Studying Hot Fuzz by Neil Archer

Author:Neil Archer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, PER004020, Performing Arts/Film & Video/Guides & Reviews
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

From ‘landscapes’ to ‘mediascapes’

Media theorist Henry Jenkins first described these practices in 1992, in his analysis of the way fans of television series such as Star Trek (1966–9) do not necessarily ‘buy into’ the obvious (or ‘preferred’) meaning of the shows, but appropriate them and interpret them in independent ways.40 Following the philosopher Michel de Certeau, Jenkins described these practices as forms of textual ‘poaching’: the way in which these viewers take something that does not legally ‘belong’ to them (not just the characters in a show, but also its ideas, what the show is supposedly ‘about’), and make it theirs. Jenkins was writing during a time when most viewers’ capacity to make stuff was limited to the production of fan fiction or fanzines, disseminated by post or at conventions, but the arrival both of the internet and cheap means of producing films (digital cameras and editing software like Final Cut Pro) subsequently made the possibilities both much more vast but also more ‘professional’.41 Hot Fuzz, like Spaced and Shaun of the Dead, is not cobbled together from nothing, though much of the ethos comes from a spirit of DIY filmmaking that often parodies or pastiches big-budget productions to frequent comic effect.

When we put these various discussions together, one of the significant conclusions is that the traditional parameters of what makes up a ‘national’ cinema culture are not so clear-cut. Hollywood might make up the bulk of what film is available on big and small screens, but the ability to ‘poach’ this cinema and read it to one’s own ends undermines its authority to stand for ‘Hollywood’ as an institution, and its ability to communicate what some suppose to be Hollywood’s values or ideologies: rather, it becomes something else to play with, part of the landscape.

But movies, one might say, aren’t ‘landscapes’. Surely, we might ask, our culture is the places and people that surround us? One simple answer to this is that, well, to an extent cinema is our landscape, though maybe ‘landscape’ is too limiting a word. Let’s look carefully again at the setting of Hot Fuzz. While the location includes specific sites we can identify geographically and culturally, such as the village square, the church or the model village, some of the most important settings aren’t really ‘places’ in the meaningful sense of the word. In 1995 a French anthropologist called Marc Augé wrote a small but very influential book about what he called ‘non-places’.42 As Augé saw it, modern life, characterised by increasing mobility and the circulation of people and cultural products, meant that the traditional ideas of a ‘place’, as something inhabited, shared and understood, have changed. Augé’s main examples are places like airports or chain hotels, sites that don’t have any real sense of identity because they are simply places that lots of people pass through or merely occupy for a short while on their way to somewhere else. But another, and very significant example of this change is the shape and character of English villages and towns.

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