Hollywood, the Global South, and Total Recall (2012)

The Global South is often presented as a geopolitical reconsideration of Area Studies and a concept gaining much traction across the social sciences. This short essay will theorize Len Wiseman’s Total Recall (2012) as a spatial analogy for the Global South. Through a comparison of two futuristic megacities—one generic and prosperous in the United Federation of Britain “UFB” and the other globally disadvantaged and named the Colony or “New Asia”—Total Recall is examined as depicting the stratification of the planet but also, more crucially, as a film that communicates the Global South as a newer cinematic invention problematized by Hollywood. My second aim in this essay is to introduce the term Aesthetic Cooperation among Developing and Developed Countries (ACDDC) as a means to stress aesthetic hybridity beyond any one style and any one conception of our many North and South urban metropoles on screen, and one Hollywood experiments with through the genre of science fiction.