Forgettable Tales of a Forgotten War: Narrative, Memory, and the Erasure of the Korean War in American Cinema

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.”