I feel like people don’t give the Cornetto Trilogy enough credit for its female characters. They’re all very clearly written as women and even though, like the male characters, they’re written as certain stereotypes they still feel so real.
Even in Hot Fuzz when the majority of the cast is male you fucking remember realistically happily slutty Doris who has a harem of men at her beck and call. She could have been a male fantasy but she’s so aggressively in charge of her own sexuality you never hear male viewers sexualize her. It’s magical.
I didn’t even realize that Shaun of The Dead set the tone for me until I watched the movie again a few nights ago.
At 1:27 there’s a random scene where the only people helping Shaun are the female characters. They don’t make any real point of it but we get it. Liz and Dianne know Shaun is slightly stronger than them so they hand him the “spear” but they act as a team. Extra material on the DVD even revealed that Shaun, Liz and Dianne were the only characters who survived to the end (Dianne got away and hid in a tree apparently).
Women are in general far more capable and helpful in the movie and Shaun himself is the most “feminine coded” of the male characters. You’ll never see a male protagonist more honest about his emotions and more willing to be visibly vulnerable than Shaun I can tell you that much.
And in The World’s End we have Sam who has her own agency and doesn’t exist to be a price to be won by the main character Gary at the end of the movie, try as he might. She will help and save him and let him help and save her, yes, but the movie makes it very clear that doesn’t mean he has any right to her. She wants Steven and there’s nothing Gary can do about that.
The movies aren’t feminist masterpieces but together Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg writes some amazing female characters.
Side note; men also act a certain way around women in these movies that I can’t quite put my finger on. They don’t treat women as brilliant goddess or anything and can be downright inappropriate but there’s also a certain respect that feels unusual in movies? When Liz grabs Ed in Shaun of The Dead he doesn’t push her away or grab her back. He just sorta shakes her off without touching her in a “fuck off but I have zero interest in hurting you” way. I really don’t know how to explain it. There’s an understanding that “yes we are stronger than women so we can hurt them unintentionally but we know they’re our equals in both good and bad so there’s no reason to take advantage of that and women have had to learn to get the upper hand in other ways so strength doesn’t mean an automatic win anyway”. Just the way Shaun and Ed approach the girl in the garden before they know she’s a zombie. They’re afraid of her but not really and yet a little scared anyway. It’s…different.
But yeah, in these movies women get to be women because it doesn’t make them lesser, just like the men get to show their feminine side because it isn’t shameful.
