Abstract

The Korean War is paradoxically remembered in the United States as “The Forgotten War.” While there are many reasons for this amnesia, the war’s representation in American popular culture, and cinema in particular, remains a key factor. Looking beyond the narrow canon of Korean War film “classics,” this article surveys a broad spectrum of American-produced Korean War films made since 1951 in terms of their capacity (or rather incapacity) to serve as adequate means of Korean War remembrance. Building on memory studies scholar Astrid Erll’s theory of media and cultural memory, the article proposes a typology of the kinds of (non-)memory work done by American Korean War films, with a specific focus on common narrative strategies that not only hinder remembrance but facilitate forgetting. These include the frequent subordination of the war to background or other ancillary roles, overly generic and nonspecific treatments of the war, and the tendency to conflate Korea with WWII. The article frames the mnemonic implications of these narrative strategies in terms of the compromised memory potentials they generate, including “peripheral memory,” “vague memory,” and “parasitic memory.”

摘要

自相矛盾的是，朝鲜战争在美国被称为“被遗忘的战争”。虽然造成这种健忘症的原因有很多，但战争在美国流行文化，尤其是电影中的表现仍然是一个关键因素。超越朝鲜战争电影“经典”的狭隘经典，本文调查了自 1951 年以来制作的各种美国制作的朝鲜战争电影的能力（或者更确切地说，没有能力）作为朝鲜战争纪念的充分手段。基于记忆研究学者阿斯特丽德·厄尔 (Astrid Erll) 的媒体和文化记忆理论，本文提出了美国朝鲜战争电影所做的（非）记忆工作的类型学，特别关注不仅阻碍记忆而且阻碍记忆的常见叙事策略。方便遗忘。这些包括战争经常从属于背景或其他辅助角色，对战争的过于笼统和非特定的处理，以及将朝鲜与二战混为一谈的趋势。这篇文章根据这些叙事策略产生的受损记忆潜力，包括“外围记忆”、“模糊记忆”和“寄生记忆”，构建了这些叙事策略的助记含义。