Hot+Fuzz+Thry+Anal


 * Karson Mo**


 * Film Theory Analysis**

The film I have chosen to analyze is “Hot Fuzz” directed by Edgar Wright, and I’ll be writing about his choices in the film through the Marxist Film Theory, Feminist Film Theory, and the Catharsis & MimesisTheory.

//Marxist Film Theory// One of the Marxist related elements that could be seen in the film is with the group Neighborhood Watch Alliance (NWA), as one of the characteristics of a Marxist system is that there is one small group of leaders that make “beneficial” decisions for the people of the system without the people having any control over any of the decisions. The members of the NWA group are basically the leaders of the town in which the film is set, which, by the way, is called Sandford. They hold meetings to decide what they could or have done to better the town of Sandford and improve the lives of its citizens to maintain the crime-free vibe of the town, and what they do is to murder the people who are not exactly “ideal” to their society, like the troublemakers and such. By doing that, they can achieve “the greater good” which in their mind would mean social justice. Often in a Marxist system, the leaders must do bad things in order to keep the society happy, and this could be seen in the film through the color and the lighting. Whenever the main character, Nicholas Angel, is around the leaders of the community (members of the NWA), the colors around him are generally darker, and side lighting / under lighting is used and is generally more low key to show that the NWA people do bad things for the greater god, while when he is away from those people, the colors are more vibrant and the lighting is more high key.

//Feminist Film Theory// Draper (an “actress”) was depicted in the film as a typical dumb – blonde type of girl. She shows through her acting that she is not the most intelligent person out there and is rather “slutty,” which is typically how a lot of people look at those females around her age. She is also shown to be a weak and pretty useless character as shown when Mr. Blower was being axed to death by a NWA member and all she did was stand there and scream. She also does not have a lot to say, which makes her rather insignificant. Other than that, when she is on the screen, she is usually behind Mr. Blower and out of focus, which also portrays that she is a weak and insignificant character.

//Catharsis & Mimesis Theory// Edgar Wright’s choice of using a montage in the opening scene of Hot Fuzz shows how Nicholas Angel is a man who worked really hard to achieve his goals. With the montage, he develops the image that Angel is a hard working serious man, and could let the more serious and hard working people who watch the film to relate to him and his confidence in doing stuff, feeling his frustration or sharing his joy when Angel does something. Through Wright’s use of sound, one could also connect with Danny. When Danny tries to do something ambitious, epic upbeat soundtrack starts to play, but immediately stops as he fails. This shows that Danny is ambitious, but rubbish, and a lot of the ambitious but rubbish viewers could probably relate to him and share his sadness as he fails to do something he was so ambitious about, like jumping over the fences the way Angel did. However, those same viewers could also share his happiness and joy as he does something ambitious and succeeds. Also, again with Wright’s use of sound in the film, like the slow downbeat music that plays as Danny surpassingly kills Angel makes the viewers in general feel sad as he just “killed” his own best friend. Most of the viewers could probably feel sad because of that because they know that if they lost their best friends, they’d be sad too.