Episode 57: Hot Fuzz

Andi and Lise talk about “queer coding” this week, and how it appeared in the 2007 movie Hot Fuzz, a British parody action comedy with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. HF is part of a related trilogy of movies called, loosely, the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, based on a joke from the first of the three, 2004’s Shaun of the Dead.

“Queer coding” means that a movie’s creators and characters don’t deny a queer subtext in a movie. In HF’s case, there was supposed to be a cisgender heterosexual female love interest, but instead, script writers Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright gave all her lines to the other male character, which resulted in a really interesting relationship between the two male main characters, that could be coded as queer and wasn’t denied by the characters or the writers.

Also, it’s just a hella fun movie.

For more info on HF and queer coding vs. queerbaiting, see Mary Kate McAlpine over at Medium.

For a peek at how the show’s writers and characters thought about HF as slash fiction, see Fanlore.

And Lise’s weekly woo-hoo is Amazon Prime’s Good Omens miniseries, in which sworn enemies an angel and a demon have to team up to save the world. It’s based in the 1990 novel of the same name by the Neil Gaiman and the late Terry Pratchett.

Andi’s woo-hoo is for the first season (not sure there’ll be more!) of the series Gentleman Jack, based on the 19th-century diaries of English noblewoman Anne Lister, who, if she had the terminology, would most likely have identified as lesbian.