowl-edged by the film’s protagonist—heroic success entails the erasure and loss ofhistory, as heroism covers its bloody tracks. To put it another way, success entailsthe kind of “political amnesia” described by Michael Rogin as an essential aspect,and impulse, of the “postmodern American empire” of the 1980s.5 But, at thesame time that Total Recall helps to reinscribe such ideological forgetting, it alsoinsistently undermines the kind of cinematic amnesia that helps to make film nar-rative possible, by repeatedly representing and foregrounding the cinematic appa-ratus within the film’s own story. The relationship between these twoimpulses—broadly, the film’s recuperation of its political content and its interro-gation of its own cinematic form—is the subject of this essay.

�Get Your Ass to Mars!� Set in the year 2084—George Orwell plus a century,or, alternately, one hundred years after Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory overWalter Mondale—Total Recall concerns construction worker Douglas Quaid(Arnold Schwarzenegger) and his visit to Rekall, a company that implants realisticmemories of expensive vacations and exotic adventures in the minds of those whocannot afford the genuine experiences. In attempting to purchase the memoriesof a secret-agent adventure on Mars, the scene of his obsessive dreams, Quaidunexpectedly finds out that he is really a member of the Martian undergroundwho has been robbed of his memory and exiled to Earth by the oppressive colonialgovernment on Mars, led by the vicious Cohaagen (Ronnie Cox). Suddenly find-ing himself on the run from Cohaagen’s agents, Quaid acquires a suitcase thatcontains, among other items, a videotaped message apparently from himself, orrather from the self he apparently once was. Staring at his own face, Quaid hearshis own voice:

Howdy, stranger. This is Hauser. If things have gone wrong, I’m talking to myself, andyou’ve got a wet towel wrapped around your head [which he does have, for plot reasons].Now, whatever your name is, get ready for a big surprise. You are not you—you’re me.

All my life I’ve worked for Mars Intelligence. I did Cohaagen’s dirty work. But afew weeks ago I met somebody—a woman—and I learned a few things. Like, I’ve beenplaying for the wrong team. All I can do now is try to make up for it.

As the story unfolds, Quaid discovers that he is still Hauser—one of Cohaagen’scovert operatives—and that he volunteered to have his memory erased as part of aplan to infiltrate rebel forces and get to their leader Kuato, whose psychic powershave enabled him to detect previous “moles.” The plan succeeds and Kuato iskilled, but when Quaid scoffs at the notion that he has been complicit in the scheme,he is confronted again by his videotaped doppelgänger, who proves Hauser’s guilt


and announces Quaid’s impending annihilation—for Hauser wants his body backand his memory reimplanted:

Howdy, Quaid! If you’re listening to this, it means that Kuato is dead, and you’ve led usto him. I knew you wouldn’t let me down. Sorry for that shit I put you through, buthey—what are friends for?

I would like to wish you happiness and long life, old buddy, but unfortunately thisis not going to happen. You see, that’s my body you’ve got there—and I want it back.Sorry to be an Indian-giver, but I was here first. So, adios, amigo—and thanks for notgetting yourself killed. Hey—maybe we’ll meet in our dreams? You never know.

The effectiveness of this moment turns, interestingly, on our embrace of Hauser’scredibility in the previous video scene. His advice, after all, helped get Quaid toMars and helped advance the narrative to this point. If we accepted that Hauserwas telling the truth the first time, can we really change our minds about his reli-ability here, even when he has clearly switched sides on us?

We can’t—but Quaid can. Predictably, he rebels at the prospect of being erasedand through heroically violent efforts not only thwarts Cohaagen but also bringscataclysmic ecological renewal to Mars by putting into operation an ancient Mar-tian technology that creates a breathable atmosphere for the planet. Cohaagenhad tried to prevent the use of these mysterious reactors, ostensibly out of fearthat the planet would be incinerated. In fact, the production of oxygen threatensCohaagen’s monopoly on air, which he rations out to the mutants and miners who

Figure 1. Cohaagen (Ronny Cox, left) confronts Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger)with the videotaped evidence of his own duplicity. Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven,1991). Courtesy Photofest.


make up the oppressed citizenry of his economic empire.6 The film ends withQuaid and Melina (Rachel Ticotin)—his romantic interest, a “revolutionary pros-titute feminist”7—gazing into the Martian middle distance under a brand-new bluesky, in a shot more evocative of Cecil B. DeMille than dystopian science fiction.

A surprising amount of good criticism has addressed, among other issues, thefilm’s exploration of dreams and the construction of reality (the film begins withQuaid’s dream of Mars and never definitively resolves whether the later events onMars are real, part of the fantasy purchased at Rekall, or a “free-form delusion”based on that fantasy and sparked by a “schizoid embolism”—in the film’s evoca-tive phrase—that Quaid experienced during implantation). Other scholarship hasexamined the film’s treatment of the fragmentation and uncertain boundaries ofthe postmodern subject (an irresistible topic in a story filled with multiple identi-ties, disguises, doppelgängers, and holograms) and concepts of masculinity andthe construction of gender in the postmodern body (speculation that any film fea-turing the former bodybuilder Schwarzenegger necessarily invites).8

The film’s politics, though, deserve further attention. On the surface, of course,they are leftist, anticorporate, and revolutionary—a government agent sees theerror of his ways and switches sides to fight for the relief of the brutally exploitedMartian working class. In this way, Total Recall resembles director Verhoeven’sRobocop (1987), another dystopian science-fiction parable. Beyond the literal level,though, as several critics have noted, the film offers a more conservative mes-sage—heroism turns out, as usual, to be the province of the archetypally mascu-line, white, professionally rugged individual, Quaid, played by the film’s biggeststar. As Fred Glass notes, Total Recall is a perfect example of the way in which “themasculinist constraints of mainstream film” can undermine the potentially pro-gressive politics of dystopian fiction.9

Additional evidence for this (entirely typical) schizophrenia can be seen in theextensive presence of product placements in a film with an ostensibly, even hyper-bolically anticorporate storyline,10 in which Cohaagen’s ownership of the air sup-ply is about the most extreme example imaginable of the dangers of uncheckedcorporatization. Sometimes the film’s product placements are ironically inflected—i.e., Mars Today (an allusion to America’s USA Today) is the name of the newspa-per available on the planet—but more often they are treated in the usual manner,placed unobtrusively but inescapably within our line of vision: neon advertise-ments for Coca-Cola and Fuji on Earth, Pepsi and Jack-in-the-Box on Mars.

These instances of product placement show us that one planet is very much likethe other—that is, not only is Mars just like Earth because you can buy some of thesame things there, but also—running the analogy in reverse—Earth is much likeMars—the newest “Third World” nation—a place of overwhelming corporate greed,exploitation, and political oppression.11 These scenes also betray some of the surfaceincoherency of the genre; a film whose surface politics purport to represent revolu-tionary or at least leftist action is actually underwritten by the very kinds oftransnational (and now interplanetary) corporations it depicts as the enemy.

My particular reading of the politics of Total Recall hinges on something elsethat the film attempts to hide in plain sight, Quaid’s problematic rejection of his


alternate identity, Hauser. In an unreflective sense, of course, his rejection of thatidentity and his embrace of the role of underground hero can be seen as a triumphof self-determination. Indeed, that victory represents the logical conclusion of theenduring exceptionalist theme in the American literary tradition, described morethan forty years ago by R.W.B. Lewis in The American Adam: the hero as “anindividual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched andundefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race.”12 It is both ironic andappropriate that this hero should be played in Total Recall by the Austrian-bornSchwarzenegger, a fact that I shall return to below.

The price of Quaid’s self-determination, however, is the repression and denialof his original complicity in his former employer’s oppressive practices, a reassign-ment of guilt and blame, and the erasure of his real history. For a late-twentieth-century American audience, enlisted into the fantasy by the story’s emphasis onvicarious adventure, Total Recall is thus not a fable of moral renewal but a lessonin moral cynicism: remembering one’s past is equivalent to self-incrimination, andremaking one’s self is simply a matter of declaring oneself remade, of choosingamnesia. Stephen Prince notes how the “ability to engineer memories is predi-cated upon the loss of an authentic past, time, and history,”13 but it is important tonote that the film depicts not just a loss of the past but its conscious rejection.

Indeed, the rejection is repeated brutally throughout the film, most tellinglyin Quaid’s choice of the good woman Melina over his bad wife, Lori (Sharon Stone),who has been secretly working as Cohaagen’s agent throughout the story (andthroughout the putative marriage, itself part of the scheme). The film’s regressivegender politics are also plainly revealed—in fact, utterly literalized—in Lori’s finalscene: after she defeats Melina in a vicious and acrobatic catfight that takes placeover Quaid’s unconscious body, Quaid wakes up and grabs a gun; when Lori in-stantly (and thus unconvincingly) adopts the demeanor of a demure wife and triesto sweet-talk him, Quaid scoffs and kills her, quipping, “Consider that a divorce.”The allegory of this scene is essentially daemonic: the feminine demons of Quaid’sunconscious fight it out while he is, literally, unconscious, and the integrity of hisemerging masculine, heroic identity depends on his repressing (with a bullet to hisforehead) the bad feminine angel, who embodies his memories of collusion, cor-ruption, and Cohaagen.

The philosophical justification for this repression that makes heroism possibleis ironically provided by the mystical rebel leader, the mutant Kuato, who sagelyadvises Quaid that “a man is defined by his actions, not by his memories.” This is acongenial formulation for an action film, reducing one’s identity to one’s deeds—not even to the sum of one’s deeds but to the deeds of the immediate present.There is the further complication, of course, that Quaid’s actions in the service ofthe Martian underground are structurally indistinguishable from the mayhem inwhich he participated as one of Cohaagen’s henchmen. Glass’s “masculinist con-straints” are nowhere more powerfully evident than in scenes like the one near theend of the film in which Quaid, using a holographic projection of himself to playcat-and-mouse with Cohaagen’s troops, confronts three of his pursuers and pre-tends to be only a hologram. “Ha ha ha,” he laughs, “you think this is the real


Quaid?” When they turn away, convinced it is not, he snaps, “It is!” and machine-guns the soldiers at point-blank range. The “real Quaid” is no stranger to dirtywork either, suggesting that one of Quaid’s doubles is Cohaagen’s point-and-shootthug, Richter, who of course gets blamed—by us and by his boss—for the inde-pendent, aggressive action we come to admire in Quaid.

At the Movies. Richter doubles as Quaid, and Quaid/Hauser doubles as himself—but there is another specular relation that must be accounted for: the identificationof the spectator with the hero. Indeed, in Total Recall, this identification is doublyemphasized: the film asks us to identify with Quaid not just because he is the heroand played by the star but because his fantasies about interplanetary rebellion andhis desires for excitement and exotic adventure are analogous to ours—that is, tothe fantasies we pursue whenever we go to movies like Total Recall.14

Thus, a trip to Rekall clearly represents a high-tech, sci-fi, futuristic version ofa trip to the movies, where we are presented with the chance literally to see, vicari-ously to experience, and fondly to remember things that never really happened;that, were they even possible, would be far beyond our pathetic power to achieve;that, when you come right down to it, are just flickering lights projected onto ascreen—as insubstantial in some ways as memory itself, and also apprehensibleonly in the way memory is, as a series of images to which we attribute an order, acoherence, and a chronology. Consider the Rekall sales pitch playing on the MetroTV screens early in the film:

Would you like to ski at the top of the world . . . but you’re snowed under with work?Do you dream of a vacation at the bottom of the ocean . . . but you can’t float the bill?Have you always wanted to climb the mountains of Mars . . . but now you’re over the hill?Then come to Rekall, Inc., where you can buy the memory of your ideal vacation saferand better than the real thing. So don’t let life pass you by—call Rekall, for the memoryof a lifetime.

The repeated, rhythmic contrasts between options for escape and leisure andthe brute facts of the real world—work, money, age—not only demonstrate thatadvertising has not improved in the future but also implicates us in a view of theworld that constantly measures the necessity of workaday demands against thefreedom promised by occasional leisure. Nor is this a very difficult case to make,since, after all, there we are—at the movies.

In forcing on us the analogy between Quaid’s visit to Rekall and our own com-plicity in the ideology of leisure, Total Recall offers its most sophisticated chal-lenge to the simple narrative pleasure that we might expect to be the result of ourcinematic indulgence. The challenge is made most forcefully in a scene near themiddle of the film in which Quaid is paid a surprise visit in his Martian hotel roomby Doctor Edgemar (Ray Baker), the pitchman from the Rekall commercial:

DOCTOR EDGEMAR: This is going to be very difficult for you to accept, Mr. Quaid.QUAID: I’m listening.DOCTOR: I’m afraid you’re not really standing here right now.QUAID (laughs): You know, Doc, you could have fooled me.


DOCTOR: I’m quite serious. You’re not here, and neither am I.QUAID (chuckles skeptically): That’s amazing. Where are we?DOCTOR: At Rekall. You’re strapped into an implant chair, and I’m monitoring you fromthe psycho-probe console.QUAID: Ah, I get it, I’m dreaming. And this is all part of the delightful vacation yourcompany has sold me.DOCTOR: Not exactly. What you’re experiencing is a free-form delusion based on ourmemory tapes, but you’re inventing it yourself as you go along.QUAID: Well, if it is my delusion . . . who the hell invited you?DOCTOR: I’ve been artificially implanted as an emergency measure. I’m sorry to tell youthis, Mr. Quaid, but you’ve suffered a schizoid embolism. We can’t snap you out of yourfantasy, and I’ve been sent in to try to talk you down.QUAID: How much is Cohaagen paying you for this?DOCTOR: Think about it. Your dream started in the middle of the implant procedure.Everything after that—the chases, the trip to Mars, the suite at the Hilton—are allelements of your Rekall holiday and ego trip. You paid to be a secret agent.QUAID: Bullshit. It’s coincidence.DOCTOR: And what about the girl? Brunette, athletic, sleazy, and demure? Just as youspecified. Is that coincidence?QUAID: No, she’s real. I dreamed about her before I ever went to Rekall.DOCTOR: Mr. Quaid, can you hear yourself? She’s real because you dreamed her?QUAID: That’s right.DOCTOR: Well, maybe this will convince you.

At this point, Quaid’s wife, Lori, arrives to help convince him to give up hisalleged delusion. Quaid—remembering that Lori had tried to shoot him in anearlier scene—curtly rejects her overtures:

QUAID: Bullshit.DOCTOR: What’s bullshit, Mr. Quaid? That you’re having a paranoid episode, triggeredby acute neurochemical trauma? Or that you’re really an invincible secret agent fromMars, who’s the victim of an interplanetary conspiracy to make him think he’s a lowlyconstruction worker? Stop punishing yourself, Doug. You’re a fine, upstanding man.You have a beautiful wife that loves you. Your whole life is ahead of you. But you’ve gotto want to return to reality.

Three unsettling things are happening simultaneously in this scene. First, ofcourse, we are introduced to the idea that “it’s all a dream,” a possibility that isnever definitively rejected in the film (and that Verhoeven himself has endorsed ininterviews15). Second, and more interestingly, the scene demonstrates how Rekall’stechnology, the film’s futuristic version of cinema, parodies the apparatus-orientedfilm theory of the 1970s, which tried to describe the ideological effect of the tech-nology of film on the viewer, advancing claims about how the self-erasing cin-ematic apparatus sought to construct the cinematic subject.

Consider this summary account of the effects of the apparatus, by Jean-LouisBaudry, written in 1975:

Taking into account the darkness of the movie theater, the relative passivity of the situ-ation, the forced immobility of the cine-subject, and the effects that result from the


projection of images, the cinematographic apparatus brings about a state of regression.It artificially leads back to an anterior phase of his development. . . . It is the desire,unrecognized as such by the subject, to return to this phase, an early state of develop-ment with its own forms of satisfaction, which may play a determining role in his desirefor cinema and the pleasure he finds in it.16

Though he is really talking about cinematic subjects reclining in the dark,Baudry could be talking about Quaid, strapped in the implant chair and about tohave his past revealed to him—or, in the later scene, about to be forcibly returnedto “an anterior state of his development.” Rekall technology, then, is the literaliza-tion of apparatus theory, since, according to Doctor Edgemar, the implanted fan-tasy is what constitutes Quaid as Quaid; he is literally constructed as a cinematicsubject by his experience in the “implant chair.” It is the triumph of the appara-tus—or at least it would be if the procedure had not somehow gone horribly wrongin his case, leaving Quaid free to choose his politics (or his delusion) instead ofpassively enjoying the company’s brand.

Thus, in this scene, the doctor must make his appeal to the coercive and ines-capable power of the “real,” which is supposed to satisfy Quaid simply because it isreal and not because it is in any way pleasant or satisfying. We are bound to live ourlives as given simply because that is the way they are. That Quaid’s memories ofbeing a “lowly construction worker” will later be revealed to be—possibly—manu-factured merely reemphasizes the hegemonic nature of the ideology that has manu-factured those remembrances. Politically, then, this moment tries to reinscribe

Figure 2. Having had his memories of Mars accidentally reawakened during histrip to Rekall, Quaid struggles in the implant chair. Total Recall (1991). CourtesyPhotofest.


the film’s version of the status quo in a completely transparent and cynical way. Iflater Kuato will claim that a man is defined by his actions rather than by his memo-ries, here the forces of the status quo try to elevate memory to the role of primedeterminant of identity.

What is most troubling about this scene, though, is that the notion of the realthat the doctor tries to convince Quaid he must return to turns out to have exactlythe power over us as viewers that it does not have over Quaid. That is, the realquite cruelly and unsubtly confronts us with the difference between our hero Quaid,who can decide to keep living a fantasy and being a secret agent, and the rest of us,who cannot—who have to leave the theater when the lights come up and return tolives that, no matter how satisfying we think they are, are pale and quotidian nextto Quaid’s adventures, at the end of which, as the Rekall salesman assures him,Quaid kills the bad guys, gets the girl, and saves the whole planet. Subjects en-tirely constituted by the cinematic apparatus? We should be so lucky.17

Finally, then, what this scene threatens to do is expose the workings of thecinematic apparatus responsible for Total Recall, that conglomeration of narrativedevices, editing practices, and special effects working relentlessly to enlist us intoits futuristic and regressive fantasy. Consequently, this cinematic apparatus alsothreatens to stop the action of this action film, literally reducing it to a trickle.But—in keeping with Glass’s notion of “masculinist constraints”—the powerfulrequirements of the genre win out over the invitation in this scene for us to thinksubversively about cinematic illusions.

Just when Doctor Edgemar and Lori have convinced Quaid that everything isa dream and have prevailed upon him to swallow a pill (“a symbol of your desire toreturn to reality”), Quaid discerns that the previously imperturbable doctor is sweat-ing—the camera tracks a single drop of perspiration as it slides from his browdown to his neck. Taking this sign of anxiety as a sign of deception—as an indica-tion that the doctor is real and not some oneiric implant—Quaid shoots him andspits the pill out (having evidently been practicing a deception of his own). Withinseconds, a wall of the hotel suite comes crashing inward (a repeated motif in thefilm) and a squad of Cohaagen’s agents bursts into the room to subdue Quaid.Here the potential complexity of the scene, on both the level of the plot of TotalRecall, which compels us to keep asking “Is it really all a dream?” and our plot, inwhich we play the part of a late-twentieth-century film spectator, is reduced to thesimplicity of action, as the walls actually come tumbling down.

Any Resemblance to Persons Living or Dead . . . Instructive here is thedifference between Total Recall and its source, Philip K. Dick’s marvelously titledshort story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.” Dick’s protagonist, whohas indeed been a secret agent-assassin on Mars, accidentally has his true identityrevealed in the course of a visit to Rekall. But before he can be killed by the agentsof “Interplan,” he suggests a compromise: he will have his Mars memories erasedand replaced not by the humdrum memories of an earthly working life but bysome sufficiently exciting fantasy. While probing the protagonist’s mind for theappropriate fantasy, the scientists discover one about a nine-year-old boy who saves


the planet Earth from invasion by virtue of an act of kindness and compassiontoward minuscule alien invaders. The fantasy disgusts the Interplan agents, whoare appalled by both its pacifism and its grandiose egotism, but in a characteristicplot twist, a trip to Rekall to “implant” this story ends up revealing that it is in facttrue—another layer that the protagonist had forgotten but has now recalled.18

The departures that Total Recall makes are obvious—Dick’s protagonist re-members, ultimately, that he was originally heroic (albeit in a kinder and gentlerway) whereas Quaid discovers that he is actually the villain and must reject thatfact to remake himself. Although Quaid’s fantasies are equally grandiose, salvationof the planet depends not on remembering an act of kindness but on forgettingacts of violence and espionage.

One more thing was “forgotten” about Dick’s 1966 story in its transfer to thescreen, and this fact points us toward another dimension of the politics of TotalRecall. Dick’s protagonist was named Quail, an appellation ironically implying timid-ity in the story but that in 1990 would have been a homonym for the name of the vicepresident of the United States. Retaining the name would have been more than justa distraction, not only because of the vice president’s buffoonish reputation at thetime but also because the reference might have called attention to the ways in whichTotal Recall is so perfectly a film for the first Bush administration. It is the quintes-sential film, that is, for a man who had repudiated Ronald Reagan’s “voodoo eco-nomics” in 1980, before changing his mind and signing on as Reagan’s running mate;a man who was not only a war hero and an oil company executive but also director ofthe CIA before promising to lead a kinder, gentler America; a man who claimed,during the Iran-Contra scandal, to be out of a loop that he had been part of foralmost two decades; and a man, who, as Susan Jeffords has observed,

cast his presidency in terms of his current expressions of sympathy for victims of disas-ters, his current outrage about international terrorism, or his current lament for indi-vidual laid-off shipyard workers, rather than in terms of his record on taxes, his serviceas ambassador to the U.N., his brief tenure as CIA director, or his response to theTiananmen Square massacre.19

Evidently, a president is defined by his actions, not by his memories.This is more than an ad hominem argument, for Bush père is himself more a

symptom than a cause.20 What is important is the way his administration, likeReagan’s before him, enacted what Rogin calls “American imperial spectacles”that “display and forget four enabling myths that the culture can no longerunproblematically embrace.”21 Three of these myths—“redemption through vio-lence,” “belief in individual agency,” and “identification with the state”—are im-plicitly represented in my discussion of the film so far. The fourth—for Rogin thefirst—is “the historical organization of American politics around racial domina-tion,” played out in Total Recall through the character of Benny (Mel Johnson, Jr.),the only significant black character in the film.

A jiving cab driver who befriends and assists Quaid on Mars, Benny has good-guy credentials, underwritten by his status as a mutant, but Benny too, it turns out, isone of Cohaagen’s operatives—in fact, the one whom Quaid unknowingly leads to


Kuato. This seals Benny’s fate in the narrative, of course, and he is gruesomely dis-patched by Quaid with a giant, phallic drill, in a scene in which Quaid is trying todrill the helpless Melina. Benny’s finale offers multiple parodies (or perhaps onlyinvocations) of racist myths about black male sexuality, the same mythic anxietiesoperative in the infamous Willie Horton ad run by the Bush campaign in 1988.22

In retrospect, the perfect mesh between the Bush administration’s politicalculture and the cultural politics of Total Recall seems almost predestined: Dick’sstory had been optioned in 1974, and the script had been working its way aroundHollywood in various versions since 1981 until “Arnold rescued it singlehandedly.”23

The allusions to U.S. history in Total Recall could not really be repressed, though—not given the presence in the film of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who campaigned forBush in 1988 (remember “Conan the Republican”?) and who was later namedchairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.24

Total Recall can also be read as a version of Arnold’s story, at least the way hetells it: the story of a skinny Austrian boy who by sheer force of will turned him-self into the greatest bodybuilder in history—literally a self-made man and win-ner of thirteen world titles—and then parlayed that success into internationalmovie superstardom, and that success into a prominent marriage (into the Kennedyfamily), a high-profile political position, and lucrative business enterprises. Self-determination is the theme of Schwarzenegger’s authorized biographies, just asself-promotion is the theme of the unauthorized ones, and his attempts to con-trol his public image are well documented, including efforts to attack or suppress

Figure 3. Benny (Mel Johnson, Jr.), a jiving cab driver who befriends and assistsQuaid, takes him to Venusville, the red-light district, as Quaid searches for his trueidentity. Courtesy Photofest.


profiles he deems unflattering (having to do, e.g., with the homosexual subcul-ture of bodybuilding and the allegations of anti-Semitism and his father’s Naziconnections in Wendy Leigh’s biography, Arnold).25 Total Recall’s combination ofthe violent exercise of the will and a Protean concept of identity render it a sortof science-fictionalized Schwarzenegger autobiography.

In fact, the autobiographical interests served by Total Recall are legible in manyof Schwarzenegger’s subsequent action films as well. Thus, if Total Recall is a ver-sion of the story of how the Austrian-born Schwarzenegger literally remade himselfinto an American film icon, Last Action Hero (John McTiernan, 1993) shows thatsuch icons are merely the property of a culture industry so safely entrenched that itthinks it can profitably sell its own secrets. In Last Action Hero, Schwarzenegger’scharacter, Jack Slater, literally comes off the screen into the “real” world, where heconfronts, among other perils, himself, that is, the actor Arnold Schwarzeneggerattending the premier of his new “Jack Slater” film.

Last Action Hero simultaneously enacts and parodies the clichés of the actiongenre and its Hollywood production. Ironic and self-conscious—probably a littletoo ironic, given its disappointing box-office performance26—the film explores therelationship between action films and their savvy audiences by making permeablethe boundary between the world and the screen. Just as Jack Slater magically passesinto “our” world, so too his biggest fan—a demographically appropriate young boynamed Danny (Austin O’Brien)—is allowed to join the cinematic universe of diz-zying car chases, spectacular explosions, and never-fatal wounds. The film sug-gests that the real-life effect of action films is not imitative violence in the streetsbut the stereotyping of stars like Schwarzenegger; the character who chooses hisown story in Total Recall is prohibited from ever participating in any other story—and he does not like it. The cinematic apparatus, in other words, is represented ashaving a much more profound effect on the star than on the audience—a bril-liantly perverse rewriting of apparatus theory that seeks even more boldly thanTotal Recall to hide in plain sight its ideological claims to our attention. Moreover,by representing audience, actor, and character all within the film itself, Last Ac-tion Hero parallels the other “planned blockbuster” of the summer of 1993, StephenSpielberg’s Jurassic Park—whose plot can also be read as an allegory of its ownproduction and the near-impossibility of escaping from its omnipresent marketingand promotion campaign.27

True Lies (James Cameron, 1994) offers a tongue-in-cheek gloss onSchwarzenegger’s very public marriage to television journalist Maria Shriver bytelling the story of a man whose wife is unaware that he is a secret agent. The film’steaser—“When he said ‘I do,’ he didn’t say what he did”—is a sentiment worthy ofKuato in Total Recall, but in True Lies the dual identity problem is eventuallyresolved, or rather obviated, when the wife too is recruited into her husband’sprofession.28 The domestic realm, which within the film stands for the world out-side the film—that is, a world not characterized by adventures and explosions—isultimately absorbed into the realm of action (and thus action cinema).29

True Lies—currently number 44 in all-time worldwide grosses—further con-forms to the biographical imperative that grew increasingly explicit in the star-


vehicle action films of the early and mid-1990s. In an era in which the cooperationof a reliable box-office star was considered more necessary than ever to the suc-cess of big-budget productions, and in which stars often produced and sometimesdirected their own films, it is hardly surprising that a literal “self-selection” ofscripts would occur. Thus, Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (Eastwood, 1992) andSylvester Stallone’s Demolition Man (Marco Brambilla, 1993) both offer up reflec-tions on, or cannibalizations of, their stars’ box-office biographies. In Unforgiven,Eastwood’s character spends most of the movie trying to avoid the homicidal pro-fessionalism that has so often been the defining trait of the star’s screen persona.In Demolition Man, Stallone is defrosted from cryogenic sleep some fifty years inthe future to rescue society from a menacing black villain whose style bears anuncanny resemblance to that of Apollo Creed, Stallone’s antagonist seventeen yearsearlier in Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976).30

Another Schwarzenegger action vehicle, Eraser (Charles Russell, 1996), ex-plicitly thematizes his films’ obsession with the manufacture and remanufactureof identity. Although the film’s tone is much more solemn than that of Last ActionHero or True Lies, the premise as expressed in print advertisements—“He willerase your past to protect your future”—is virtually transparent in the way it con-forms to the conventions of the “official” Schwarzenegger biography.

In Eraser, Schwarzenegger plays federal marshal John Kruger, who is known as“the Eraser” for his skill at making people disappear through the Witness ProtectionProgram. A witness Kruger is assigned to protect is an executive in a defense con-tracting firm who is convinced by the FBI to betray her employer, who has illegallybeen selling arms abroad; her peril, and the film’s plot, arise precisely from her desireto reject her professional history. As in Total Recall, Schwarzenegger’s character hasto face enemies who were once colleagues. James Caan plays another marshal,his mentor, who is deeply involved in the illegal arms sales and thus becomesSchwarzenegger’s chief foe. As Eric Mallin has noted, the “Eraser” role extendsSchwarzenegger’s characteristic free play with issues of identity; it “gives Arnold an-other facet to reflect and distribute his fictionality—he is the source of fiction-mak-ing in others.”31

Eraser, again like Total Recall, also tests the boundaries of cinematic fiction inthe matter of choosing amnesia, for the witness Schwarzenegger protects is playedby Vanessa Williams. The winner of the 1984 Miss America Pageant, Williams wasforced to relinquish her title when Penthouse published nude photos of her, butshe was able to put that scandal behind her and remake herself as a successfulactress and Grammy-winning recording star. In Eraser, she receives an allegorical,action-film absolution for her past sins. Much more than, say, Linda Hamilton,Schwarzenegger’s tough-as-nails costar in Terminator 2 (James Cameron, 1991),Williams is a female version of the self-made man that is Schwarzenegger’s publicpersona. The success of the Arnoldian formula has now become so commandingthat the chief qualification even of a damsel in distress is her willingness to aban-don—erase—her own history. Doing the right thing means not only becoming anew person, long a traditional move in our exceptionalist and self-help-addictedculture, but also denying you were ever anybody else in the first place.


Notes

1. On Working Girl, see, for example, Elizabeth G. Traube, Dreaming Identities: Class,Gender, and Generation in 1980s Hollywood Movies (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press,1992), 106–14.

2. Anne Thompson, “Flatliner$: The 16th Annual ‘Grosses Gloss,’” Film Comment 27,no. 2 (April 1991): 32.

3. For an account of how Ghost also neutralizes anxieties about race, see Judith Mayne,Cinema and Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1993), 142–56.

4. Thompson, “Flatliner$,” 32–33.5. Michael Rogin, “‘Make My Day!’: Spectacle as Amnesia in Imperial Politics,” Repre-

sentations 29 (winter 1990): 103–5.6. Linda Mizejewski notes that “both the Afrikaaner name of the industrialist-villain—

Cohaagen—and his mining industry specifically suggest South Africa” and that “thescenario of the villainy reifies and exploits notions of a Third World that is absolute andabsolutely separate—on another planet!” Mizejewski, “Total Recoil: TheSchwarzenegger Body on Postmodern Mars,” Post Script 12 (summer 1993): 28.

7. I borrow the phrase from Fred Glass, “Totally Recalling Arnold: Sex and Violence inthe New Bad Future,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 1 (fall 1990): 10.

8. See, in addition to Mizejewski and Glass, Johanna Schmertz, “On Reading the Politicsof Total Recall,” Post Script 12 (summer 1993), 35–43; Jonathan Goldberg, “RecallingTotalities: The Mirrored Stages of Arnold Schwarzenegger,” Differences 4 (1992): 172–204; Stephen Prince, Visions of Empire: Political Imagery in Contemporary AmericanFilm (New York: Praeger, 1992), esp. 180–89; and Robert Miklitsch, “Total Recall:Production, Revolution, Simulation-Alienation Effect,” Camera Obscura 32 (1995):4–39.

9. Glass, “Totally Recalling Arnold,” 1.10. Prince, Visions of Empire, 18211. Total Recall’s colonialist themes thus produce another irony, since principal photogra-

phy was shifted, in April 1989, to the Estudios Churubusco outside Mexico City in anattempt to rein in costs. Evidently the cast and crew suffered from food poisoningthroughout the shoot, although Schwarzenegger, “in view of his star status, was al-lowed to have a cool box full of fresh fruits and vegetables flown in from Los Angelesevery day.” Rob van Scheers, Paul Verhoeven, trans. Aletta Stevens (London: Faberand Faber, 1997), 216–18.

12. R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nine-teenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 5. Schwarzenegger’s Ter-minator films—The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984) and Terminator 2: JudgmentDay (Cameron, 1991)—are in a perversely literal way connected to this theme as well,since both emphasize the use of time travel to wipe out the past and the threat it posesfor the (dystopian) future.

13. Prince, Visions of Empire, 183.14. J. P. Telotte makes a similar observation in Replications: A Robotic History of the Sci-

ence Fiction Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 165–67.15. Verhoeven has played up the possibility that Quaid’s heroics are nothing but a para-

noid delusion in which the audience is willingly complicit:

The quintessence of the film is that Quaid likes the dream so much that he doesnot want to wake up. He does not hesitate to pull the wool over his own eyes. . . .And the funny thing is that the public wants it too. I have noticed in the cinema


that during the scene in the hotel room, the audience is watching very quietly,almost grinding their teeth, as if to say, ‘Damn, we haven’t been watching a dreamfor an hour, have we?’ And to their relief Arnold then takes them further on hisjourney by shooting the doctor. But it remains a dream.

Quoted in van Scheers, Paul Verhoeven, 222–23.16. Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impres-

sion of Reality in Cinema,” in Philip Rosen, ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: AFilm Theory Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 313. On scenes ofregression in the film, see Robert E. Wood, “Remembering the Body: IdeologicalAmbivalence in Total Recall,” Studies in the Humanities 24 (1997): 36, 39.

17. Action rather than contemplation is of course Schwarzenegger’s metier, and his pres-ence in the film necessarily inflects the direction of the script. Mayne (Cinema andSpectatorship, 123–41) discusses how the intertextual study of film stars creates prob-lems for apparatus theory; Wood (“Remembering the Body,” 33, 35) describes thesituation in Total Recall as arising from the conflict between plot and icon (i.e., the waya star like Schwarzenegger can never be completely submerged into his character).

18. Philip K. Dick, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” in Dick, The PreservingMachine (New York: Ace Books, 1969), 129–51.

19. Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (NewBrunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 102.

20. This symptom apparently affects other members of the family. Consider George W.Bush’s much-touted conversion at age forty from a hard-drinking, dissolute black sheepto an abstemious Christian family man and his concomitant refusal to discuss the wildand irresponsible days of his misspent “youth.”

21. Rogin, “‘Make My Day!’” 117. For Rogin’s account of Bush and the CIA, see 101–0222. At Ibid., 120–21, Rogin concludes with an analysis of this ad and Bush’s repudiation of it.23. Nigel Andrews, True Myths: The Life and Times of Arnold Schwarzenegger (Secaucus,

N.J.: Carol Publishing Group, 1996), 189. According to van Scheers (211), whenVerhoeven was drafted for the project in the fall of 1988—he was at least the seventhdirector to be involved—forty-five different versions of the script were delivered tohim for review. For an account of the script’s odyssey through “development hell,” seeDaniel S. Duvall, “Total Recall: A Long, Strange Trip,” Creative Screenwriting 5 (1998):31–34.

24. Schwarzenegger appears as himself—that is, in the role of the chairman of thePresident’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports—in Ivan Reitman’s Dave (1993),sporting with the film’s very Bush-like president. Schwarzenegger held the post (inreal life) from 1991 to 1993.

25. For a discussion of Schwarzenegger’s efforts to control his public image and his re-sponse to the publication of Leigh’s generally unflattering Arnold: An UnauthorizedBiography (Chicago: Congdon and Weed, 1990), see Andrews, True Myths, 199–204.On the “specter of homosexuality” that haunts bodybuilding, see Goldberg, “RecallingTotalities,” esp. 173–79.

26. Andrews, True Myths, 231–32. An impressive analysis of Last Action Hero and its “priorShakespearean text,” Hamlet, is Eric S. Mallin, “‘You Kilt My Foddah’: or Arnold, Princeof Denmark,” Shakespeare Quarterly 50 (1999): 127–51.

27. For observations on this process as it functions in the “historical epic,” which “formallyrepeats the surge, splendor, and extravagance, the human labor and capital cost en-tailed by its narrative’s historical content in both its production process and its modes


of representation,” see Vivian Sobchack, “‘Surge and Splendor’: A Phenomenology ofthe Hollywood Historical Epic,” Representations 29 (winter 1990): 24–49, reprinted inBarry Keith Grant, ed., Film Genre Reader II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995),280–307.

28. A parallel argument could easily be made about Schwarzenegger’s later comedies, thatthey repeatedly tell the story of a man confronting the new domestic and parentalresponsibilities typical of Schwarzenegger’s own demographic group (Schwarzenegger’sfirst child was born in December 1989). The examples are Kindergarten Cop (IvanReitman, 1990), in which he plays a detective forced to work undercover as a kinder-garten teacher; Junior (Reitman, 1994), in which he plays a fertility specialist whoimpregnates himself to test an experimental technique; and Jingle All the Way (BrianLevant, 1996), in which he plays a father who has promised to buy his son the season’shottest, hard-to-get Christmas toy.

29. For an extended treatment of this issue in True Lies, see Mark Gallagher, “I MarriedRambo: Spectacle and Melodrama in the Hollywood Action Film,” in ChristopherSharrett, ed., Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media (Detroit: Wayne StateUniversity Press, 1999), 199–226, esp. 213–20.

30. In this context, one could argue that Eastwood has become a favorite of film criticspartly because of his willingness to thematize the aging of his action-film persona infilms like Unforgiven (Eastwood, 1992), In the Line of Fire (Wolfgang Petersen, 1993),and Absolute Power (Eastwood, 1997). Film critic Richard Schickel both exemplifiesand analyzes this trend in his biography, Clint Eastwood (New York: Knopf, 1996),esp. 452–65 (on Unforgiven) and 470–77 (on In the Line of Fire). Of course, JohnWayne did the same thing at the end of his career in films like Big Jake (George Sherman,1971), The Cowboys (Mark Rydell, 1972), and The Shootist (Don Siegel, 1976), thoughin that case Wayne was aided by the elegiac mode that has always been available in thewestern. For a critical discussion of these films, see Garry Wills, John Wayne’s America(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 289–301. More recently, and more pertinentlyhere, the phenomenon is observable throughout the action genre, for example, in StevenSeagal’s repeated allusions in both his films (e.g., Above the Law [Andrew Davis, 1988])and in his magazine and television interviews to a mysterious past spent studying themartial arts in Japan and working for secret government agencies. Likewise—and morepractically—the films of the Belgian actor Jean-Claude Van Damme often attempt torationalize his apparently ineradicable accent, casting him as a Cajun merchant mari-ner in Hard Target (John Woo, 1993) and as a French foreign legionnaire in MaximumRisk (Ringo Lam, 1996). The measure of Schwarzenegger’s success in remaking him-self, of course, is that his films no longer bother to explain or to explain away his dis-tinctive accent.

31. Mallin, “‘You Kilt My Foddah,’” 143.

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Frank Grady - Arnoldian Humanism, Or Amnesia and Autobiography in the Schwarzenegger