9 - Manufactured Emotions: Home Sweet Home

Summary

Very often, there are a lot of different things going on at a lot of different levels in my films. As far as I am concerned, these are worked out in terms of imagery and metaphor just like any other piece of art. … Sometimes I think it's very much on the edge in terms of the audience seeing the wheels going round. Of course, I'm always aspiring to [them] not seeing the wheels going round, and only being explicit through being implicit – saying to the audience, go away and let it carry on in your head.

–Mike Leigh

The horrors in horror movies are too external, too superficial, and too exceptional. Home Sweet Home shakes us in a way nothing by John Carpenter can because it depicts everyday, ordinary horrors like the horror of a self-centered, loveless life. While Hitchcock, Lynch, and the Coen brothers externalize their characters' problems, implicitly endorsing a psychology of victimization, Leigh tells us that we have no one to blame but ourselves. Our problems do not come from outside, but inside.

Leigh is a spiritual filmmaker in the sense that one of his central subjects is the way in which, in Blake's terms, characters “mind-forge” their own manacles and lock themselves in their own self-created imaginative “prisons.”