Family Fortunes: Key Representational Paradigms

Abstract

So how did the family function in mainstream Hollywood films — films which held a purchase on an international marketplace — in a decade which was obsessed by defining its morality, politics and practice through the lens of the ‘happy’ nuclear family? If we assume Hollywood cinema to be deeply implicated in circulating and engaging with contemporary ideology and that familism was an important discourse within that, how did Hollywood represent the nuclear family?

All happy families resemble each other, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Leo Tolstoy