Of Mutants and Monsters: a Posthuman Study of Verhoeven’s and Wiseman’s Total Recall

• Beatriz Domínguez-García ^[1]
  1. [1] Universidad de Huelva

     Universidad de Huelva

     Huelva, España

     
• Localización: Hélice, ISSN-e 1887-2905, Vol. 7, Nº. 1, 2021, págs. 37-51
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo (pdf)
• Resumen

  • The abuse and violence exerted on the posthuman bodies of fiction is born from their resistance to the postulates of the most traditional humanism. The diachronic vision of the figure of the mutant, as a dehumanized and isolated body from the transhumanist perspective, anticipates the debates generated in the 21st century about the survival of hierarchy in the typification of bodies into ‘more or less’ abled. The examples of corporeal alterity are, thus, manifested as a monstrous, mutant image that warns spectators about the dangers of both medical and environmental experiments. In this sense, the analysis of the film Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990) and its remake (Len Wiseman, 2012), serves as a starting point to offer a critical vision of the abjection caused by the dismantling of the human form, in the words of Manuela Rossini. The critique emerges from Feminist Studies but also from other contemporary schools which also question the hierarchy between bodies such as Queer or Crip Theory. From a posthuman perspective, the presentation of disabled bodies reflects humanity’s propensity for their nullification and, therefore, their capacity to be exploited and discarded