Home Movies: The American Family in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (International Library of the Moving Image) by Claire Jenkins

Author:Claire Jenkins [Jenkins, Claire]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: action-melodrama, single-parents, family dysfunction, film studies, maternal archetypes, meryl streep, contemporary hollywood cinema, reproductive technologies, gender studies, american family, family history, homosexual unions
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 2015-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

Although, as Keane notes, this rules out movies involving monsters from space as disaster films, in contemporary cinema Independence Day arguably does function as a disaster film due to its adherence to contemporary genre conventions and its representation of global attack.

The 1970s disaster films, including Airport (1970), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1974) and Earthquake (1974), amongst others, are indicative of social unrest and a lack of faith in US politics. Class conflict was regularly played out through narratives, with characters representing a cross-section of American society4 and a ‘liberal twist’ in the way the films also criticize ‘unrestrained corporate capitalism’ and the ‘pursuit of profit’.5 This is particularly evident in the narratives of The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, in which man’s opulent creations are destroyed. Keane suggests that these films provide ‘disaster as therapy’,6 giving their characters, and therefore audiences, a renewed sense of perspective, expanding Krämer’s notion of family-adventure movies as therapy. Although in the earlier disaster films there is a renewed focus on social and personal issues rather than a ‘fixing’ of the family, the spectacular action film continues to be consistently therapeutic for its audiences.

Unlike many contemporary disaster films, the need to display a ‘microcosmic view of American society’7 led to these films being dominated by non-familial groups, whether the passengers of the Poseidon or the workers and professionals of Airport. However, beyond an interest in professionals, disaster films focused on ordinary members of the public, who were ‘important, as disaster fodder, to a certain extent but also fundamental to the requirements that ordinary folk be put under as much extraordinary duress as possible’.8 As the cycle developed, this focus on ordinary people made room for gender diversity, with more women than men surviving The Poseidon Adventure and young people sympathetically incorporated into the plot.9 The industrial reasoning for this, Keane notes, was that ‘Hollywood cinema needed to widen its demographics and sacrificing the women, teenagers and children would have proved far too alienating’.10 Nevertheless, while women were given some narrative weight in the 1970s disaster films, they were still confined to relatively traditional roles: in The Towering Inferno, ‘the men are primarily defined in relation to their jobs and the women are defined solely in terms of their relationships with men’.11 Although family narratives were not central to disaster films, the dysfunctional family does appear in Airport. Mel Bakersfield (Burt Lancaster), the film’s lead, is a man whose job has affected his marriage, with his wife deeming him a bigamist because he is married to his profession. Although family dysfunction is played out alongside the disaster here it is not rectified, indeed the husband/father is set free to pursue a relationship with another woman, and the family is broken.

Keane suggests that the disaster film cycle of the 1970s is considered to have been ‘acutely reflective of social, cultural and political developments’,12 an argument cemented by the correlation between disaster movie cycles and times of crisis. This accounts for the resurgence in

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