Family fictions

by Sarah Harwood

What do E.T., Fatal Attraction and Look Who's Talking have in common? As well as being amongst the most popular films at the UK box office of recent years all three represent dysfunctional families, families which profoundly transgressed contemporary ideological norms. The eighties were a decade in which the family occupied a pivotal position in an increasingly complex social and moral universe and film itself enjoyed a resurgence. Sarah Harwood argues that Hollywood cinema engaged in debates over the 'crisis in the family' in intense and complex ways, both feeding and resisting dominant social mythologies. In a fascinating analysis of films as diverse as Airplane! and Terms of Endearment, Family Fictions maps the functions, paradoxes and pleasures of familial representations in recent times. These startling analyses shed light on power and gender relations in contemporary cinema as well as on how the films themselves engaged with their broader cultural contexts.