ABSTRACT
The concept of the American family, as it emerges in Home Alone, illustrates what Roland Barthes has famously described in Mythologies as a contemporary myth. Roland Barthes argues that, in the process of signification, signs acquire a secondary level of meaning, thus constituting "second-order semiological systems": namely cultural myths. Home Alone was a blockbuster for twelve consecutive weeks; a Christmas movie that stayed in the cinemas well into the Easter season, to become the third highest grossing rental movie of all times. Robert C. Allen proposes to read the extended McCallister family as a critique of what he calls the "postmodern family". It is the image of a "white nation" that is constructed with the help of an ideology of "manifest domesticity", an image that reverberates in a popular movie like Home Alone. The sense, the image of the normative American nuclear middle-class family is by definition white, and it suppresses both alternative family structures and excludes families of color.
