Home-Made

Home-Made is the home-goods store where Jane Smith and John Smith arrive armed for a confrontation with their enemies while hoping to start a new life together. Its promise of affordable domestic comfort becomes the backdrop to a collision between that future and the couple’s immediate danger.

Setting and Intended New Life

Just outside their delivery point, Home-Made is Jane’s favorite home-goods store. She and John regard it as an ideal place to begin their new life, imagining that they may soon be free to live as they choose, together. Their ordinary-looking shopping trip therefore carries an unusually high stake: the couple are not merely furnishing an apartment but trying to reach a future beyond their dangerous work.

They arrive early in the parking lot, presenting themselves as a young couple shopping for reasonably priced furnishings. Beneath that appearance, both wear bulletproof Kevlar underwear. Their romantic hope has left them somewhat careless about planning, and the store’s ordinary commercial setting sharply contrasts with the lethal assignment they are preparing to undertake.

An Armed Shopping Trip

Before entering, Jane and John silently ready themselves for the mission, taking care not to touch. The pause turns the couple’s hope of intimacy into a moment of professional separation: they are experienced killers psyching themselves up for their next task even as they aspire to build a life together.

They enter carrying shopping bags as if they were returning purchases, but the bags are full of weapons. John takes a basket, apparently expecting to buy only one or two things; Jane rolls her eyes and chooses a full-size shopping cart. It is a practical way to carry their heavy arsenal, but also a useful piece of cover and a bulky shield that might let her duck behind it if necessary.

The Prairie Room

A display of small robotic Roomba vacuums briefly distracts John, and Jane pulls him away; once he is back with her, they are ready to act. Hand in hand, they look for a suitable vantage point from which to wait for their enemies, and soon find one in the Prairie Room.

The room’s artificial farmhouse scene centers on a raised mock house with a porch and swing bench, backed by a golden wheat field promoting an idealized vision of America. Jane and John climb the steps and sit on the bench, where they have a clear view across the store. Home-Made’s carefully staged domestic landscape thus becomes their lookout: the image of a peaceful home frames two armed fugitives preparing for violence, while also giving them a place to begin imagining a home of their own.