Green Card: An American Romance

Bruce (b. 1949) and Norman Yonemoto (1946–2014), brothers who produced a body of collaborative videos beginning in 1976, deconstruct and rewrite the hyperbolic vernacular with which the mass media constructs cultural mythologies. Ironically employing the image-language and narrative syntax of popular forms such as soap opera, Hollywood melodrama and television advertising, the Yonemotos work from “the inside out” to expose the media’s pervasive manipulation of contemporary reality and fantasy, individual and collective identity. In their highly stylized, deadpan fictions, they decode the tropes of cinematic and television formulas, self-consciously appropriating the artifice and cliches of this “media delirium” as metaphor. In their ironic psychosexual melodramas, including Vault (1984) and Kappa (1986), they decipher the Freudian symbology, psychoanalytic strategies and Surrealist tactics that underlie media representations and narrative texts. The Hollywood myth of romantic love, and its role in the construction of personal desire and cultural memory, recurs throughout their work. The Yonemotos’ critique of America’s mediated culture is informed by their Japanese-American heritage, their youth in Silicon Valley and their relationship to the Hollywood entertainment industry. They write, “Only by understanding the contents and strategies of metatextual nonsense can we hope to put our postmodern spectacle into a new and constructive context.” The Yonemotos have also produced collaborative multi-media installations, many of which address issues of Japanese-American identity in the context of popular media representation, history, and autobiography. In these installations, as in their narrative fictions, the Yonemotos locate meaning in the interstices between myth and memory. They have also produced videos and installations independently.