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

Abstract

The abuse and violence exerted on the posthum an bodies of fiction is born from their resistance to the postulates of the most traditio nal 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 21 st century about the survival of hierarchy in the typification of bodies into ‘mor e 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 Stud ies but also from other contemporary schools which also question the hiera rchy between bodies such as Qu eer or Crip Theory. From a posthuman perspective, the presen tation of disabled bodies refl ects humanity’s propensity for their nullification and, theref ore, their capacity to be exploited and discarded.