Cops in Culture #3: Hot Fuzz
by Heather
Hot Fuzz is, to put it simply, a troperiffic movie. Edgar Wright — the writer/director — wears his influences on his sleeve, with a wealth of both overt and covert references to the buddy-cop tropes and cowboy cop characters that dominated police representation in 1980s-90s media. To hear Wright and co-writer/lead actor Simon Pegg talk about it, it’s clear that Hot Fuzz is intended as more of an homage to these movies rather than a full-on parody, but the interplay of the two and the treatment of this wealth of source material leads to something interesting. Hot Fuzz stands out from the long list of police movies — including both buddy-cop and one-cop-versus-the-world stories — in the way that it manages its genre conventions.
To understand Hot Fuzz, it’s first important to understand what created it.
The Hero Cop
Police — and crime more generally — have been, and continue to be, incredibly popular in film and TV. They account for some of the longest-running franchises, seem to be at home in both comedy and drama, and remain lodged in our collective memory with their bombastic action scenes and myriad witty quips ready to be regurgitated whenever the occasion demands. Because the representation of the cop has existed for such a long time in the media, and has gone through a real rolodex of characteristics, it’s important to pinpoint exactly where Edgar Wright’s inspiration comes from.
The era of police representation beginning in the 1980s and running well into the 90s seems particularly influential. If I were to list every reference in Hot Fuzz, I’d meet my word count and then some, and the references aren’t all as clear-cut as, well, literally putting clips of the films in the movie (Point Break and Bad Boys 2). A lot of it is in the filmic language itself; the characterization, the dialogue, and not just the words spoken but their cadence and how they’re framed. Some of it’s in the promotional material, where leads Simon Pegg and Nick Frost pose like Hollywood action stars in tongue-in-cheek posters — the joke being that these men don’t look how we expect. One trailer announces that the film comes from “The guys who watched every action movie ever made”, and a lot of the humour comes from transplanting these familiar Hollywood stories onto the English countryside, but what’s interesting to see is how Wright engages with the American Hero Cop beyond the initially funny concept.
The 1980s-90s was the era of more militarized super-cops, who solved every problem with a barrage of bullets. You know the type: they’re cool, catchphrase-spewing, and hyper-masculine, usually played by Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone. These men embodied the maverick cop, the only one willing to break the rules to do what’s right! By… uh... committing violent acts against the criminals, in order to... ensure justice prevails?
With protagonists like these, audiences are invited to empathise with the cool action cop as he forgoes paperwork and beats confessions out of suspects, his rule-breaking and violence normalized as a necessary response to a scary, criminal world. A study by Color of Change found that the genre ”advanced a false hero narrative about law enforcement, and (...) dismissed any need for police accountability. They made illegal, destructive and racist practices within the criminal justice system seem acceptable, justifiable and necessary — even heroic” and considering the state we’re currently in, it seems clear that this deluge of media has influenced the public perception of the cop (and the criminal). The use of violence as a solution to crime is a big part of Hot Fuzz — particularly in the pursuit of “the greater good”.
Police and the NWA
Violent behaviour being accepted as a necessary evil — even as a preferred, justified approach for law enforcement — is the subject of antagonism in Hot Fuzz. The antagonists are revealed to be the all-white, elderly Neighbourhood Watch Alliance (NWA), who do everything for “the greater good” of Sandford — including violent murder. What is the greater good? A veneer of social cohesion and homogeneity, with bodies (literally) buried beneath, in the pursuit of the Village of the Year award — in other words, the epitome of the purely aesthetic, conservative British rural village.
Although the NWA are framed as the main antagonists, they’re only able to get away with it because of the police — who are either too incompetent to recognise and oppose them, or are in active support, like Chief Frank Butterman, who founded the Alliance. Regardless of their individual knowledge or support of the NWA, the issue remains the same: the police prefer to keep things quiet and aesthetically, superficially perfect, by being more preoccupied with exerting social control and maintaining the status quo than pursuing justice. Crime is punished differently depending on who commits it: Danny Butterman, Angel’s partner and the son of the Chief, drives drunk but is let off without much consequence. Danny benefits from nepotism, from being part of the in-group, but others aren’t so lucky. The status quo disproportionately punishes the outliers in this homogenous community, including “travellers'' and “hoodies” — people who aren’t necessarily criminals but who threaten the picture-perfect village image. These small infringements reflect a different type of crime, and a different kind of policing, where the perpetrators face violent deaths that are in no way proportional to the ‘crimes’ committed — simply because of who they are and where they fit into the social landscape of Sandford.
This idea of less powerful communities being policed more than the ruling class is certainly relevant to the real world. One example is in stop and search statistics, where black people are up to 40 times more likely to be stopped compared to white people. This is despite 90% of searches leading to nothing. This is certainly the case in Sandford, where the victims are treated as social deviants but their deaths and disappearances aren’t even noticed until the climax of the film.
Nicholas and Danny must rebel against the NWA and the Chief, finding themselves unable to rely on the Metropolitan Police whose internal politics would prevent Angel from launching a successful case. The “buddy-cops versus the system” seems pretty in-keeping with the history of the genre, and the fact that the climax involves a massive, over-the-top gunfight is an homage to action movies, but is it an effective response to the quiet evil lurking in Sandford?
Policing and Media-Influenced Vigilantism
Angel’s reaction to the antagonistic force is a learned behaviour; he is influenced by the media he consumes with Danny. Like in the real world, the 80s-90s cop movies Danny and Angel watch inspire and justify their behaviour as they ignore the rules and turn to vigilantism. Angel, a by-the-books cop, takes matters into his own hands and executes violent ‘justice’ on the antagonists, acting as judge, jury and executioner. This kind of rhetoric is very important when it comes to the legal system and the police, particularly when it comes to revenge and justice.
Angel chooses not to rely on the judicial system because he's aware of the inability of the current system to root out this corruption and institutionalised violence. However, using the inadequacies of the justice system as an excuse to bypass it entirely is a tactic already used by police who react, like Angel, with vigilantism. Writing for Vulture, Abraham Riesman investigated the rise in cops and soldiers identifying with the Marvel character ‘The Punisher’ — a violent vigilante antihero. Here are two quotes from members of American law enforcement:
[The Punisher] does to bad guys and girls what we sometimes wish we could legally do. [He] doesn’t see shades of grey, which, unfortunately, the American justice system is littered with and which tends to slow down and sometimes even hinder victims of crime from getting the justice they deserve.
He has a job to do and he does it. No political correctness, no rules other than his own, he just does what needs to be done. Period.
There’s a Karmic system in play here, a sense of criminals getting what they deserve, but when one man is making that decision, it fulfils the dangerous belief that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun. Like these real life cops and The Punisher, Angel and Danny have been indoctrinated by the police media that supports this kind of policing, and the movie treats their approach as justified. The results, as we’ve seen, can be deadly.
Hot Fuzz is a police movie about police movies, and the relationship between media and real policing. The antagonist is the perfect representation of how incompetence and corruption can lead to massive social stratification and violent outcomes for marginalized groups in the pursuit of a perfect society. The movie presents the inadequacies of the police in a multilayered way, by not only showing the violent enforcers of social control (or the ‘bad eggs’), but the complicit system that emboldens and encourages this kind of behaviour. At one point Nicholas considers reporting the murders to the Met, but he turns back knowing that this won’t work. The processes available to him are insufficient to constrain and effectively deal with the violence perpetuated by the NWA and the police in Sandford. The true problem here is that neither vigilantism nor the current policing system is sufficient, because the justice system itself is not sufficient. Hot Fuzz is a comedy, and a clear send-up of the genre, but it’s also interesting to note the kinds of tropes that were used, and what messages we could be sending in some of our most popular films and television shows.