The three films that make up Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy are bound together not by a continuous narrative, as in the case of other series, but rather by a series of motifs that are introduced in Shaun of the Dead, and repeated and riffed upon in Hot Fuzz and The World’s End respectively. The motifs run the gamut from the relatively inconsequential (the repetition of a fence gag in which characters played by Pegg and Nick Frost take a short cut through a series of back gardens and a wonderful series of cameos by Bill Nighy) to the thematically indispensable (the appearance of a Cornetto which is tied to the films’ color scheme, urination as a thematic reminder of anti-utopian corporeality, and a series of jokes about usage covering “the zed word,” official police usage guidelines, and the etymology of the word slave).
The films also contain a series of references to works by (or inspired by) Shakespeare, which references will be the focus of this paper. One expects Shaun to reference the films of George Romero, Fuzz to reference Bad Boys II and Point Break, and The World’s End to reference Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing, Aliens, and They Live. Less expected however, are Edgar Wright’s consistent references to Shaun in terms of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, the Sandford-Gloucestershire dramatic society’s performance of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet, and the chain of associations that connects Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale to Hanna-Barbera’s Yogi Bear. These allusions bespeak a hyper-referentiality that is emblematic not only of parodic discourse, but which reflects contemporary discursive practices more generally.
About the presenterRaymond Joseph DiSanza
Dr. Ray DiSanza is a professor of English and Literature at Suffolk County Community College. Scholarly interests include anglophone postcolonial studies, modernism and classical mythology. His dissertation focused on the use of epics and classical myths as frame stories in postcolonial writings. His work in Pop Culture explores many of the same questions regarding hegemony, otherness, and mythological structures.