Screening Siblings in Contemporary American Film

An in-depth exploration of sibling relationships and their representation in popular American cinema.

Siblings are everywhere in film, but their place in cinema has largely gone unstudied. This book turns attention to the brother–sister dynamic on screen and the many ways it shapes how stories are told.

Screening Siblings in Contemporary American Film offers the first sustained analysis of how sibling relationships have shaped some of the most influential films of the twenty-first century. Exploring popular films such as Bring it On (2000), Legally Blonde (2001), Frozen (2013), Jurassic World (2015), and Black Panther (2018), Katie Barnett uncovers how contemporary cinema uses sisters and brothers to explore gender, family, grief, and identity. She shows how teen movies use siblings to construct ‘safe’ romances for girls while reinforcing older brother gatekeepers, how depictions of sororities both challenge and reproduce dominant ideas of femininity, and how on-screen fraternities reveal anxieties around troubled masculinity.

Barnett also explores how siblings, particularly twins, are utilized in contemporary horror to explore parental failure, grief and disturbed identity, and how representations of dysfunctional adult siblings are used to address loss and the impact of family identity on the self.