An Impotent Metaphor (1979)

Created as part of the Yonemotos’ Soap Opera Series (together with Green Card: American Romance), this postmodern tale navigates artistic and sexual crises in Southern California. Boredom and alienation, the banality of fantasies and reality and the need for idealised romance afflict the characters that wander through this narrative representation of the LA art scene. The pervasive cultural malaise is seen as conditioned behaviour — conscious psychological manipulation by the mass media. Against this dominant ideology, the film’s central figure Norman, played by Norman Yonemoto, approaches art as a means to ‘expose the derivative nature of the romantic ideal’ and ‘promote the examination of our personal contexts.’