Everything You Always Hated About Thatcher's Britain: A Cultural Analysis of Mike Leigh's High Hopes (1988)

Abstract

This paper starts from a definition of culture that is set in the realm of cultural studies. Broadly speaking, cultural critics see Culture as both lived experience (i.e meaning making of individuals) and social construction. Hence the deduction that we cannot live social reality outside of the cultural forms through which we make sense of it. Along with and as a consequence of this assumption, no text, practice or event can be severed off from its contextual connections since, as Stuart Hall claims (1997: 25-46), the meaning ofa cultural form is always the product of the text's "articulations", of the web of coruiotations and codes into which it is inserted. Such a view is essential to a productive understanding of Mike Leigh's High Hopes (1988) -a film which, at first sight, appears to be no more than a weird comedy about ordinary people doing ordinary things. For this reason, only a "radical contextualising" of both Thatcher's years in power and of the (visual) text itself will help apprehend Leigh's film as a real-life, political and ideological manifestation of what it felt to be alive at a particular time and place, i.e Britain in the eighties. My analysis of the film will show how the social tone and class tensions developed during the period are conveyed through the humorous portrayal of the actions, interactions and intimacy of three different couples.