Sarah Harwood,
Family Fictions: Representations of the Family in 1980s Hollywood Cinema.
London: Macmillan Press, 1997.
ISBN 0-333-64844-7.
265 pp.
A$39.95 (paper)
(Review copy supplied by Macmillan Education Australia)
Uploaded 12 November 1999

Sarah Harwood’s book considers the representations of family in popular Hollywood films. Her analysis is self-limited to those films that were most successful at the UK box office, and the list includes films familiar to international audiences.

Part one contains the contextual framework for her analysis. Chapters one and two describe Britain and Hollywood in the eighties and outline the similarities in the ways in which family and family values were invoked within the two economically and ideologically similar climates of crisis in Thatcher’s Britain and Reagan’s USA. Within this climate, the family underwent substantial changes and chapter three details how easier divorce laws, child abuse, domestic violence, AIDS and abortion all impacted on and arose from shifting discourses and functions of fatherhood, motherhood and childhood.

In Part two Harwood looks more closely at familial representations and chapter four contains the key familial paradigms used in her analysis. The paradigms are diagrammatically represented in Appendix One. Harwood situates the films according to the appearance of actual or metaphorical families within the narrative, whether the families are absent, present or foregrounded, and whether their representation is utopic or dystopic. Such a diagram is helpful for placing the analyses of such a large number of films in a relational way.

Chapters five, six and seven are devoted to the family terms of fatherhood, motherhood and childhood. Each chapter considers the construction and representations of one of the terms, but Harwood argues it is childhood that is the dominant issue of the eighties film and she devotes all of chapter eight to an extensive analysis of ET (US, 1982). I find her work here the most interesting, not least because of her account of the marketing and extra-textual context of the film’s release worldwide, but also because it details the ways in which particular meanings were offered, circulated, and constrained culturally and globally. After an extensive narrative and generic analysis of the ways in which motherhood, fatherhood and childhood are variously (and often contradictorily) represented, Harwood concludes that while ETs success could be linked to marketing, it could also be due to the variety of positions available for identification and pleasure of the spectator.

Chapter nine concludes that the family to which the climate of crisis was calling could not be found in the narratives of the popular eighties films. Rather, ” these narratives . . . display the possibility of fracture, of fragmentation and of difference. (T)hey licence us to imagine other possibilities in which the nuclear family need not be a limitation or the only option…”(176).

In chapter ten, Harwood maps the early nineties shift in the invokation of family and family values to the community, and thus the breakdown of the community is caused by the breakdown in the family. Consequently, the call to family values is stronger than ever. Within this climate the child again is foregrounded, and in cases such as the murder by children of toddler Jamie Bolger the emphasis on the role of the video nasty in the formation of the child killer mind allows regulation and control to be made on behalf of the child, perceived as innocent, “passive victim and potential psychopath”(179). It’s unclear exactly what Harwood would say about the recent school murders in Columbine, USA, or the children gassed by and with a parent in the family car in Western Australia, or the outcry over the remake of Lolita.(USA/France, 1997). What is clear is that work such as Harwood’s continues to be relevant.

Family Fictions is not light on supporting material. Each chapter includes comprehensive notes, and the most popular fifty-five films between 1980 and 1990 are listed, along with a narrative synopsis and paradigmatic description, in Appendix two.

Appendix three details the reasons for the focus on US product in the UK, a discussion of the term “popular”, the reasons for using box-office figures (and not video or televisual release) as a measure of the film’s popularity, clarification of generic terms used in her analysis, and her reasons for not using certification and other forms of classification and regulation in her study. Also included is an extensive filmography of one hundred and fourteen films, and a comprehensive bibliography.

This is an interesting and exhaustive study, and it is particularly strong in discussions of familialism. However, the work raised many questions for me about the elusiveness and complexity of cross cultural studies and the analysis of film and culture. Much is made initially about the connections between Britain and the US, but the analyses of the films (ET excepted) say little about how those connections and differences might impact/constrain particular readings. I guess I wanted a bit more of the extra-textual. But this is not to take away from the depth of Harwood’s work. Family Fictions is a good addition to the field.

Margaret Nixon