This paper examines the interplay between the nation-state model, the metaphors of family and body, and the effects of global capitalism on the individual body. Using The Edge of Heaven and Dirty Pretty Things as case studies, I argue that changes to and ruptures in the nation-state model can be correlated with the transformations taking place in the nuclear family unit from which the "national family" draws its symbolic force. Furthermore, looking at the films through frameworks produced within political philosophy and literary theory, I suggest that the commodification of the individual body within the nuclear family unit attests to the pressures that global capitalism exerts on all persons, particularly those outside the protective borders of citizenship, thus forcing their entrance into the market as commodities without regard for the ethics of the transformation from person to good.