I am not normally a fan of Salon.com's movie critic, Andrew O'Hehir. I
disagree with him about most movies that we see and review. But every so
often he breaks out of mediocrity and takes a chance and, like Roger
Ebert, utilizes the medium of film criticism as a mechanism for social
criticism. This is one of those times.
"Total Recall" and
America's false-memory syndrome
<http://www.salon.com/2012/08/04/total_recall_and_americas_false_memory_\
syndrome/>
Do we know who we really are? The 2012 election is a Philip K. Dick
showdown between dueling American fantasies
By Andrew O'Hehir <http://www.salon.com/writer/andrew_ohehir/>
[http://media.salon.com/2012/08/recall_amnesia2_rect-460x307.jpg]
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.
Whatever about the actual differences between Barack Obama and Mitt
Romney which I would argue are minor, in the bigger picture
their supporters see them as embodying different visions of the nation,
both of which are notional or imaginary. One of them promises a renewal
of the past, although it's a past that never existed in the first
place and one he certainly cannot recreate. The other seems to
represent a more inclusive and optimistic future, or at least he used
to. Given prevailing cultural and economic realities it's a future
well beyond his capacity (or anybody else's) to will into
existence.
This week's new Hollywood remake of the science-fiction classic
"Total Recall"
<http://http://www.salon.com/2012/08/02/total_recall_a_sci_fi_classic_re\
loaded> is more concerned with Colin Farrell's muscular frame and
its exaggerated stunts and effects than with political allegory. But
like the Arnold Schwarzenegger original from 1990, it draws its source
material from Philip K. Dick's famous science-fiction story "We
Can Remember It for You Wholesale," which can absolutely be read as
a loaded commentary on our understanding of history, or lack thereof.
Farrell plays a factory worker who builds robot soldiers in a ruined,
totalitarian future society, until he is thrust into an endless loop of
epistemological doubt, where he can't be sure who he really is or
what he really knows about himself or the world. He may be a highly
trained secret agent, or he may have an implanted false memory to that
effect. Furthermore, if he is an undercover ninja assassin, he
doesn't know whether he works for the nefarious one-world
government or the underground resistance.
America as a whole finds itself in a similar position, uncertain about
the basic facts of its own history, let alone what lessons to draw from
them and whether or not it's truly on the side of the angels. That
goes double, I think, for America's declining white majority, which
simultaneously feels itself embattled and undermined even as it still
holds a grotesquely disproportionate share of power, money and
privilege. This is among the principal themes of my Salon colleague
Joan Walsh's upcoming book "What's the Matter With White
People?", <http://www.amazon.com/dp/1118141067/?tag=saloncom08-20>
which is certain to provoke much discussion as the campaign season heats
up.
To paraphrase her argument into my own terms (which she may not
entirely agree with), Walsh sees the contemporary Tea Party-aligned
right wing as the latest manifestation of an enduring ideological
current in American politics that appeals to a harmonious, godly and
racially coded vision of the past. In our day, that means the past
before the Civil Rights movement and feminism and gay marriage and all
the social tumult of the 1960s that led inexorably, last but not least,
to the election of a president who may or may not be Kenyan or Muslim
but is certainly not one of us. Walsh further argues that there's
more going on here than simple racism, and she's right. Most
importantly, the idea that there was some period of universally
prosperous and harmonious white hegemony in America's past is a
ludicrous fiction, employed to enable an especially pernicious imagined
community. The real history of European immigration to North America is
full of discord, bigotry and violence, with bitter nativist prejudice
unleashed, in turn, against the Irish, the Italians, the Poles, the
Jews and anyone else who came along.
Those groups were eventually able to acculturate as "white" in
ways that African-Americans and most dark-skinned immigrants could not,
but at the ultimate cost of having their cultural memories reformatted,
"Total Recall"-style, or subscribing to Henry Ford's famous
proclamation that history is bunk. Again, I'm not suggesting that
the allure of a mythological past is unique to Americans, or white
people, or the Tea Party. But there's no denying that the modern
Republican Party has been extraordinarily successful at convincing the
white working class to vote loyally and even enthusiastically against
its own economic interests by offering a seductive vision of American
identity that is based on a past that never was and that excludes vast
swaths of the bicoastal urban and suburban population from full
membership.
At times the left has also been guilty of its own historical mythology,
a crypto-Christian vision of American exceptionalism turned upside
down, in which the U.S. is a profoundly evil nation poisoned by the
original sins of slavery and the Indian genocide. (This is roughly how
the Martians view Earth in C.S. Lewis' religious allegory "Out
of the Silent Planet.") That certainly isn't what the Obama-era
Democratic Party stands for (if it stands for anything identifiable at
all), as much as Republicans love to harp on anomalous figures like the
Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It's difficult for any American to view the
Obama-Romney contest from an objective distance, but when I try to do
so, I come up against the fact that these are two men from slightly
different sectors of the elite caste, who will pursue similar policies
on a wide range of issues and have almost identical relationships with
corporate capital, the true power center in our so-called republic.
No one should doubt that there are meaningful differences between Obama
and Romney when it comes to healthcare policy, likely Supreme Court
appointments, reproductive rights, gay marriage and a handful of other
things and then there's the telling personal detail that
Obama rose from the middle-class intelligentsia, while Romney was born
into wealth and privilege. (Their foreign-policy differences seem
largely a question of how loudly they plan to cheer while Israel nukes
Iran.) Those don't seem sufficient to explain the extreme level of
invective on both sides, especially not the right's depiction of
Obama as a dangerous, tax-happy socialist with some concealed Hugo
Chávez-style agenda ready for the second term. (Maybe he's
really a Red secret agent who just doesn't know it yet, like
Farrell's character.)
I was raised by California liberals and now live in New York City, so
of course I'm more attuned to the imagined community that Obama,
however vaguely, seems to represent. If you're reading this, you
get it: A multiracial, multicultural future in which the universal
prosperity and liberty imagined by our country's screwed-up and
contentious Founding Fathers finally extends to everyone. If that
sounds more like the society depicted in a Verizon commercial than a
realistic possibility based on our country's actual history and its
current state of economic decline, cultural division and political
paralysis, well, you grasp the problem.
Sure, it's a nice picture. But the imaginary version of small-town
America circa 1953 that Mitt Romney stands for (also with a high degree
of fuzziness) paints a nice picture too, in a different way. Neither of
them has anything to do with what these guys will actually do as
president not much, as usual let alone with the more urgent
questions which Philip K. Dick and Henry Ford were actually addressing,
each in his own way: where we actually are, how we got here, and how in
hell we can get out.
