Representations of the Mother in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema

Representations of the mother are trapped into certain patterns which we come across particularly in
the movies Stella Dallas (1939), A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and Kramer vs Kramer (1979).
Hollywood cinema has been perpetuate patriarchal myths and it is possible to sort the representations
of the mother under four categories: the good mother, the bad mother, the heroine mother and the silly
mother. In this paper The Florida Project , Lady Bird , Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri and
Tully all of which have been released between 2017 and 2018, are selected because mother characters
are at the center of the narration. Selected films will be analyzed with the aim of responding the
question of whether the Hollywood movies can or cannot outgrow the categories of mother
representations they are squeezed into and can or cannot look upon the mother characters as feminine
individual subjects at the same time.