Symposium—Legal Outsiders in American Film
This article examines the conflicting film narratives about the internment produced between 1942 and 2007. It argues that while later films, especially documentaries, counter early government film narratives justifying the internment, these counter-narratives have their own damaging hegemony. Whereas earlier commercial films tell the internment story through the eyes of sympathetic whites, using a conventional civil rights template found in films like Mississippi Burning and To Kill A Mockingbird, Japanese and other Asian American documentary filmmakers construct their Japanese characters as model minorities—hyper-citizens, super patriots. Further, the internment experience depicted in films remains largely a male story. With the exception of Emiko Omori’s documentary film memoir, Rabbit in the Moon, the stories and voices of Japanese-American women, who with their children comprised the bulk of internees, are marginalized.
Film is a potentially powerful educational tool, but this tool is only as effective as the stories it tells. Non-Asian filmmakers tend to use the internment era as a vehicle or backdrop for stories about white redemption. Asian American commercial filmmakers, perhaps in an attempt to capture white audiences, follow a similar pattern. Although Asian American documentarians do a better job of educating audiences about the internment era, even these filmmakers tend to emphasize the hyper-patriotism within the World War II Japanese-American community, an image also used by the redress and reparation movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Thus, I argue that the shadow of the internment experience affects Asian American documentarians’ telling of the internment story. These filmmakers engage in a degree of self-censorship, crafting their stories to show Japanese Americans as a model minority to counter persistent perceptions of Asian American as foreigners—marginal citizens whose loyalty is forever suspect. . . .