“Total Recall” and America’s false-memory syndrome

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 19:30:00 +0000

Every variety of nationalism, in every country in the world, involves some degree of invention, imagination and amnesia, standing in for actual history. Most scholars of Balkan history will tell you that the supposedly ancient enmity between Serbs, Croats and Muslims that led to the terrible civil war of the 1990s – the first serious outbreak of genocidal violence in Europe since the Holocaust – was a modern invention, deliberately inflamed by political leaders. Along with the even worse conflict in Rwanda between the Hutu and Tutsi, two groups indistinguishable to outsiders, this offered a gruesome example of what historian Benedict Anderson has called “imagined community,” the shared sense of a tribal or national identity that runs deep and links unconnected strangers together, even if it was actually concocted the day before yesterday.

So Americans are not unique when it comes to our ambivalent or hostile relationship to history, our preference for simplistic myth-making over the unsettled and perennially conflicted character of the past. Given our nation’s short and bloody history – and the fact that there’s so much of it we’d rather not think about – it’s possible that we suffer from an exaggerated version of this syndrome. Whether or not that’s true, in this historical moment we face an especially stark choice between different versions of the American imagined community, which is what I believe accounts for the poisonous character of this presidential campaign.

“Total Recall”: A sci-fi classic, reloaded

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 19:37:00 +0000

The original Arnold Schwarzenegger “Total Recall” from 1990 – and let’s admit that applying the word “original” to any Schwarzenegger movie, especially that one, feels weird – marked the apogee of director Paul Verhoeven’s meteoric Hollywood career. I still think film history will vindicate Verhoeven as a singular and important figure, who bridged the gap between 1970s European art-house film and big-budget spectacle cinema. (You can find my now-ancient essay in defense of Verhoeven's oeuvre and significance here.) A dedicated ironist and formalist whose work always has a dark, Freudian undercurrent, Verhoeven was following in the footsteps of Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma, but just as clearly paving the way for Christopher Nolan and Zack Snyder.

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“Total Recall” and America’s false-memory syndrome

“Total Recall”: A sci-fi classic, reloaded