The film opens with Shaun (Simon Pegg) in his natural habitat. He sips on a beer in his favorite pub, The Winchester, with his best friend Ed (Nick Frost) moving from bar to arcade game. He is interrupted by his girlfriend Liz sitting across from him. She laments their rudimentary relationship and its lack of intimacy and spontaneity. Shaun placates her when he suggests they dine at seafood restaurant the next night. “Things will change, I promise.” Shaun tells Liz. “Really Shaun?” Liz asks. Shaun responds by nodding and taking another sip of his beer. The ensuing opening credits are displayed in front of an old man pushing a series of shopping carts across a grocery store parking lot. We then see aisles and aisles of cashiers within the grocery store, methodically scanning customers’ food purchases. Shortly thereafter, we are reintroduced to our main characters. Ed sits on a sofa playing video games with a pile of candy wrappers and beer cans in front of him. Thus begins Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead, the first of his aptly dubbed Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy that continues with Hot Fuzz and concludes with The World’s End.
Amongst the consistent visual style and brand of comedy employed throughout, the trilogy hones in a conception of conformity that is tied to consumption. This extends to what and how the characters eat and drink, which is directly influenced by larger social structures that seek to homogenize culture. This is realized in the trilogy through the literal consumption of human flesh, alcohol, and, of course, Cornettos, whereby the dominant social structure seeks to undermine human agency by controlling and homogenizing consumption, only for the films’ protagonists to revolt and justify their own excessive consumption as a means of exercising free will.
The first film of the trilogy, Shaun of the Dead, follows our titular character as he breaks up with his girlfriend in the midst of a worldwide epidemic that brings the dead back to life. Shaun responds to the crisis by guiding the various people in his life – including his now ex-girlfriend, her two friends, his mother, and his best friend – to safety at The Winchester. The plan inevitably fails, and the numbers in his group begin to dwindle under the pressure of the zombie attacks.
The way the film addresses conformity in culture writ large is informed by the conventions and thematic preoccupations of the zombie subgenre. Within the subgenre, the literal consumption of human flesh paves the way for literal conformity, as living humans turn into the undead once they have been ‘consumed’, and movements, mannerisms, and desires are applied equally to all. This operates as a commentary on commodity culture, whereby human thoughts and movements are always already homogenized through materialistic consumption and desire. This is reinforced through Shaun of the Dead’s opening credit sequence, showing the working force of a grocery store adopt similar patterns of movement. The satire within the film allows a commentary on conformity and consumption to prevail, whereby the consumption of flesh brings about conformity. However, this conformity is rejected by Shaun as he remains steadfast in his commitment to The Winchester – a place expressly visited to consume alcohol.
Shifting from the consumption of flesh in the satirical and subversive mode, the Cornetto Trilogy’s second film is grounded in the stable iconography of the buddy-cop genre. Hot Fuzz centers on Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg): an exemplary police officer who is promoted to the position of Sergeant – but in the English countryside town of Sanford, where crime is sparse. He is nonetheless persistent in attempting to unveil a town-wide conspiracy of murder, manipulation and façade. As the film progresses, it becomes clear a select group of townsfolk murder public offenders and dissenters to ensure their town remains the cleanest in the country.
Unlike Shaun of the Dead, literal consumption in Hot Fuzz is not protracted and overbearing, but instead appears in spurts. Early in the film, we see Angel given a tour of Sanford’s police station. Intermittently, the various employees of the station are seen eating cake, simultaneously noticing Angel whilst indulging themselves. This is seen again later in the film, as Angel’s attempts to bring suspicious activities in the town to the attention of his fellow officers are interrupted by the cutting of another cake. Consumption, in this case, prevents progress and perpetuates conformity. This conformity is the prevalence of ignorance in the town that prevents justice and accountability – specifically, the rejection by the townspeople and police officers that anything suspicious is happening.
The moment that Angel connects the dots to unravel the conspiracy occurs as he begins to lick on an ice cream cone. He looks into the distance, going through the various clues in his mind. “Brainfreeze?” Danny asks him. “No, brainwave.” Angel replies. In pairing the consumption of ice cream with revelation, intuition is paired with consumption. This is to say that, akin to Shaun sipping on beer as he promises change at the beginning of Shaun of the Dead, the consumption parallels the initial action towards undermining conformity. This is further reinforced in the film’s seminal action set-piece, which takes place in a grocery store. The neatly stacked shelves and pristine floors of the store are undone by a bloody battle between the police officers and the store’s employees. The formal order of the store is displaced by the violence of the battle, instigated by an attempt to instill true moral order within the community.
If Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz address distinct kinds of conformity tied to consumption –homogeneity and moral turpitude – the trilogy’s final entry consolidates the two. That is, The World’s End distills the central thrust of commodity, consumption and culture. The film follows a group of childhood friends who reunite in their childhood hometown thirty years after a failed ‘golden mile’ attempt, which involved drinking at 12 different pubs in one night. Their ‘leader’ Gary King (Simon Pegg) propels the action, bringing the group together and urging them towards each new pub. Yearning for his memories of adolescence, King remains steadfast in his pursuit of excessive alcohol. However, his plans are derailed when it becomes clear the people of his hometown have been displaced by aliens who appear as normal humans.
The first pub the group enters is unrecognizable. Taken over by ‘corporate bodies’, it reflects a contemporary real-life epidemic in the United Kingdom, whereby privately owned pubs that retain authenticity and character are converted into homogenous family-friendly dining establishments. This turn from a place of specific, communal practices of inhibition through alcohol to broader, accessible practices of dining signal a turn from independent thought to group-minded action. Instead of the conversion of human flesh to zombie flesh in Shaun of the Dead, or the elimination of transgression in Hot Fuzz, we witness voluntary and involuntary submission of free will in The Worlds End. The townspeople either choose to cooperate with the aliens, or are forced to submit, yielding the same result: balance and lack of character.
The central premise of The World’s End relies on the continued consumption of alcohol, which, as the narrative evolves, becomes an agent of emancipation. As Gary King reaches the final pub in the ‘golden mile’, he is confronted with the figurehead of the alien race, who attempts to persuade King that conformity is desirable and inevitable. King refuses, embracing his own free will – which in turn reinforces his choice of adolescence over adulthood. The alcohol he has consumed up until this point propels him to speak in a coherent, unabashedly human way. He ultimately succeeds in inadvertently convincing the alien leader that the earth and the human race are hopeless and destined for folly. In this sense, we see consumption as a means of rejecting conformity and reflecting free will.
It comes to bear that the protagonists of the trilogy are in perpetual stasis. Shaun, Nick Angel and Gary King fail to transform after their traumatic experiences. Shaun continues to play video games with Ed, who is now a docile zombie in his shed. Nicholas Angel accepts his latent propensity for extreme action, whereby his composed outer demeanor becomes reactive. Gary King embraces his outlier status and recruits a troupe of renegades to take arms in a post-apocalyptic world. In each case, conformity is rejected in favor of a greater expression of self, and in each case, societal perpetuation of conformity remains. The protagonists fail to instigate a radical change outside of themselves, concurrently embracing their own identities. Consumption, in each case, was a means of creating conformity – and in large parts, succeeding – but expressions of free will went hand in hand with consumption as self-expression, whether that be excessive amounts of alcohol or ice cream.