I agree very much with those who emphasize the element of the Spectacle in _Total Recall_ and other films -- in the course I did, we read both Debord's _Society of the Spectacle_ and Baudrillard's _Simulations_ alongside our menu of cyberpunk films (TR included). Plausibility isn't the point -- it's like all those annoying people who used to tell me that the giant ants in THEM! would actually collapse of their own weight because they were wrongly proportioned foe exoskeletons of that size . . . Also, I stronly agree that the "nuclear" family lies somewhere near the dark heart of many of these films, T1 and T2 in especial. There's an excellent essay which makes this point and relates it also to Lynch's _Blue Velvet by Fred Pfeill; the title is "Revolting Yet Conserved: Family Noir in _Blue Velvet_ and _Terminator 2_" and it appeared in _Postmodern Culture_ 2.3. (PMC can be ordered bia listserver or ftp; if you login to [log in to unmask] and go to the directory: pub/docs/pmc/pmc-list you can "get" this file as "pfeill.592" -- I used it in my class and it led to some excellent discussions. --Russell Potter --English Dept. --Colby College